I was up at 6am to appear on BBC Breakfast News, reviewing the papers. This is one of the gigs I get given by my evil PR people, who think that somehow me talking about news stories at 7.20 and 8.20 on a Saturday morning will somehow encourage people to come and see my show in Edinburgh. Even though I will be mainly talking about serious news stories and will at no point mention even the name of my show. I suppose it's possible it might sell one ticket to some insomniac somewhere, who chooses to google my name after my appearance because he/she has nothing better to do. But I don't think so.
And who watches Breakfast News on a Saturday anyway? Well according to my dad about six people in Cheddar, including my old English teacher Mr Litten. But I am sure they are the only ones, and as no-one in Cheddar dares travel beyond Banwell for fear of falling off the end of the earth, this is not useful for selling tickets in Scotland, a country that exist only in myths in Somerset. And in the film Braveheart which is available at the local video shop.
I am perhaps unsurprisingly not at the top of my game at this time of morning. I arrived at the BBC at 6.30 and was given the papers to plough through. I needed to choose 5 "serious" stories for the first bit. This was quite hard as the papers were dominated by one serious story - the identity of the London bombers. Not many laughs here. Perhaps people would come along to my Edinburgh show hoping I would talk earnestly about world issues and be disappointed when it turned out mainly to be yoghurt based material.
Then I managed to get in the Harry Potter phenomenon as a serious topic, which I was a bit surprised about. BBC Breakfast News actually had a 9 year old boy in the studio who had been up for the last six hours reading the book. They were interviewing him at various intervals to find out how it was going. Isn't this against the law? Child labour surely?
"Please let me go to bed," he would whine off camera.
"No!" barked the producer, hitting his be-shorted legs with a birch twig, "Read the book! Read it now!"
"I don't even like Harry Potter. I find it childish. I prefer the work of Philip Pulman, which is infinitely superior and less not all over-written and nicked off other people."
"Read the book! Say it is fab! Then when you have finished we
might let you go home.
Then I talked about a flying fish that had been found in the sea off Devon and Stephen Byers (which I knew very little about to be honest). It was so early that I can't really remember what I said.
The second bit was going to be "lighter stories, which would surely make sense of employing a comedian to look at the papers. I had some cracking stuff prepared, but then at 8 there was some more appalling breaking news from Iraq and so my time got shrunk down to two and a half minutes and I gabbled my way through the things that I had selected.
It was all somewhat surreal and pointless and unlike the 9 year old boy who I suspect is still imprisoned in the BBC, I was back in bed by 8.45 and asleep by 9. So when I woke up I figured the whole thing might have been a slightly dull dream.
Except for my dad telling me about some of his friends seeing me and berating me for not letting him know I was going to be on.
Still after that I will be surprised if there is a single ticket left available for my Edinburgh run. And the 9 year old kid is apparently sold out for a national tour in the autumn already. It's a great show. Audience members ask him questions about the Harry Potter Books and every time he gets one wrong he is electrocuted. The more he gets wrong, the higher the electrical charge. Fifteen questions wrong and his brain explodes. Do catch it if you can manage to steal a ticket - though probably best to try and get one from near the beginning of the run. Just in case.
