Warming Up

It’s going to be a very unpleasant fortnight of trying to work through exhaustion, so buckle up, motherfuckers. It’s going to be moaning and complaining followed by relief and me deciding I am a genius so I’d suggest you take a break from this if that annoys you.

The nice thing about writing for the radio is that they absolutely leave me alone to get on with it (and for the money they’re paying they have no right to comment). It means I can do what I like and experiment a bit and in many ways it doesn’t even really matter if it works or not. I mean I hope it will. But it’s nice to be given the freedom to fuck up. 

I can take some risks and experiment a little bit. In the last two days I’ve totally changed my idea of what happens in episode 4 (which isn’t great news for the already written episode 5) and turned the whole thing into one long scene. Will it work? I have no idea. But I love that I can just make this decision and will only be knocked back by my producer if I do something absolutely ridiculous.

Still dubious about whether I can actually do all the work in time. Mind you I felt like that in May and it’s a lot closer to being finished than I thought it would be a month ago.

I had more or less decided not to do Twitch of Fun tonight, but a burst of good work and a worry about the grown adults who would miss out on having their birthdays celebrated by a broken finger puppet spurred me on. And I quickly picked out some stories and got on with it. I forgot to do a tribute to Rick Jones and I also forgot that I’d idly been thinking about what other 70s and 80s TV stars we could bring back and force to do the jobs they pretended to do, like Captain Kirk going into space. I’d really like to see Leee Majors (he should have gone for the extra e) having to reprise “The Fall Guy” and being made to be an old stunt man. It might be nice to make it a gritty reboot, which still has to have the seemingly comedic sexually suggestive opening song.  This might mean playing it in a minor key and making the Fall Guy a stalker who has lost his job because he pestered all the actresses he worked with (it’s all there in the text) and now has to make a living as a male sex worker “It’s true I hire my body out for pay” and is still obsessed with the ageing and dead actors that he sings about. If they can do it with the Fresh Prince, they can do it with the Fall Guy.

Anyway, forgot all about that and let the puppets do their stuff. My daughter had escaped her bed to see what I was up to. It’s been a while since she’s tried to get in on the action, but I view her very much as Matthew Corbett to my Harry and am happy to show her the ropes. So we did a live promo for the show at 7.30pm which is at the top of the podcast /YouTube version  and should leave you in no doubt about who is the comedic genius in the family.