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Freedom! Freedom! Just like in Braveheart. Just before he dies.
We are going to Center Parcs in August (which is a controversial decision to some on Twitter, though one of the people who questioned me then said, “It’s good for the kids” as if we had booked this for ourselves and were dragging the children along). At 7am the website would be open to book activities and we knew that things went quick and so were poised to get on there as soon as possible. Not so much for the extra activities (though we were going to book some of those) but because of Covid CP is only allowing four swim sessions in the week for each family and we didn’t want to end up having to do those at 7am of 7pm.
I had been waiting til 7am to start as a dutiful and obedient citizen, but about a quarter of an hour before I thought I’d better check to see it hadn’t opened early. And discovered it had and jubilantly got our swimming sessions booked. By 7am the website suddenly slowed down to a crawl, unsurprisingly as everyone was doing the same as us and this website is the same one for all the many Center Parcs in the country. You’d think they might have some kind of system in place to make it easier (maybe staggered times - the earlier you booked, the earlier you get to choose activities), but I suspect they have realised that the blind panic that parents might miss out on something makes them spend lots more money. And as many people were keen to point out CP is an expensive holiday. Though it’s not as expensive as going abroad and doesn’t involve taking kids on planes so it’s not all bad.
It took 90 minutes and a failed attempt to pay to get a few activities booked - we picked up a few more later in the day when the demand had died down (but choices became rather sparse) and we’ve ended up with a good amount of stuff to do. Though all the time as I was booking it I wondered what the chances were that the holiday would go ahead. I suspect that stuff will still be open in August, but if any of us get ill or the staff get hit by Covid then it could all fall apart.
And it seems crazy that today is Freedom Day. I don’t think there has been a time during the last 18 months where I’ve heard of more people I know either being made to isolate or actually having Covid. I was in Elstree today working on the programme that I am “consulting” on and two of the guests on the panel and a producer had to pull out because they’d been pinged or been in contact with someone with Covid. One of the other writers (I mean programme consultants) got promoted to panellist during the course of the day. All Covid restrictions stayed in place - we even did the script meeting with masks on, which made it harder to hear other people’s ideas.
As someone whose immune system is still possibly compromised, I was glad that the people I was working with weren’t burning their masks and shouting Freedom and licking each other’s anuses - well it was a shame about the last one, but no one ever licks mine in these circumstances - but I still felt a bit vulnerable. Hindsight might show us that relaxing restrictions at this point was a stupid and dangerous thing to do. Also sight might show us that. It clearly is an insane time to open night clubs. Yet nothing seems to shake the Boris Johnson Death Cult supporters. But it’s nice to get this concern down in writing on the day, so that people can’t claim in the future that we didn’t know that this was a stupid move. Not that that will stop people claiming that.
It’s been fun working on this show, though it was show one today and there was a lot of wasted time waiting around and the script was being tinkered with right up to about 20 minutes before recording. It was enjoyable to hear the cameramen laughing at the jokes we’d been working on - always a good sign and my favourite joke went down particularly well. This was one that the host had written that included two funny ideas, but my contribution was to suggest cutting one of the two bits and even though it had been funny, losing it somehow made the joke 200% funnier. Comedy can still surprise and fascinate me. Sometimes one example is better than two. It’s not just about brevity being the soul of wit (which is far from being true - there are no rules to comedy and if there are, then breaking them is funny too), but about specificity and starkness sometimes being funnier. It sometimes just defies analysis. This joke makes me piss myself every time and yet it didn’t really make me chuckle until we took out the other bit.
I didn’t hang around for the recording, but the run through had gone well and I think my presence had helped, even if it felt a bit like a wasted afternoon of waiting around and not being kept in the loop. Inevitably the writers (if there were any on this show) are the lowest in the food chain.
