Rob Sedgebeer, the internet king was coming round tonight to gather material for my new web-site (that youÂ’re looking at now) and so I started looking through my big boxes of old material for flyers and scripts and photos.
I can’t believe what a hoarder of stuff I have been. I found all kinds of rubbish, including a copy of the very first full length TV script me and Stew wrote called “CHT” about a TV celebrity called Coat Hanger Tim, who does a TV show involving coathangers. This was based on a script that Stew had written for the Oxford Revue 1988 which was pretty funny, though I seem to remember that I did most of the work on the TV scripts, which was fairly lame. It involved the a man somehow being sucked into his TV set and then being flipped between channels, which was hardly original even then.
I also found a script that I had totally forgotten writing for an On the Hour style fly-on-the-wall documentary called “Corridor”. I don’t know if we sent this to anyone, or what it was for. It was about a men’s group meeting up on a hill somewhere, and we certainly did a version of it as a sketch in “the dum show” ( I’m pretty sure Corridor came first as I can vaguely remember giving a copy to Patrick Marber and him not giving it back, but there’s certainly a very Steve Coogany character in it) It’s not all that bad, the bits that I read.
Both scripts were written on my old Amstrad Word Processor, so thereÂ’s absolutely no chance of them existing in computer format anymore and I doubt Rob will want to scan every single page of them both, but I might try and put them up on here some time. Maybe someone will offer to re-type the whole thing into Word! Though IÂ’m not sure I want to unleash CHT on the world anymore!
It was strange coming across something that we had slaved over and then forgotten and as this whole site has done, it brought back some memories and mixed emotions. I am glad I kept all this shit, although I still didn’t bother with lots of things. The complete script of “the dum show” was never kept. I’m not even sure we had some of it written down, but the few bits I found were reasonably amusing. There was a great (and again forgotten) sketch that I’m guessing Stew wrote (but it may have been a collaboration between us all, as much of that script was) about an extreme stag night and the pranks that went on, funny mainly for the repeated use of the phrase “his trousers round his ankles”, no matter how far the prank was going. I think Stew played the policeman who comes in to tell them that the groom has been found dead, lists all his many injuries and then adds that his trousers were round his ankles. It was all in the timing.
But I might be wrong. To be honest it might not even have made the final cut of the show. ThatÂ’s how little I remember.
It did strike me again what a missed opportunity that show had been. But then I am thankful in many ways that I didnÂ’t end doing a TV sketch show at that point and with those people (well with Marber anyway). The sketch show was then seen as very unfashionable, but it would have been an amazing group of people to try and make something of it. But it was maybe a couple of years too early and the mix of personalities was wrong. And to be honest, so much of what makes a hit show is based on luck.
ItÂ’s weird to be confronted with your past. The fact that you can now choose to put that past into a readily accessible public domain is even weirder. Or at least would be to the 1990 me, writing CHT in my bedroom in Acton.
