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It's 2015! And I am still writing "Why I am still using cheques?" on all of my cheques.
It's impossibly futuristic. My child will be born this year (unless it proves to be remarkably fastidious and stays inside my wife until 2016). Everything about having a baby is just stupidly freaky.
I sent out
this month’s newsletter, giving details (amongst other things) of my plan to duck out of this year’s Edinburgh Fringe and instead do something much trickier and less financially crippling and perform all 11 of my one man shows, plus a bonus brand new show, over six weekends in August and September at the Leicester Square Theatre.
Chortle picked up on the story and I gave them a bit more info about the proposal. Tickets are not yet on sale, but I am hoping we can work something out where you can get a discount if you come to a few of them and I am planning on organising some kind of nice prize for anyone who manages to attend all 12. We’ll see.
I started the year as I mean to carry on, by going on my 6.75 mile run around the Thames. Me1 took control of my legs for the first time in a while and turned in a respectable 58minutes 38 second time. The year may just have begun, but the time trials for this year’s Half Marathon have already begun in earnest. I enjoyed the run and with Me1 doing the work was able to tune out and think about other things. Consequently every now and again I’d realise where I was and how far I’d gone and be a bit freaked out that I hadn’t really noticed that I’d just run another mile. My fear is that because it’s a different part of me running that it might be the Mes who get fit and I won’t lose any weight.
I worried that the other people walking by the river this lunchtime would look at me and assume that I was the kind of idiot who had made a New Year’s Resolution to go running and that this would be one and only attempt in 2015. I wanted to shout at everyone I passed, “I do this all the time, or at least semi-regularly. It’s just a coincidence that it’s January 1st. Don’t judge me.” But I didn’t. Having said that I did judge every single other person that I saw running. “I won’t be seeing you again, old January 1st runner. I will be back here on a semi-regular basis all the year round, unless I get a cold or having a baby makes me too tired. You make me sick!"
I think Me1’s exertion does have some pay off on my own body as I was pretty wiped out for the rest of the day. I only managed to get about four more pieces into my jigsaw and failed entirely to get any work or even chores done. I watched the Rik Mayall tribute on iPlayer, though didn’t think it quite captured what was interesting and amazing about the man. Greg Davies was the only one who really spoke about what Rik meant to his fans and I found that very moving, but the mock/genuine eulogising of him didn’t feel right except when it came from Rik himself. It’s too soon to do a real appraisal of the man, who is undoubtedly the comedic heart of his generation of comedians and had an enormous impact on the next generation, where maybe there’s a more subtle examination of where things went wrong and then went right again for him, but the tone wasn’t quite right for me. With Ben Elton using this an opportunity to point out that Flashheart was brilliantly written, thus allowing Rik to fly exemplifying that. Mainly because he’s wrong. It wouldn’t have mattered what Flashheart said (a lot of it is crap on paper), it was all Rik Mayall. Ben Elton should be on his knees, thanking Rik for allowing him to hitch a ride on the comet. How many of those people would be stars without Rik?
There’s something interesting in the way that overall Mayall’s genius was unfulfilled and yet unlike other unfulfilled comedy geniuses like Peter Cook or Tony Hancock, he was still happy and positive and actually capable of delivering the goods. Man Down is a fitting swan song, but also a painful taste of what there would have been to come.
Anyway, it made me sad and it nearly made me cry again, proving once again that Rik Mayall means way too much to me or that I have some deep emotional issues that make the death of a stranger matter more to me than tragic things that happen in my personal life. But Greg nails it in that tribute show. What Mayall means to our generation. Or at least the comedy nerds and idiots in our generation. He was a part of us. And 2014 decided to rip that part of us out without any warning, after we'd maybe forgotten it was in there. That's why it hurt so much.
RHLSTP with Milton Jones now up on free video here-
youtube VimeoThe audio will be up over the weekend. The producer thought he’d put it in dropbox, but he hadn’t and now he’s in France! The dick.
