I like it when Warming Up pays its way. Usually it is like a child of mine that hangs around the house expecting me to do everything for it and never contributing anything - a lot of work and only the reward of pride at being its parent. But occasionally something I have written in the past will become of some commercial value, when I am able to reuse something in a routine or newspaper article of TV show. To be fair to Warming Up, it is here that I have created a good 75% of my last three Edinburgh shows and without it I don't think I could ever have put this year's show together in six short weeks.
But there is something strangely satisfying about earning money for something that I just wrote for fun. Also it often means I don't actually have to do work for something, because I did it already at some point in the past. Even though this is a sort of false logic it is still sweet.
Not only was I able to use an old Warming Up for a small financial gain today, the place I was filming was only about half a mile from my house. If only all jobs could take this little effort then I might be able to amputate my legs and live on my sofa. Think of the weight loss.
I was doing a guest slot appearance for
Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe which I was very excited about. Brooker is a misanthropic, yet endearing and hilarious man in print at least and I love his
bits in the Guardian Guide and think
his weekly column in G2 is little short of comedic genius. The things he seems to go through in this latter series are so similar to things that I have been thinking about or going through, that for a while I was suspicious that I might actually be Charlie Brooker without realising it - a bit like in Fight Club or something. But I am pretty sure I am not him. I am just like him, as I think many of us probably are. I actually emailed him after reading one of his articles to tell him how brilliant I thought it was. This is something I never usually do, but I appreciate it on the occasions that people take time out from their lives to say something I've done has meant something to them, so I made an exception. And clearly it paid off because he emailed back to thank me and also asked if I'd be interested in doing something on his TV show. I guess this is how all TV works and maybe I should just have spent the last five years writing complimentary emails to people in the hope of getting work, rather than writing this useless blog.
Anyway, today was the day for filming my piece, the only brief being that it had to be something about a TV show that I felt passionately about. I had been wracking my brain to think of something clever and pithy enough to appear in the same programme as Brooker, but nothing was leaping out at me.
Then I remembered my Warming Up bit about
Big Cook, Little Cook, which although mainly a load of cheap jokes about taking a children's television show too seriously has always been one of the most popular and linked to Warming Ups. I decided to do something with that. It meant I didn't have to write anything. I was going to earn literally tens of pounds (BBC4 is not going to make anyone a millionaire) and not have to do any extra work! Ha ha ha!
Although having said that it has been a while since I've watched this show and so I had to get a DVD of the differently sized cooks' show and spend the morning watching it.
Which meant I did come up with some new observations to add to the old ones. It was an interview format - I wasn't to meet Brooker alas, though I did bump into him in Edinburgh at a party where he seemed suitably grumpy and angry that he hadn't been able to get in touch with me, as they had wanted to do the filming up there. It was great to do something to make Brooker grouchy. Anyway there was some new content about the cooks, as I ended up adlibbing quite a lot based on the questions, including a suggestion that I should be in the next series of the show, which should be named "Big Cook, Little Cook and Richard Herring" and that I would help the chefs out, instructing them on how to run their cafe more efficiently, instituting menus and making sure the larder was stocked so that Little Cook didn't have to keep flying off to find stuff that they'd forgotten. Also I said that if I was a customer at the cafe the gift I would leave as payment for my food would be a box of my own faeces, just because it would be good to see the confused faces of the cooks when they opened it.
Anyway it was fun. Not sure which episode it will be on, but you should watch them all. Brooker is brilliant.
