The last thing I needed on this busy day where Collings and I would be recording 5 podcasts and he would also be filming Secret Dancing was to be woken up at 5.30am by my TV inexplicably coming on to the CBeebies Channel. I that this was an alarm call either set by the previous occupant or delivered to the wrong room. I looked at the menu to try and stop it happening again tomorrow but it wasn't possible to set anything in the room. I couldn't get back to sleep for a couple of hours and by the time I finally did my actual proper alarm went off and I was awake. I had had a brief half an hour of sleep where I experienced that rare phenomenon of lucid dreaming. I was aware that I was asleep, but didn't wake up and to a certain extent was able to control the action of my dream. When I sat in for Dave Gorman I had been talking about lucid dreams with Martin White and he had claimed that you can distinguish lucid dreaming from reality by turning on a light switch. In dreams, so he said, lights never come on. Unfortunately I was in a car so couldn't put this fully to the test, but tried to reach over and flick some buttons on the dashboard, but my dream wouldn't let me. The dashboard went all fluidy like I was in the Matrix. And then I woke up. Or thought I had, but I found myself in another lucid dream, which I decided to turn into a sexy one with slight success before I (hopefully) properly woke up. But you can never be sure with lucid dreaming that you haven't just woken up in another dream. Until you turn a light on.
I had forgotten that Martin had also told me never to look in a mirror in a lucid dream because you see something horrible about yourself if you do. I wish I had remembered because I would definitely have had a look to see what monstrous subconscious version of myself was staring back at me.
Still this gave us a little something to talk about in the five and a half hours of podcasting we were about to do for the new Collings and Herrin: War and Peace, Crime and Punishment CD (which should be out on gofasterstripe in a matter of weeks). It was four in the studio and one in front of a live audience (this last one will be out in audio format on iTunes and the British Comedy Guide on Thursday, but will be in video format on the CD/DVD). I was annoyed that I hadn't had a proper sleep before attempting this marathon, but as it turned out didn't really start to feel tired until Andrew Collings was on stage doing "Secret Dancing" which to be honest, would probably have sent me ot sleep anyway. We motored through the four subjects in the studio with only the occasional lull. We were improvising a whole lot of material so it was not all going to be gold, but there were some funny and explosive moments, brought on mainly, of course by Collings' idiocy. You will have to purchase the CD to find out what we said, mainly because I can't remember now.
The live performance was taking place in a Masonic Lodge in the centre of Cardiff, which was a bizarre and unsettling venue, but the only place that Chris Evans (not that one) could find for us. As it happened the room we were in wasn't too bad a space for comedy, aside from a high domed ceiling that ate up some of the laughs. Collings hadn't eaten since lunchtime and was pumped up from performing his stand up show for the last time and his brain was maybe a little shot from spending all day talking to me in a studio and he had had a pint of cider, but he had a wild look in his eye and jabbered like a man on drugs and seemed incapable of distinguishing jokes any more. And I was not exactly as fresh as a daisy, so this final podcast was a bit like two deranged men jabbering at each other on a park bench - though we were in fact in large Masonic high-backed armchairs that made us look like little kids as our feet scarcely touched the floor. The audience seemed a little tense, possibly because they were in bright lights for the filming and scared of being picked on, but from the post gig tweets it seems that most of them enjoyed themselves.
I was a bit scared of going back to the hotel with Collings, who was still slightly maniacal after the show in which he almost inadvertently revealed my hotel room number (as well as the fact that the hotel wasn't one of the very near ones to the venue), yet I would rather have been with the strangest nerd member of our audience than Collings at this moment. Stand up corrupts even the gentlest of souls and he had, hopefully just for the night, lost all touch with reality in the hysteria of the mild-adulation of his crowd. Still you should all buy his DVD when it comes out, if only to see the bits where I warmed up the crowd and clapped the clapperboard in between his two sections.
I tried to unplug the TV to ensure it wouldn't wake me up again, but it was all connected to some big metal box and I couldn't get at the plug, so I had to hope for the best. Cbeebies at 5.30am is no way for a man with no children to be woken from his lucid slumberings.
