WARNING - if you're eating or of a sensitive disposition do not read this entry.
I really should never eat baked beans. I know I shouldn't, but still I do. I know what will happen and I am sure you do too.
They make me trump, but not only that, the trumps they produce are pungent and resilient and seemingly adhesive, so they linger and surround me like a cartoon stink cloud or a dirty smellable-only Ready-Brek glow.
I apologise for the graphic detail, but it's true. The farts are so bad that I almost don't enjoy them. In fact they're so bad that I enjoy them even more than usual, because of my astonishment that I can produce something that I don't really like the smell of myself. I am nothing if not perverse.
I thought I might be OK to eat the beans at 6.30, hoping that they wouldn't have taken effect by the time I was on stage, but my metabolism is quick - not in the sense of burning off calories, but in transforming food into gas. In fact I think that possibly I am only fat because my body is concerned mainly with extracting methane from my food and less worried about breaking it down for energy. I am a fart machine.
And if I farted one of my baked bean farts on stage then there would be no way I could escape it. They'd have to evacuate the theatre.
But things had already started rumbling at just after 8 as I headed to the theatre. And as I waited for my tube at Tottenham Court Road with no one near me I released a small test detonation to see if the nightmare had begun. Indeed it had. Disgust and delight swirled together in my mind, but then - hubris - my tube arrived. I realised that if I got into the carriage I was nearest to that the fart would not have a chance to dissipate and my fellow passengers would be subject to a chemical attack that would make them assume Al Qaeda was back in business.
My only option was to hope that a brisk walk up the platform to the next carriage along would shake off this foul gaseous stalker, especially if I employed some tricksy walking and wrong-footed the clinging stink with a couple of dummy moves.
Luckily my plan worked and the confused smell was left bewildered on the platform, as I hopped on to the train and made my escape. It will probably haunt Tottenham Court Road tube station for years to come. If you smell anything while you're down there, then you'll know what it is. But move away fast. That needy stink will suck on to you like a limpet if you give it a chance.
As I moved away from my stink baby, abandoned at birth, I considered how I would feel if an actual factual suicide bomber blew himself up in the carriage that I would have been in, had I not done a baked bean guff. How would I feel if I had been saved by a bottom burp? If fate had laid a trap for me and I had accidentally escaped it due to an unfortunate anal announcement? How would you live the rest of your days knowing you had been saved by a fart? You'd feel a bit like God had been watching over you, except that surely God, however mysteriously he moves, does not make himself known through the medium of bum gas. He has a higher purpose surely. Only Satan would use such sulfurous means to influence the world. It would be odd to spend the rest of your days knowing that only by doing something very wrong had you saved your own life.
Of course there was an equal chance that in escaping the guff I would inadvertently enter the carriage that contained a terrorist and thus my poot might be my undoing. There would be more of a natural order of justice to this, like it was a morality tale written by Roald Dahl, with a suitably expected unexpected result. To be saved by the fart would be the difficult thing to cope with, morally speaking.
This conundrum would make a much better "Sliding Doors" film than that bloke from Bread came up with. In one version Gwyneth Paltrow is saved by her fart and in another undone by it - she couldn't actually be killed, but is maybe horrifically injured and we see the two different lives she has to lead, one where her pumping is punished and one where she has to cope with the guilt that it actually saved her (and possibly the left behind embarrassment even added to the force of the explosion). That would be a film of some moral resonance, rather than the flimsy and embarrassing reality that was actually put out in cinemas.
If you think a bomb is too devastating a beginning to a light romantic comedy, then the film could at least have been about Paltrow doing a guff on a tube station platform and in one reality she manages to shake it off before she gets on the train and in the other it follows her in, to the disgust of the other passengers.
Maybe her potential life partner is in the carriage and she gets off with him in the reality where the fart is left behind, but in the one where the fart remains he is disgusted by her and she ends up sad and alone.
I think I will try and make both films, if I can persuade Paltrow to do them (and maybe the fact that I have played Trivial Pursuit with Chris Martin will give me an in). Sliding Doors 2 will be the one where the fart ruins the romance and then Sliding Doors 3 will be the one with the terrorist bomb and the guilt versus the wheelchair. That will be a surprisingly serious end to the trilogy, but I think luckily Paltrow has the range.
Luckily my bottom behaved itself on stage, but inadvertent disaster was always just one step or bend away. However ill or gassy one is, it is a very rare thing to let off on stage. Dr Theatre sees you through.
Sorry about that.
It had also been an exciting morning as I got a copy of the long-awaited Headmaster's Son DVD through the post. It looks really great and is packed with extras like the second Collings and Herrin video podcast, my dad TK Herring being interviewed by Andrew Collings (my dad is amusingly impressed to be talking to the film editor of the Radio Times, but also cannot hide his disdain and disappointment that this respected broadcaster only went to Art School and not a proper University), a tour of my school the Kings of Wessex, extra exclusive diary readings, plus an earlier version of the show from the Frog and Bucket, a video about the Great Fire of London in which I play Pepys and some of Nathan Jay's amazing music videos (some hidden). Plus if you buy the programme too then one pound will go to SCOPE (the other pound pays for the extra p&p - I am not being all Peter Kay about that) and you'll get an excellent programme.
Buy it here! - and check through their other stuff, cos there's some great stuff from other brill comedians.
I also added an update to
The Collins and Herrin page.
