Ticket sales for Edinburgh are looking good already, which fingers crossed will continue and I was excited to note today that edfringe.com has sold out of its allocation of tickets for the first Saturday already. There are more tickets available at the venue and admittedly the first few days are cut price anyway, but with over a month to go this is very encouraging. And if you are planning to take advantage of those cheap ticket offers then I would advise that you do it sooner rather than later.
Click here for the edfringe website.
Please spread the word to anyone you think might be interested.
Last night as I was walking home from my gig I was walking alongside a man who was talking on a mobile phone. He was clearly receiving some bad news. "Oh no, that's terrible," he said, with no irony in his voice. He then turned to me, keen to unburden his news even on a stranger and said, "Richard Whiteley has died."
"Oh no!" I replied and even gave this stranger an encouraging pat on the shoulder. He hadn't recognised me off the telly and thus thought I should know, he just thought it was important enough news to tell a stranger. Which I think shows the regard the man was held in.
I don't think there are many deaths that people would feel the need to share in this way and I am sure there were many young people who had enjoyed Whiteley's work in an ironic post-modern fashion for so many years would now find themselves hit in an unironic fashion by his unexpected demise.
Richard Whiteley, I think, was like one of the family. In the sense that he was always there, sitting in the corner of the room, making rubbish jokes and who you openly chastise as a bit of a prat. Because he was always there you never considered how you would feel if suddenly he wasn't and I think this makes the shock all the worse. There was no pretension about him and in some ways only limited ability - I always thought my dad would do about as good a job and after a period of mourning might suggest him for the vacancy.
I met him once in Edinburgh when me and Stew were guests on his lunchtime chat show. I don't remember much about it. I was hungover and I think made a few inappropriate jokes, a bit over-excited by being close to such a legend, but wanting to distance myself from those feelings because I was supposed to be vaguely cool. This seems to be my reminiscence of most of the famous people I have met once. Maybe I am buffoon enough to fill Whiteley's shoes.
I realised today that Richard Whiteley must have been 38 when he started doing Countdown. I am 38 in two weeks time. It's a sobering thought, because he looked middle-aged when he started the job and of course he was. The weird thing is that I am as well now.
Don't worry I wouldn't dare send off a jokey application for his job. It's OK to do that with the Pope, but with Whiteley that would be sacrilege.
