Who says I am not a big celebrity?
No one. But they would say that I wasn't a big celebrity if they had heard of me.
But anyway, yesterday someone who worked for Ribena obviously attended the show and heard me mention their product a couple of times (I have Ribena Light in my squeezy bottle to help me through the bike race and Jesus suggests Ribena as a more tasty alternative to vinegar). Tonight Ian Ribena (who still makes every bottle of the fruity drink in his own kitchen personally) sent one of his minions down to the gig to give me a box of four bottles of new fizzy Ribena. Yes, four bottles of soft drink. For free. This is where the 20 years of graft start paying off. In a small amount of carbonated beverages.
No one can buy me with money. But give me some soft drinks or some pots of porridge and I will say whatever you like.
I remember Ribena used to do a fizzy version of the drink back in the mid-80s. I was a big fan of it. It was my preferred soft drink in fact. Then one day they changed the recipe and RUINED it. Stupid, stupid, Ian Ribena. I hadn't really been aware that fizzy Ribena had been off the shelves since then, but it must have been or they have done a relaunch.
As I have strong Proustian memories of fizzy Ribena and then being let down by new fizzy Ribena, Ian Ribena and his cronies and inadvertently taking a risk letting me taste the new fizzy Ribena. What if I didn't like it? Their shameless attempts to buy me with four bottles of Ribena (with a retail value of up to six pounds depending on where you buy them) might backfire. I drank one in what might laughably be called my dressing room at the Leeds Library. And if I am honest Ian had put in a bit too much fizz and not enough blackcurrent for my liking. It was more like one of those lightly flavoured carbonated waters than the nectar-like fizzy Ribena of my memories. Plus they don't even do a Light version.
Back to the drawing board Ian and your Ribeanies. Or just go back to the old recipe. I still appreciate your work in the non-carbonated blackberry flavour drink market, but your early work in the bubbly drink market remains unsurpassed.
The audience tonight were back to their usual dour selves, after yesterday's aberration of a laughing Leeds audience. I think tonight's crowd still enjoyed it, but they gave me little to work with, which makes timing very hard and also put me off taking the leap off the cliff into ad-libbed material. You need to be lifted by the atmosphere to take the chance of trying something different and tonight, aside from one rather sullen protracted bit with Luke and Matthew arguing about who was best, I pretty much stuck to the script. Typically though some jokes that only get a titter elsewhere got guffaws here. I got many, many positive comments afterwards and was more than aware that this was par for the course at this venue (it is renowned amongst comics for being a quiet room), although after last night I hoped I had broken the curse.
And I had had a productive day, having a long work out in the gym and also getting the first scene of my new script written. There's a long way to go with it and I have no idea what will happen next, but I have a beginning that I am pleased with, which should also cost a fair amount to film, but hopefully intrigue and amuse people. Very little of a first draft usually survives even to a later draft, let alone to making it to the screen (and there is no guarantee of that), but I was pleased with what I had got down, even if it doesn't even amount to two pages. On the other hand if I can write a scene a day then the script will be finished by the end of next month as planned!
You know I love getting your emails. And not all of them are threatening me with eternal damnation. Charlotte Bishop has been in touch to say
"Hi Richard
I came to see your show at Harrogate on Monday evening, and really rather enjoyed it.
I was particularly struck by your question of how many holy communions would you have to take before you had eaten a whole Jesus. I'm not a great one for maths, however my friend Brian is. I asked him to work out the answer to the question and below is the answer he came up with.
The average human male weighs 170lb at present, its a fair assumption this was a lot lower 2000 years ago as almost no one was able to eat sufficiently well to be over weight, also people were a lot smaller, probably by about a foot, assuming thats not far off but that the distribution of below, at and above weight individuals was the same as today then the average weight would be decreased by about 25% so... Hyperthetically Jesus weighed about 129lb (170 less 25%) the human body is approximately 60% water which is more or less the same as the wine you drink to represent the blood. So dry weight Jesus was about 52lb. The average loaf of bread is about 12oz and is split amongst a congregation of say 240 people so they each get a 20th of an ounce at each communion. 52lb is 832oz so they would need to attend 16,640 communions to 'eat' Christ - thats every Sunday for 333 years.
If we go back to the blood, we can use the overall body weight to be equivalent to the weight of wine you'd need to drink to account for the water (as they're both about 60% water plus other stuff) so you'd need to drink 129lb of wine to 'drink' Jesus. We'll be very naughty and convert dry weight straight to fluid ounces on a one to one ratio which gives us 129pints (US imperial) one US pint is 473ml so thats 61 litres of wine. A bottle of 700ml split between the same congregation would mean 2.8ml per member of the congregation, so you would need to go to communion 21,785 times to drink Christ or every Sunday for 419 years.
I hope this is helpful in your quest.
Lots of love
Lottie xx"
So it seems you would have to be a very old Catholic before you had attended enough communions to have eaten a whole Jesus, which is why they have to keep going week after week, I guess. Thanks Lottie! I love it when a silly joke prompts such fastidious and time wasting research! I suspect others of you might want to dispute the calculations. Bring it on. Let's waste some of this precious gift of life on nonsense.
