It was easy to predict but all I have done by moving my script deadline back two weeks was to postpone the pain and the pressure until now. And it's all getting on top of me a bit again. On days like today I pretty much always decide that I am going to give up comedy all together and go and live in the country and live off the land. When my nervous breakdown finally hits maybe I will finally do it. I will die an old hermit in a shack, with an overgrown untended garden and boxes and boxes of old show programmes around me that I refused to throw away.
There is probably a middle ground where I don't take on quite so much work and keep a few evenings free to spend them with my girlfriend and don't continue to produce hours of free material every week. But I am not quite ready to admit defeat just yet. Either the world must realise that I am the greatest comedy genius that has ever lived or I will work myself into the ground, just realising on my death bed that I am at best mediocre and have wasted this precious gift of life writing about talking anuses when I could have been laughing in the sunshine with the people I loved.
Chances are that the latter realisation is the more likely, but whilst there is a chance that I am the greatest comedy genius ever - just for some reason no one has noticed it (probably because I am such a genius that the people of my own time are not equipped to understand the sophistication in my wank-based material)- I have to press onwards.
The best thing in the otherwise quite tedious William Ringpiece Thackeray novel "Vanity Fair" (SPOILER ALERT - though you've had over 150 years to read this, so you can't really complain) is that after Dobbin has spent so much time loving and wanting Amelia when he finally gets to be with her he declares, "I knew all along that the prize I had set my life on was not worth the winning." Ah Vanitus Vanitatum. All is Vanity.
Actually maybe the book is worth a read. I did it for A level and hated it then, probably because I didn't understand it, but that bit is so good that I wonder if perhaps I am mistaken in thinking that the best thing that Thackeray did was spunk up a bit of jizz that would ultimately contribute towards the creation of Al Murray.
Thinking about it, if William Ringpiece Thackeray had withheld that one orgasm, then Al would never have existed and I wouldn't have written Time Gentlemen Please and been able to buy this house. So maybe I owe old Ringpiece enough to give his satire of Victorian manners another crack.
On the other hand if Ringpiece had managed to curb his sexual desires and not impregnate his wife on that occasion then I would not have achieved the financial cushion which allowed me to carry on working in comedy for the next ten years. I might have given up on my ambitions when I was young enough to retrain and do something else. Bloody Ringpiece Thackeray! You have ruined my life with your carefree spunking. I am going to find your grave and spunk over that in return. Give you a taste of your own medicine. I wish people would consider the long term consequences of their spunkings before they just spunked up willy-nilly.
So anyway the last thing that was needed in the middle of all this tension and madness was for the man with the most punchable face in the world to walk into my house. It's like the situation had been engineered for fireworks. But stupidly I had agreed to do a podcast with Collings today. And it didn't result in fireworks, just me being annoyed and grumpy like the petulant and idiotic child that I am. Though Collings partly deserves it on this occasion. What's quite good about this is that you don't usually get to hear broadcasters who are actively annoyed with each other being forced to talk (although there was one occasion on 6Music where I was similarly peeved and childish and sabotaged the show and my own broadcasting career), but with the podcasts we just steam on regardless. Until one of us murders the other. Hopefully whilst the Tascam is recording it.
Collings has been like this too, though we binned the podcast that he got annoyed on and I felt close to suggesting we just abandoned ship. But you get us, twarts and all, on this podcast.
So have a listen to an uncomfortable 68 minutes of chat and protracted silence. Will there be another one? Or will we go out on a whimper?
My bad mood continued and I was unpleasant and grumpy to my girlfriend too (not the same person as Collings), but then had to go out to try and be funny in front of 150 people in Ealing. Annoyingly I managed to be charming and polite enough to them (though subjected them to some half-thought out routines). A load of people I don't know. There's no people like show people.
Don't worry. The plan is to take it a bit easier in the autumn and not do gigs and just do my radio show and work on some new ideas. If I make it to September without freaking out, burning all my bridges and moving to a cottage in the Scotch Highlands.
Alternatively maybe the Queen will honour me with the title of Greatest Comedy Genius Who Has Ever Lived (the hardly ever given out GCEWHEL award) tomorrow and I can finally relax.
I know you've got your fingers crossed for the nervous breakdown though. You're only human and it'll be a lot more fun.
