I was taking the tube to my night of two previews in South London (Stockwell followed by Brixton). I managed to get a seat, although it was next to another gentleman who clearly had balls the size of watermelons as he was splayed out across half of the empty seat. I sat there anyway and pushed my leg against his in what I thought was a clear indication that he should move. But just like the last time this happened he seemed perfectly content to have a stranger's leg pushed hard against his own. I was seriously considering saying something to him in a loud voice about whether his genitalia was as cumbersome and huge as he seemed to be making out.
But then I was distracted because Harry Shearer got on to the tube. I couldn't believe it was him. What was he doing a) in the United Kingdom and b) travelling on a tube in this heat. The man must be so rich that he could afford to buy his own tube train and pay men to drill tunnels between the place he's staying and anywhere that he wants to go and then travel alone in his massive underground train eating diamonds. Or just get a taxi. This is Derek Smalls, for Christ sake. This is Mr Burns. Why was he on the tube? I loved him for it though. Unless he'd just got into some comedy caper where he'd lost his wallet and his filofax and hie entourage and was forced to try and make it across town under his own steam. How cool that he uses public transport.
I am a massive fan of this man and nearly everything he has done (apparently he was in The Truman Show, but no one is perfect). I did once interact with him briefly at a show in Edinburgh, but much as I wanted to go up to him and tell him how great I thought he was and have a chat with him, I was either too shy or too respectful of his privacy. Or both.
He had a little handheld fan which he was cooling himself with, suggesting that this wasn't the first time he had tubed it and that he wasn't in the middle of a comedy caper. And I could have gone up to him and opened with, "Hey, I bet you haven't sweated this much since that time you got trapped in those pods that time," then laughed way too much and then gone quiet for much too long. Before adding, "You know, like in This Is Spinal Tap." Before going quiet again and then saying "Which you were in." Before going quiet again and then saying, "Playing bassist Derek Smalls." Before then going quiet and saying, "Did someone turn the heating up to 11? Damn I should have started with that one."
But I decided that might be awkward.
What I found even more astonishing was that this man, who must be one of the highest paid entertainers in the world, just down to pure consistency - he has appeared in over 500 episodes of The Simpsons in the last 23 years - could go about his day almost entirely unnoticed by the public. Unless everyone else in that carriage was as cool and/or cowardly as me, I was the only one who realised that we were in the presence of Ned Flanders and Principal Skinner. How cool to be this famous and yet this anonymous.
I was so starstruck that it didn't even cross my mind to ask him to be a guest on my Leicester Square Theatre podcast. But that might be a good thing as I would just have spent 90 minutes reminding him of bits from Spinal Tap between awkward silences. I regretted just not saying hello to him. What was the worst that could have happened? It's unlikely our paths will cross again (unless like Mark Thomas I try to go to the toilet in his dressing room). I had a bag full of my show programmes. I could have handed him one and invited him to come and see the show some time. My show's theme is probably about seizing the day and making the most of every second of life and though I have got better at this lately, my shyness and fear have stopped me doing so many things and I could have had a brief chat with one of my comedy heroes tonight. He wouldn't have minded. If he's grounded enough to go on the tube, he'd be nice enough to shoot the breeze with me for three minutes.
On the way back home after a couple of promising previews, with the show finding its shape, the woman sitting next to me asking if I was Richard Herring. We had a chat and she was a bit apologetic, asking me if got hassled by strangers a lot. I said that I didn't and that it was nice to chat to people and told her how I had failed to say hello to Harry Shearer. She congratulated me on being cooler than her, but I told her that my point was that I had fucked up. What's the harm in saying hello politely? I chatted to the woman until it was my stop, about her job and how she gets free clothes and how she'd just been to karaoke. Which was preferable to sitting there my own playing Yahtzee on my phone. It made me rue my shyness even more.
As long as people are polite and respectful (unlike the guy who recently shouted in my face about my Holocaust material) then it's the opposite of a burden to have a chat.
Remarkably I have also managed to complete all the Limited Edition Edinburgh programmes for those of you who were kind enough to donate (there were fewer of you than usual, which made it slightly easier). There are four people who have not provided me with a real name or their address so if they could get in touch with me and let me know what name they donated under I will send them their programme and DVD. Otherwise you should get your stuff in the next couple of days, or you've had an email from me asking for your address. Remember that if you haven't donated and you're not coming to the Fringe you can buy a copy of 10 - here.
In fact, here's the latest newsletter with all my Edinburgh news and links
To be fair to Stewart Lee (which obviously I hate to be), he feels he's been misrepresented by Chortle in the article I wrote about yesterday. It does seem they have taken the quotes out of context (as I suspected they might have). He's written a response.
To be fair to myself I should add that I don't really claim to have been much influence on Stewart's current work. Usually anything I have said about this is a reaction to a journalist (or whoever) commenting that my work is clearly influenced by Stewart (this happened a bit when I returned to stand-up but rarely does any more) and I would just point out that it was possible (and likely) that he was just as influenced by me as I was by him (given that we wrote together and saw each other practically every day for a decade). It seemed unfair and a bit stupid to assume I was copying Stew given our history. But in truth we learned our craft together and often don't remember which of us came up with a particular trope that we might both still employ (probably because we did it together). But I don't want to take any credit away from Stew for what he has achieved. You can not blame me for any of that.
