So I don't know why people have a problem with talking to people at call centres in India. I find the whole experience rather charming and sweet. It's like stepping back into a past where people were actually polite with each other. Having received brash and unwanted calls from 3 Mobile in Wales it was something of a pleasure to get through to a quietly spoken, yet efficient man who would come across as sarcastically courteous if he was in the UK, but whose level of deference seemed pretty genuine coming from him. He was saying things like, "I am terribly sorry to hear that sir" and "I apologise for this inconvenience." It was great. Why do people have a problem with this? Is it because they don't like to be reminded of how horrible people in our country are and how shit at their jobs?
As seems to happen every few months my BT Broadband had gone up the spout. I was trying to download a TV series from iTunes (really just to see how it would look on my iPad) and admittedly it was in HD, but the status bar told me each episode was going to take between 13 and 29 hours to download and there were 44 of them (for some reason iTunes was giving me both the HD and non-HD version of every episode) and that to me seemed unreasonable. Even when I paused the download it was taking a long time to get into normal sites, like I was back in the mid-90s. I would be traveling in time quite a lot today - and am now wondering if the people at the call centre actually were in the 1950s. Think of how much money companies could save if they hired people from the past to man their phones - they could pay them in obsolete old money and probably only give them the equivalent of thruppence a week. Maybe they tell them to also put on Indian accents to throw us off the scent.
The internet is my life and I was doubly annoyed that my new iPad was not able to show me all the things it could do, thanks to BT squeezing some broadband wire somewhere and only letting a tiny amount of the magical juice through to me. I was getting withdrawal symptoms. I am perhaps too dependent on this stupid and wonderful web that sprawls across our planet. Luckily I had 3G on my iPad so could get my fix another way.
But the man in India was pretty helpful and had a good go at getting things right. As it happens he didn't manage it and though I got some messages later saying the problem was rectified, it was still the same when I got home. But at least I had been treated like a human being along the way. But how quickly become reliant on technology and how frustrating it is when we take a step backwards like this. Even if it's rather nicer to step back to a time when people were helpful and pleasant, in a time before we became greedy for stuff.
The first draft of the Christ on a Bike programme came through to me despite the slow connection and it's looking pretty amazing. It's always exciting to see it for the first time, even if it is a little disconcerting to realise how close Edinburgh is - my first preview is next Tuesday - and how little work I have done on the show. Even if I were to just do the original version of the show I still need to learn it - and I think it's likely that I will want to change most of it. And given that I have an AIOTM to get through first I don't know what the early previews will be like. I have a month and a half to knock it all into shape, which is plenty of time and I am actually relishing getting on with it. But there has been so much going on this month and I have barely had any time to think about August.
I would have liked to crack on with it straight away, but I had to go out to record an episode of a World Cup based panel show "Never Write Off the Germans" which will be on Radio 2 at 10pm on Saturday. It's a job I got, I think, because of my blogs and/or tweets about York City. The producer thought that supporting York City meant I had an interest in football and asked me if I'd like to take part. I had been in two minds about it, but then I know more about football than I do about rugby and I had just about got away with my appearance on
High Tackle, so maybe I could blag this too. Even though I have been working too hard to watch that much of the World Cup.
We were recording at the Cochrane Theatre in Holborn, which is where we had filmed the one and only Lee and Herring video back in the mid-nineties. I had one of those going back to your old primary school as an adult moments, because I am not sure I have stepped foot in the building since then and in my mind it had a big stage and an impressively large auditorium, but it's rather a modest sized space and not as glamorous as my memory has it. But back in the last century I had no doubt been excited to be in a theatre at all and had sprinkled the place with show business dust and made it more impressive than it was. Not that's it's not a perfectly lovely place, because it is, just that in my head it had transmuted into the London Palladium.
Fifteen years had passed since that day. We had been exhausted having just flown back from the Edinburgh Fringe which had finished the day before and now we were going to be performing the show twice in a night to give us some options for the edit. All I wanted to do was sleep and we found it pretty hard to find the energy. I only watched the video once and found it disappointing, mainly I think because it sounded like we were going down to no response, even though the first show in particular had gone pretty well on the night, but the audience hadn't been miked up too well. You can see the result for free
on Stewart
Lee's website, along with all the TV stuff we did too. It's not worth buying.
It didn't feel like a decade and a half ago and I remembered bantering with the crew and flirting with a pretty young woman who was working on one of the cameras. I wondered what had become of her in the intervening years. And I thought of the audiences who had seen the filming. Where were they? What had become of them? They were mainly teenagers back then, but now they'd be in their thirties, married with kids. Yet in some ways it felt so recent that I could almost touch them. The ghost of those crowds felt like they were still there somewhere, still somehow reachable. Tonight's audience was real but soon they would be just a ghost of memory too. And in the future in the same room what other audiences would congregate? People not yet born might one day be sitting in those seats. They felt like ghosts too. A night turns into a memory and then as the years pass fades and becomes obliterated.
These were odd things to be thinking about as I settled down to record a laddish look at the World Cup.
I blagged my way through it all and got a few laughs and looked like I might know a little bit about football. It was a fun romp, like all these panel shows a little but disposable. It will be a diverting half hour for people listening to the radio, but then it's gone. Evaporating away like the laughter we produced. But that doesn't make it a waste of time. The laughter existed for that instant. That is about as good as it gets for a laugh. We did our job. We went for a drink. We went home. Just like all those other days that have gone by. Just like those days that are to come.
Sorry, I don't know where any of that came from.
There's some more cod (Herring) philosophising in
this long and strange interview I did yesterday for B3TA. And some funny stuff too. Which I have neglected to put in this blog.
