I spent most of the day and much of the night editing down my "Double Act" script. I actually had to lose almost 20 pages, which was more than a fifth of what I had written. But it wasn't too difficult in the end, though I was reduced to trying to artificially shorten it by trying to take the odd word out of directions, so that they would become a line shorter. Obviously this doesn't actually make any difference to the length of the script as recorded, but all I was interested in was hitting the magic 70 pages.
I took a break at about 7pm to make myself a chilli. It was an opportunity to use some of the spices I had got from the Spice tour on Zanzibar (not to be confused with the Zanzi-bar). I hadn't really noticed when I had bought them, but each of the little bags had a description of the contents on a little bit of photocopied paper. A few of them had nice little notes on them as warnings or advice to the user.
The first one I spotted was on the "Zanzibar Chilly Seed" pack, which they call "Pilipili Hohoo" because it makes you go ho hoo when you eat it.
"This is the hottest chilly in Zanzibar", the packet reads, "most of the time its using in Rain season or in a cold area gives boding warm."
Then there is the additional note, "Zanzibar chilly is strong. Neither play with it Nor put it in your sense organ."
I wondered what this last bit might mean. What is the sense organ? It could be any number of things. I was a bit worried as I was planning to put the chillis in my food and was then going to put the food in my mouth, which might be my sense organ. I thought my sense organ was probably my eye, but it could be something a lot more important (not that I was planning on putting chillis in there, and anyone who says I was is lying), like my brain (that's what I was thinking) which is, some might argue, my organ of sense. I took the chance and put the chillis in my food, making a note not to put it into any other organ than my mouth.
I also had some "Zanzibar Hot Chilly Powder" which the packet promised was "among the hot spices" - clue in the names guys.
This had my favourite note though (and you don't get this kind of info on the spices you get at Sainsbury's). It was, "Be care when you cooking. Don't use sealing or table fane. The powder can separate everywhere."
Isn't that wonderfully thoughtful. I'm not bothered by the spelling mistakes (after all I'd like to see how most of you would get on with translating that into Swahili), I just like the fact that whoever put the packaging together cared enough to warn the person buying it of this potentially disastorous occurrence. I wouldn't have thought of that and if I'd been cooking in a kitchen with a ceiling fan then I could have had chilli powder filling the room, getting into all my sense organs. It would be a terrible thing to happen. I suspect that the person who wrote the note might have had personal experience of this. If it had happened to me I don't think I'd warn other people. I'd want them to go through the same ordeal as me. But whichever Tanzanian man or woman wrote the notes for my spices cared enough to stop anyone else going through the same thing.
My chilli gave me boding warm and I went upstairs and finished my script. I almost got it down to 69 pages. That's how good I am. I've sent it off and now we just have to wait to see what happens. I think it's good. It took some time getting there, but now it's in the hands of the gods and Channel 4 execs (who may be one and the same people).
