Today I celebrated New Year's Eve. No, I'm not mental, Chinese or following some old-time, abandonned calendar: I was participating in the lie that is television.
Everything you see on TV is fake, apart from the moon landing of 1969, that was genuine. All the other stuff is completely made up.
Bear this in mind if you watch Jools Holland's Hootenanny on New Year's Eve this year. It may all look like the festivities are unfolding before your very eyes and you may wonder how Jools persuaded a high class celebrity audience including Amanda Burton, the bloke from Gimme Gimme Gimme and opera director Stewart Lee to come out on this day of a million parties, but in fact what you will be seeing happened three weeks before and Amanda Burton, the bloke from Gimme Gimme Gimme and the opera director Stewart Lee are all tucked up safely in bed. Together as it happens. It's a well guarded show-biz secret that Amanda Burton, the bloke from Gimme Gimme Gimme and the opera director Stewart Lee have all been married to each other for several years now and share a one bedroom flat in East Dulwich. Someone should really write a sit-com about it.
Or a porn film.
I have been invited to this event for three years running; I don't know why, I am clearly not on a par with the celebrities I have already mentioned above. I couldn't make it last year, but did come along the year before and it was tremendous fun. Sadly, when it came to the actual real New Year, I was on my own in my flat (partly due to illness and partly due to my lack of enthusiasm for last day of the year enforced shennanighans) and I ended up watching the show. This was rather surreal, like an episode of the Twilight Zone penned by Sir Charles Dickens, as the sober, miserable me watched a drunk, happy me apparently partying it up for the New Year 2002.
Thus when this year Jools reminded us to get into character and when the countdown came to act exactly as we would for the real New Year, I made a mental note that I should make a glum face and pull my duvet up around me and eat some tear-soaked crisps.
But that is all to come. I had a fantastic false New Year. I told the beautiful Claire Grogan how bad Gregory's Two Girls was (apparently they didn't even ask her to be in it, which shows how stupid the producers were), I complained to the guitarist from the (actually excellent) "The Primal Scream" (I know) that his music was just bang, bang, bang and you couldn't hear the lyrics -he took it in the spirit it was intended, which was lucky as he looked like he could have probably decked me - and I saw the tiny little "The Sugarbabes" (I know) in real life. I told Stewart that my intention was to marry all three of them, at the same time. To begin with I wouldn't tell them that I was also married to the others as well, but gradually I would drop hints about it, testing the water, to see if I could end up with some kind of situation where we all shared the same one bedroom flat. From there it would be just one short step to a scenario where they were lezzing up. I think it will almost certainly happen.
Stew was very dismissive and judgemental about this idea, which I think is a little bit hypocritical given his unsavoury arrangement with Amanda Burton and the bloke from Gimme Gimme Gimme. I think he thinks such behaviour is expected for opera directors but not for people who have never directed an opera in their lives.
Anyway, I had a fine night (as you might see in a few weeks if you live as sad and lonely a life as me), and the extra bonus is that I am now living in the year 2004. Let me tell you, my friends, the future is a wonderful and mysterious place. They have invented an entirely new topping for toast which is so popular that the marmalade, Marmite and honey producers (not the bees, but the people who look after them - you may know them by their unusual head gear) have all gone bust.
That's actually the only difference, but still it's quite a turnaround in 21 days.
So the only real advice I can give you to prepare for this Brave New World is to stock up on Marmite now, before it's gone forever.
