Stewart Lee (from 8 out of 10 Cats) is way ahead of me, as usual. He has illegal copies of much of our TV work directly linked to from his site. If you wish to catch up with much of my back catalogue and see me when I was apparently still funny (though I find myself rather over the top and annoying in the bits I have seen) then
click on this highlighted piece of writing. Also you can have a look at what else the controversial Opera Director is up to while you're there.
I was at a small dinner party last night. It compromised of me and three doctors, so if there was ever a time to choke on my food or have a heart attack this was it. Unfortunately I got through the evening without even falling into a faint. What a wasted opportunity.
When I arrived the host asked if I would mind coming next door with her to witness the will of her next door neighbour. I didn't mind, of course, though worried that I was not respectable enough of a figure to do such an important thing. I had once verified someone's passport photo for them, saying they were who they claimed to be when they sent the forms in, but the forms were sent back to them saying that I did not have a sufficiently impressive place in society to be capable of fulfilling this function. Essentially the passport people were saying I was untrustworthy because I make up jokes. What if this was another of my hilarious wheezes?
But anyway I popped next door to do the witnessing anyway. At the back of my mind I hoped the man whose will I was helping with might be so grateful to me that he altered the will so that everything went to me. I am nothing if not a deceitful opportunist - the passport people certainly had my number.
As it turns out though I wouldn't have been able to witness it if I was a beneficiary, so I would have been trapped in a paradox that I could not have escaped from.
The old fella we were witnessing for did look pretty frail and was having a stair lift installed, so my witnessing might just have come in the nick of time. It was an oddly intimate service to be performing for someone I had never met before, even though it essentially involved me just agreeing that I had seen him sign a piece of paper. This is where all his stuff was going when he died. I'd only just said hello to him.
I had to put my name and address and occupation down after my signature and just to be on the safe side I said I was a "Scriptwriter". Hopefully my crappy job won't mean that the old timer ends up being declared intestate and there is some massive wrangle as his friends and relations fight for his possessions. Who'll get the stair lift is what I want to know? I didn't see it in the will.
In fact I wonder what happens to old stair lifts once the owner passes on? - many of them must get only a limited amount of use, yet they are tailored to the staircase that they were bought for. Do the stairlift people come and buy them back or does the next owner of the house just throw it in a skip or try and flog it on ebay. A stairlift isn't the kind of thing that you can really install on your own though is it?
I don't mean to be morbid and hopefully this man will ride this stairlift into the ground (not literally), although it would be awful if he wore it out just a few days before he died and had to get a new one.
I should have asked him if I could have it as a reward for the service I had provided him. I am capable of walking upstairs, but I am very lazy. And to be honest I've always thought they looked like fun. Like a very gentle funfair ride. Maybe you could soup it up a bit to make it faster and put some loops on the track and stuff. It would be like having your own amusement park on the way to bed.
