5214/18134
I have been using my brain (or as that guy from yesterday might call it, my “brain”) way too much recently, so it’s been cool to have a few days where I can let it lie fallow and not be trying to use every spare moment writing jokes or scripts. Tragically for the future of my career I discovered a Mac compatible version of Civilisation II online and for the last couple of days have been a bit lost in it. It’s the perfect game for zoning out, but also hugely dangerous as it’s very difficult to ever stop playing it. Every time I think I will take just one turn I become obsessed with getting a caravan from Athens to Minsk and two hours have disappeared into a hole. This isn’t such a bad thing on tour (though perhaps my time would be better spent reading a book - ha, some chance!). There have been a lot of long dull car rides this week and Civilisation II is like a magic portal which turns a three hour drive into ten minutes of actual time.
I wasted a lot of my twenties on this game when I should have been out partying and having sex. Whole weekends would vanish, leaving me bleary-eyed from next to no sleep. I am amazed that the residual associations of this don’t make the game painful, but I actually like returning to the coma-like stasis of being an immortal God-like figure, letting people live and die at my whim. In my show I liken the mental illness that God clearly exhibits (creating people with urges and then punishing them for acting upon them etc) to being like Donald Trump in gas form. And it’s no coincidence that in this game I am playing as an American and have called myself after the 45th President. Though was tempted to name myself after the 46th, Mike Pence.
I will be deleting the game again once I reach Alpha Centurii (and have reached a commanding position now where I basically own the world, allowing a couple of other civilisations to keep their capital, but slowly picking off the cities of the warring ones and inciting riots in them to keep things clean). I haven’t used nuclear weapons at all, which is very reserved of me (and makes me using Trump’s name quite the affront) though in a moment of madness I did command a spy to nuclear bomb the Celts final city, but she was captured, thankfully, before she could detonate).
Even when the game is essentially over it’s hypnotically alluring. In fact reaching a fairly peaceful state and just being able to build up your resources and make your citizens as happy as possible is a never ending joy. I have never been able to get into any of the subsequent versions of Civ. But Civ II is more or less perfect. Though gets much too hard for me on the higher settings.
In Canterbury I had to break off from the game to be interviewed by Oliver Double who runs the comedy archive there (which I donated loads of scripts to) to chat about my University days and the fastidious scrap book I kept of my time doing comedy and drama at college. It’s an embarrassing tome, but I am glad the young and enthusiastic Herring kept it. I relived all the old battles between student and alternative comics and thought about how much impact that Fringe of 1988 had on my life and my career and my confidence. The lines were drawn between stand up and sketches and after the beatings I took I found it very hard to accept that the former art form was superior to the latter. Stew who missed out on it all, held no such resentments and nursed no wounds and made the correct (though disloyal) decision to side with the stand ups. The repercussions of it all still echo down the unsoundproofed corridor of time. It was not pleasant to be at the centre of it.
But interesting to go back and see the words of that young man, some ludicrously confident, others totally insecure, hoping to make it in his dream job, allowing himself to fantasise about doing so, but also not believing it was at all possible. Which pretty much sums up where I am now.
That desire to catalogue and record obviously still persists within me. I mean look at this thing that I am writing for the 5214th time. I think I knew it was a golden time for comedy at the University, that there was a combination of people that were exceptional, in a way that there hadn’t been at Oxford for a very long time. And weirdly as we all performed in the Union Jazz Cellar, upstairs in the Oxford Union were Gove, Cameron, Johnson - the men who would change the face of the country in a way more hilarious than any of us comedy morlocks could muster. I am surprised there hasn’t been a book or a film about both this impossible seeming coincidence of Lee and Herring downstairs and Gove and Johnson upstairs and their parallel lives of success and betrayal!
But seriously, Armando Iannucci impersonating the alphabet downstairs, whilst wet lipped Michael Gove wore his kilt upstairs and I missed yet another opportunity to incapacitate him. We could have done a literal gunpowder plot and changed the whole shape of our country.
Well maybe someone one day will take a look at the way that the people who would influence comedy and politics came so close to one another as young men. I have some useful source material if anyone fancies a crack at it. But only if you make me the underdog hero and Lee the Govian manipulator.Who am I am kidding? I know exactly how I would be portrayed. By a background artist. Writing everything down.
The podcast will be out in a few months.
Another laugh filled gig tonight. I await the emails of complaint in the morning.
