I am off to Melbourne surprisingly soon. In preparation for the Festival IÂ’ve been doing some press interviews to publicise the show. I was informed that I would be rung at 7 o clock tonight to do a pre-recorded radio interview for a breakfast show. No call came at 7 and so I went out for the night.
At ten o clock I was in the pub and had had a couple of pints and my phone rang. They wanted to do the interview now, so I went out pissed into the streets of Balham to talk to some people on the other side of the world who were settling down for breakfast.
This would have been disorientating enough, but because I was on my mobile there was a massive two second delay on our conversation (as is much loved by the sketch writers of comedy TV shows).
And it was quite funny. “Who were those girls laughing?” asked one of the presenters. I didn’t know what he was talking about, but then I remembered that some girls had walked past me, what seemed like ages ago to me, but because their laughter had taken a few seconds to get to him and his question had then taken a few seconds to get back to me, and because the alcohol in my blood stream had caused the words to take a few seconds to get from my ear to my brain, the girls were well up the road before I realised what he meant.
“Is this live?” I asked, imagining how shoddy and unlistenable it must be.
I got an affirmative answer back eventually, though it might have been to a different question.
Within thirty seconds the presenters were bailing out and saying theyÂ’d organise something when I was in the same time zone as them!
I was left thinking that the people of Australia would be left with the impression that I was a confused, drunk man who took about five seconds to answer any questions. It seemed to me that this was unlikely to help ticket sales. Although they do like Paul Hogan out there. Ha ha!
I went back into the pub and sat down with Mackay, Simon and Dave. I told them what had happened. “So you’ve just been talking live on Australian radio?” Sitting in the dingy old man’s back bar of the Bedford Arms this did seem like an extremely surreal thing to have just happened.
It seems this incident shows the wonders and limitations of technology.
