After a few false starts and then the need for a drainage expert, I have finally had the toilet that has been blocked since the visit of seaweed faeced Chris Evans (not that one) fixed. I finally went with
Pimlico Plumbers who turned out to be efficient and friendly and unusually for tradesman actually did their best to keep the work within the hour, rather than going over by 5 minutes to double their wages. I don't mind paying people to do jobs like this and when you think what they're dealing with these men deserved their £75 an hour each, but I am surprised that more tradesmen don't realise the value of doing a job well as quickly as possible. I would definitely use this firm again. Just as I would never think of ringing up
the company that had me waiting in all day Friday, never showed up and never phoned with an explanation.
And it turns out that Chris Evans (not that one) may have been the victim of a miscarriage of justice. He is currently on Welsh death row for the crime of blocking the toilet of an Englishman, but he may get out on appeal as the plumbers identified the problem using a drain camera, a technology that they were over keen to share with me. It turns out that the men who installed my boiler almost three years ago, had put the overflow pipe from the boiler into the drain for the toilet and pushed it right into the pipe so it blocked up half of it. I was told to look at the image on the screen and could clearly see the pipe, surrounded by human excrement, which must have been there for some good time. I don't know that they needed to show me this, but perhaps plumbers get as much pleasure from substantial turds as proud toddlers. Sometimes I do a poo that is so prodigious I want to show it to people. But I have never yet considered filming it. Maybe I should and could put them up on the internet as Poocasts.
The plumbers assumed the boiler must have been newly installed, but somehow this pipe had not been a problem for the first two and a half years and it was only when Chris Evans (not that one) used the toiled in July that a sufficiently massive turd was produced to plug the gap. So I will be advising my lawyers to still charge Evans with culpability, though accidental and be advising them to commute his sentence to life imprisonment for the crime of having massive Welsh shit. His many children will be pleased that their father no longer has to die. In a way I am the new Jesus.
I found the image of a pipe clogged up with shit quite distasteful and asked the plumbers if they just got to a point where they were used to the sight of strangers' effluent. The man with the camera gleefully told me that he loved working with drains and was obsessed with it as I appear to be with my career. Even when he is on holiday he can't resist opening up manhole covers to check out the drainage system at the hotel. I like that kind of commitment. He also told me of the unusual people he has met on his visits from transvestites that he has to politely take at face value to nudists who don't see the need to cover up when they have visitors, to vampires. I challenged this one, but he seemed sincere that he had been at the home of a man who made that claim. Even bats need to shit. The plumber meets every man.
Of course the comedy writer in me was immediately wondering if there was a sitcom in what I was hearing. I could turn Chris Evans (not that one)'s girthy turds to my advantage and more than make back the £150 + VAT that I was shelling out if I could make this work. Often times if a tradesman recognises me or finds out what I do he will suggest that his job is funny enough to make a sitcom about. Plumbers seems an obvious one, but I can't really think of many sitcoms about tradesmen. Robert Dawes (my You Can Choose Your Friends brother) did an internet show about a celebrity plumber (I think), but apart from that I can't think of anything. The problem I guess is the fact that a job like this, by its very nature, would need to be set in a different location every week, which would make it more expensive than something set in a middle class family's lounge. And I suppose the temptation is to go too far down the scatological/sex-starved housewife/Confessions of a Window Cleaner route. But good sitcoms are all about the characters and the relationships rather than the situation (something that no one in TV really seems to understand). And I think you could make a great sitcom about this if you got the characters right. A plumber who loves drains that much is quite a good start. But two men in a van is almost the perfect sitcom set up - trapped together through their job, at odds over the way they look at the world, meeting vampires and nudists. Clearing up the massive turds of Welshmen.
Doubtless you will all now email me with sitcoms that have done this already, but otherwise this blog entry is my pitch (and my dated proof that I came up with this idea before you thieves) to TV companies.
Now I just need to break more toilets and taps so I can get more plumbers in and chat to them, steal their stories and make a million. They think they'll be ripping me off with their inflated prices, but I will be part of a much bigger scam - show business. I wonder if I can claim my drainage expenses against tax. And if this idea flies I suppose I will have to pay Chris Evans (not that one) a finder's fee of some kind. Or a shitter's fee.
I have never been one for networking, being useless at it and embarrassed to try and hoping that somehow people will give me work based on my abilities rather than my schmoozing. But I was out at a TV channel's Christmas party tonight and realised that power of socialising as a way to get work. I think I had partly been invited because they were interested in working with me (which is a good sign), but I met a woman who is now in a senior position, but who used to work at Light Entertainment Radio back in the early 90s. One of her first jobs had been to work as a production assistant on the Fist of Fun radio series. It was good to see her again, although both of us expressed exasperation at the passage of the years. But she had fond memories of working with Stew and me and seemed to be making some positive noises about giving me some work in the future. It proves that old adage about being nice to people on the way up, but also that it's worth remembering if you're in this (or indeed any) job that there's every chance that the runner who gets your tea on one job might be the controller of BBC1 in ten years. If you treat them like they're one of Chris Evans (not that one)'s turds then they will be delighted to avenge themselves down the line, but if you're a decent human being they will hopefully remember that. It's easy to get full of yourself and behave like a dick when success comes to you in this business (and we discussed another comedian for whom it has infamously gone to his big, fat head), but luckily, as arrogant and difficult as we could be sometimes, I think Stew and me were always grateful of the contribution of everyone on our shows, not out of any cynical desire to profit from that fifteen years down the line, just because it would have been massively embarrassing to be such a dick. It's nice to think that the good work we did on screen is still paying off (as discussed yesterday) but that also the work off screen was appreciated.
We certainly made some mistakes as well - probably being so vociferously critical of twats like (then BBC2 controller) Jane Root didn't help (will I never learn?) and certainly some of our success went to our heads. But we weren't total pricks.
It's an obvious lesson, but one that many people seem to miss.
