I headed to the posh flat of the Guardian newspaper (a paper whose readers, as you'll know if you've seen my show, are worse than paedophiles) in a Georgian square to record a podcast with Lucy Porter, Brian Logan the comedy reviewer and Robin Ince. When it is ready it will appear
here. I was pretty tired and it seemed to take a long time, though part of that was waiting for Ince, who had got lost trying to find this mystical oasis of uber-poshness in the middle of just regular posh houses.
Being in a big posh flat like this put our rather more studenty lodgings into some kind of perspective. "So this is where my 70p a day goes!" I lamented (oh yes, you see the irony is that I AM a Guardian reader too - almost like some things in my show aren't meant to be taken at completely face value!)
But I clawed some of my hard spent money back when lunch arrived. There was a selection of fine cheeses and hams and some crusty bread from the local deli. Yeah, the Guardian might pretend it's all right on and left wing, but this is what its journalists are eating. It made me sick to the stomach. But not so sick that I couldn't eat much more than my fair share of the delicacies on offer.
The podcast itself was good fun, though it did drag on, but luckily for you it will be edited down to mere highlights, so whether you will be able to hear me talking about students in their pants looking embarrassed in my bedroom, or the context which made that an amusing joke is up to the gods and the bloke who edits the thing down. If he can ever get round to it, when he's not stuffing his face with middle-class crudities. Ah, The Guardian, how you have changed.
Then I went back to the flat to start work on putting programmes in envelopes so I can send them out to you generous folks who paid to have your name in the centre pages. It is going to take me some time and I am starting with the people who gave the most, but hopefully the programmes shall be with you soon-ish. If you donated but haven't sent me address, please do so asap. The other prizes will be sent out in late September.
I also spent about an hour counting out coins from the charity collection and putting them in paying in bags for the bank. Ah admin, how I love thee.
It was a solid show tonight - not quite as good as the last two, but enjoyable nonetheless. When I accused a man on the front row of being a paedophile when he failed to cheer when I said "Cheer if you think paedophilia is wrong!" he seemed to be desperate to interrupt. Finally he bellowed in a jolly voice "How dare you? My dad is a paedophile!" It seemed like an odd heckle and the level of his delivery made me pretty certain that he was attempting to be funny, but then I don't think many people would be thinking - "Oh that's a bit embarrassing, there's Richard taking the piss out of paedophiles and there's someone who is related to one. Leave the paedophiles alone."
There was a part of me worried that the man might then say, "And he abused me when I was a child," which would be a hard one to dig my way out of, but luckily I managed to keep my composure and dealt with the heckle quite quickly, pointing out that the man maybe shouldn't sound so proud of his dad and that it might be something that would be better to keep quiet.
After the show I came down to the bar. There were a lot of men dressed in fancy dress in there - I don't think they had been in my show. A slightly scary looking tattooed, muscly bald man in a wedding dress recognised me and whooped with delight and grabbed me. "You're my hero!" he told me excitedly.
"That's not something you really want to hear from a man in a dress," I replied, but he didn't really hear me. Edinburgh is a funny city.
