Having survived my late night ride on the train of lost souls I was pretty tired this morning, having got to bed very late. But had to plough onwards nonetheless and did some work on the book and for the "Teenage Diary" radio show that I was recording in the evening (it's on Radio 4, but not sure of the broadcast date yet).
I am going to have to brave the train again on Friday for my gig in Whitstable (nearly sold out - book ahead), because I doubt that my car will have been mended by then. I wonder if my crazy, laughing nemesis will be there to liven up my journey. I am sure there will some other Kental person to make the slow hours pass by. Watch this space. Tune in live for Twitter-like updates!
Or maybe not.
The repercussions of the Brand/Ross affair keep reverberating onwards, all these weeks later. Before the recording at the Drill Hall, charming host Rufus Hound told me that Radio 4 compliance were not only up in arms about the things I was going to talk about (the producer had accidentally sent them an unedited version of my diaries in all their Nazis-blowing-Anne-Frank's-tits-off glory, but were also warning everyone involved that we had to watch absolutely everything we said. Even though the show would be pre-recorded and could be edited retrospectively if one of us ad-libbed something unacceptable, we had to self-censor and not say anything controversial in case a journalist was in the audience and wrote about it.
Firstly it is a very bad idea to tell comedians not to do something. The minute you say "oh you can say anything, except...." then whatever follows will be foremost in their mind and once they're in front of a crowd they will find it very hard not to vocalise it.
But more worryingly, if we, as performers are supposed to constantly consider and self-censor everything we are about to say, then it's going to have a serious effect on our creativity. It's a producer's job to cut our beautiful but rude jokes to pieces after the record and it's that safety net that means we can really relax and say anything we wish. And that is what leads to great, improvised comedy, which won't necessarily even be rude. But with draconian restrictions like these it can only limit us.
And the fun thing about radio recordings is that the performers will say some things specifically for the audience, knowing that they are much to rude for broadcast. The performer knows it and the audience knows it, but the occasional surreptitious bit of rudeness can relax everyone and lead to some of the biggest laughs of the night.
If the BBC is trying to control absolutely every aspect of a recording for fear of another scandal then they might as well shut down. Because if journalists want to go that far then they could just follow the performers around all day, catch them swearing in their every day life (or blog or podcast) and create a furore from that.
Hopefully all this craziness will pass, but for the moment it's making for a sticky situation.
As it happens Rufus and I had a fine time, with a packed and responsive crowd, going over my stupid diaries. We recorded 45 minutes for a 15 minute show, so lots of good stuff will hit the digital version of the cutting room floor and it seems a shame that Radio 4 isn't giving 30 minutes to this fun show. Unusually for these shows, it was just me and the host and Rufus is a good enough comedian to understand when to let his guest speak and when to chip in with a well-timed ad-lib. We covered some quite interesting philosophical issues, as well as discussing my teenage masturbatory habits. Time and censorship might mean that neither of those things make it on air.
