I was working by 7am with eight and a half hours to create an hour of material that we'd be performing live on stage that night. Easy right?
Necessity is the mother of invention and luckily I could remember the ideas that had come to me just before bed and had some notes that I had made in my dressing room yesterday about a new character that would satirise the media's interest in the buttocks of Pippa Middleton. I wasn't quite sure how I had had that idea, but it seemed like a strong one to me. For the moment though I was trying to get the opening of the show sorted out. The word document said I was on page 3 of 5 which didn't seem like much and I was perturbed when two hours later it still said the same thing. I felt like I had done loads of work, but maybe I had edited stuff out elsewhere. I was still a bit tired though even through the fug of exhaustion that seemed wrong. I changed the layout in the view section of Word and the software corrected itself. I was already up to 19 pages. A complete script is usually about 30 pages so that was a goodish sign (although most of what I had done was intro so that suggested I would need to edit down a bit in order to get some actual content in).
Douglas Adams liked the whooshing sounds of deadlines as they passed by and I know how that feels when you are writing a script or book, because people will give you more time to complete them if you have failed, but with a live show you need to have something to do in front of the audience and it always seems to bring out the best in my imagination and my work ethic. I have also relaxed a little bit with the AIOTM scripts, given myself permission to fail and put in bits that we can improvise around in rehearsal and on the night. It's never going to be the most polished and perfect script ever, but that, it seems is the appeal of the show.
As if all I had to worry about wasn't enough, Irish dissidents were threatening to bomb central London, but I am used to threats of violence by now and this one, for once, wasn't directly aimed at me (unless the heckler last night had got in touch with his friends on the Falls Road).
By 3.30 I had most of the script done and printed it up and headed into town. Dan Tetsell was unavailable for this show (though he will be back Nazi-spawn fans) so we had the lovely Ben Moor standing in. Ben, Emma and me were all in the unsuccessful Oxford Revue of 1988 which was so badly battered by critics and Keith Allen and other comedians that I think we all came close to forsaking comedy forever. I have spoken of it many times before, but it has taken a long for the psychological scars to heal. But I had decided to reopen them tonight and we were going to perform the very sketch that Keith Allen sabotaged at the end of the podcast. Was it shit or was it good? You'll have to listen to the podcast to find out
