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I had been invited by my ambassadorial friend Tony (he brought in a tray of Ferrero Rocher for my wife at our wedding, and has thus made one of her dreams come true) to watch the England versus Ireland test match at Lords. I believe I saw at least one live professional cricket match as a child, as have vague memories of going to Taunton to see Somerset play (possibly against Yorkshire, who I would have been supporting) and Somerset once played against Cheddar Cricket Club in a friendly and I got Ian Botham’s autograph (I have a feeling my brother, who was a very decent bowler, might have got Viv Richards out, but I may be wrong). But I have never been to Lords to to see a Test Match. Given the self-employed nature of my work I should really have spent more time dossing around in the sunshine doing nothing, but even when I am getting nothing done, I’ve always felt I should be working and have wasted my life sitting in doors and feeling sad.
But I do not understand how so many hundreds of people can take Wednesday off to come and sit in the sun watching cricket. Many of them are pretty old, but do most people just have jobs they can skive off of? I guess the kind of people who go to cricket do. I’d hate to think that being a comedian is actually more of a proper job than the proper jobs that the wealthy elite give themselves.
I have known Tony now for 33 years and it was great to see him. British comedy owes this man an awful lot, as he set up the Oxford Revue Workshop - the fortnightly comedy club in the bowels of the Oxford Union, where upstairs Gove, Cameron and Johnson were preparing to destroy the country, Tony was leading a band of young people including Armando Iannucci, Al Murray, Kevin Cecil and Andy Riley, Sally Phillips, Ben Moor, Dave Schneider, Ben Moor and many more and without this club it’s debatable whether I would ever have met Stewart Lee. But I won’t hold that against Tony - it’s not his fault. He gave us all the chance to try out new material every fortnight, in a friendly environment and ahead of the game compared to most of us, he was doing stand up, whilst we all flailed around with sketches. In 1989 he did a stand up double bill with someone else who had seen the ascendancy of stand up over revue, Stewart Lee (you can buy a recording of Stewart’s set at
http://gofasterstripe.com - The Cellar Tapes). Tony still does the occasional gig when work and family and skiving off to see the cricket allow - He made the semi-finals of Old Comedian of the year this year.
Tony’s vision in creating this club on the very year Stew and me came to the University is without doubt one of the many pieces of good fortune that has led to me somehow making a career at this. Although he didn’t make it his full time job he opened up the pathway for the rest of us. He sent me some great background detail for the proposed upstairs downstairs film about that weird coincidence of a generation of comedians and a generation of politicians being in the same building at the same time. The Union were intrigued by the comedy boom happening downstairs and invited a few of us upstairs to take part in a debate about whether Englishmen were funnier than Scotchmen and Armando proved that the Scotch were the best - on his team was a radio producer who invited him along to the BBC for a meeting….
If that was the only opportunity that Tony’s club had created then it would still be a pretty major influence.
Anyway - good to sit next to him in the ridiculous heat and watch Englishmen again being proven inferior to our neighbours as Ireland took the World Champions apart and bowled them out before lunch. I tweeted that it was nice weather for ducks. The only sporting joke you will get from me (self-playing snooker is deadly serious).
I managed to resist the lure of beer and stuck to sparkling water and a £4 Solero (it wasn’t 8 times as good as the ones I have at home), but it was enjoyable just sitting in the full blast of the sun watching some men trying to hit some leather with some wood. And mainly failing. My biggest takeaway was that the grass was incredibly green. That was my best bit.
Also I should have brought some of my Soleros with me to sell for £3. Could have cleaned up. As long as people like melted Soleros.
The other exciting news of the day is that we now have RHLSTP badger membership packs which will be sent out to anyone who is currently a monthly badger paying £3 a month or more and to all new subscribers. You get a beautiful plastic wallet, two cool pin badged and a fold out membership care full of secret stuff, like a code you can use to communicate with other Badgers and some new emergency questions and the rules of RHLSTP club. If you’re a badger paying a pound a month then you will have to unsubscribe and resubscribe at the new level to get the pack (and if you’re paying the correct amount you will be getting an email to make sure we have the correct address).
If you’re a Dripster then the bad news is that Kickstarter are shutting Drip down (as I think we were about the only people that it was working for), but the good news is that you can move across to becoming a badger and get the membership pack. Unsubscribe from Drip (or cancel your card if you can’t work out how to do it) and then subscribe.
You get a red cool kids badge for £3 a month
A “gold” one for £5 a month
And a “platinum” one if you think that four podcasts a month is worth a tenner.
Plus you get access to the member’s area with backstage videos, ad-free podcasts, stand-up shows, advance news of guests and much more.
All your money goes towards making even more internet content.
It’s the last RHLSTP of series 15 (though the pods are coming thick and fast with series 17 having already started on Fridays and series 16 coming daily from Edinburgh) with the geniuses behind the No Such Thing As A Fish Podcast
