I don't think I am going to hit the Friday deadline for my sitcom script. I managed maybe two words of it today. This isn't a massive problem. I am allowed to give it in later, but I just miss the chance to have it put on in a sit-com showcase. It's more important that the script is good and realistically I need to work on the characters for a bit longer. Also I need to recharge my batteries. I slept for almost twelve hours last night. It was glorious.
I had my first ever Set List dream, which is weird as I have already discussed that doing Set List is a bit like having a dream anyway, as you're on stage, out of your comfort zone, freewheeling and allowing your subconscious to direct things. I wonder if this will become a new recurring dream, but more importantly will the dream gigs make me better at the real gigs. And what if the real gigs have been dreams as well? Who knows?
There was too much unpacking to do to really concentrate on work (though I did manage to cobble together next week's Metro column - my 30th one unbelievably) and yet by the end of the day the house looked more messy and disorganised than before. Inevitably I managed to knock fresh paint-work with a chair and somehow put a small dent in our new fridge-freezer (my wife's taken it well, saying that it's good to have damaged something so that we're not tip-toeing around scared to enjoy it for fear of wrecking stuff). I also came within about a centimetre of poking myself in the eyeball with the twig of a plant I was moving. It scratched my skin, but might have popped my eyeball. I've paid enough for this fucking kitchen without losing 3 dimensional vision!
How long before the whole house is scratched and broken and covered in Marmite? Still nice to have had everything looking pristine for 24 hours.
The good/bad news is that there is now lots of room to play snooker in the basement - though I am going to concentrate on Rasputin for the moment, mainly because I don't know where my snooker cues are.
Chris Evans (not that one) had emailed me a couple of deleted scenes from the series 2 Fist of Fun DVD (out in the next couple of months -
Pre-order here) as he wanted me to check that Graham Linehan was happy with using one that featured him in publicity. Graham, of course, didn't mind at all (you can see the clip
here - see if you can spot Katy Brand in the audience). Graham commented that he had no memory of doing this sketch at all, which slightly weirded him out. But oddly much of series 2 of Fist of Fun was totally unfamiliar to me too, much more than the first series. I'd love to claim that we were all taking dangerous cocktails of drugs throughout the series, but I certainly wasn't (it might have made some of the sketches better if I had). It's mainly just a gap in my memory. There's another deleted scene from the end of the first show of the series which brings over-ambitiously tried to bring together about four or five strands from the programme. It makes sense of loads that has gone before, but got lopped off. I seem to remember we filmed these very close to transmission and the producer stayed up all night trying to make it work, but in the end had to opt for a truncated finale where our goodbyes came in over the credits and where nothing really made any sense. But I have no memory at all of filming this ending - the version you'll see (again I think it might be up on Chortle over the weekend) ends with us all corpsing rather charmingly, but doesn't make much sense unless you're familiar with the rest of the episode. But disconcerting to have had it all blanked from my memory. It's only sixteen years ago and I didn't do all that much TV stuff so you'd think it'd still be in my head. But I think it was probably quite a turbulent, stressful and unhappy time. If only I'd had a blog back then! I don't think I kept a diary at that point - there wouldn't really have been any time. As you'll see if you buy the DVD the second series is a bit of a mess, with us not really knowing what the format was any more and struggling with the changes forced on us from above. There are some really funny sketches and bits - many of the more well known Lee and Herring bits - but I can understand why we didn't get offered another series.
But the out takes make it look like we were having a laugh, so maybe it wasn't as grim as I remember (or rather don't remember). And gofasterstripe have put together another amazing package which I think you'll enjoy. And I might be able to as well given that much of it will be like watching someone else performing something that I've never seen before.
Ah what young fools we were. I still can't work out if it's a missed opportunity or whether things turned out for the best. I guess we'll have to wait until the end to find out.
And as someone always asks whenever I mention Fist of Fun release, we are hoping to buy TMWRNJ from the BBC as well, but have not yet heard back from them. With luck we'll release series 1 next year and series 2 the year after that. We've more or less broken even on Fist of Fun now so the experiment has been a success (breaking even was all we hoped for). Hopefully the second series will see a modest profit for gofasterstripe, Stew, me and the BBC (who get a quarter of the profit as well as the hefty amount of money we had to pay up front). But the good news is that that will give Chris Evans (not that one, why don't you listen? I already said that) more funds to invest in commercially unviable comedians. He may be the greatest Welshman ever to have lived (I know there's not much competition, but he would still be in the top 90% of greatest Englishmen if he had been lucky enough to have been born here).
By the way in October I am taking Talking Cock on a mini-tour taking in Liverpool, Brighton, Sheffield, London (the Purcell Rooms) and Manchester. These dates are selling well (in fact Manchester might be sold out by now, so you might have to come to the Lowry, Mancunians)and all in towns that I generally do well in so do book ahead. Details of these gigs and the rest of the tour
are here.
