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I continue to fulfil Kickstarter rewards. This afternoon I went to the Leicester Square Theatre early so that I could interview Ally, my ventriloquist dummy about his life and the incident at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1987. I had agreed to do a 30 minute interview with the 125 year old lump of papier-mache, which was going to be quite a challenge. I didn’t think I could subject an audience to this so was going to do it on a closed set in front of only the cameramen and George the sound man.
I did a bit of research into the character. Ally’s full name is Ally Sloper and I knew this was based on a popular figure in the 19th Century, but it turned out that he was one of the world’s first comic book characters, a drunkard who sloped round the allies and who was possibly an inspiration to Chaplin, WC Fields and Andy Capp. I also think that the 1990s Stewart Lee took inspiration from the dummy’s hair style. The surprisingly fresh looking bits of torn up newspaper that are in Ally’s legs date him to January 1892 and are mainly full of adverts for unguents and ointments and asthma treatments.
So I liked the fact that Ally is part of showbiz history and is also literally stuffed with history. It was a struggle to keep up a conversation with him for half an hour, but then I did manage to talk to myself for an hour for another kickstarter thing and at least this time someone else was doing half the talking. Sally also emerged to give her take on events, not that she saw much. And Ally and I tried to relive the old sexual magic. Luckily you will only get to see this if you paid £30 or more in the RHLSTP kickstarter. It will take a little while to edit together.
Ally hung around and made some brief appearances in the proper podcasts. I was talking to Caitlin Moran about Raised by Wolves and the ambitious kickstarter that she’s launched to try and raise £350,000 to shoot another episode. She’s hit the same point as all my kick-starters did, the lull after the strong start. I think she will probably make it in the end, but they do need to raise over £8000 a day now, so it might be a noble failure. She’s a very interesting woman though and we talked about her childhood, her obsession with Cumberbatch and we both revealed the music stars that we had failed to bed in our youth through complacency or in my case just being too stupid to realise I was being flirted with. I was a dolt. Still am. But as I am married now that is a good thing. Ally posed a question to her too, which could only have come from someone with very Victorian attitudes. I quite like the idea of bringing him along every week, or maybe he should have his own interview podcast.
I had never met Caitlin before but we talked freely and easily and I liked her very much. Her interview is being bumped forward to come out next week and will be well worth a watch.
After having largely behaved myself and been professional with the first guest I became immediately giddy and silly with the second, Ed Gamble and we had a lot of fun messing around, being rude to each other for the next hour. I tried out loads of my new emergency questions on him and went on a very unexpected tangent based on Trivial Pursuits (as it is definitely called) and the Harry Potter version of that game. I was crying with laughter at the silliness of it all, though to be fair I might have been having a mental breakdown. It’s hard to tell. He’s a very funny young man. Catch him on tour if you can.
It’s shaping up to be another good series and there are some great guests to come. So come down and see one live if you can. Next week’s show with Dawn French only has a few tickets left. So book now!
