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A month away from my puppet friends has been much too long. So it was good to be back chatting with them tonight for the series 2 opener of Twitch of Fun. As always, I spend all day looking at the papers and trying to pick some stories and try to work out roughly what each character might get up to, but once the show starts the other performers have their own ideas and most of it is unexpected. I felt very relaxed about going with the flow though. I think we actually managed some quite interesting chats about the news. Mostly the penis news. And the my balls news. But still…
And it was the first outing for a new character, who I think has a lot of legs, even though he hasn't got any legs. Will Brian Wasp ever make it back into this show? Even Marmite Lid, the £500,000 signing from the Sun, didn't make an appearance tonight. That's the level of the the competition.
I love this stupid show and how much I dread it beforehand and how much (usually) it surprises and pleases me. This was an especially relaxed one and I felt surprisingly little fear. And the viewing figures were up a bit, with over 300 people tuned in for most of it and over 1300 viewing it at some point.
It still feels full of potential as a format. And hopefully that bollock won't succeed in killing me and I can develop it even further.
It's also good to be doing stuff again after the enforced rest (though I sneaked in a few bits and bobs because it's impossible for me to relax completely - and plus it was boring being in bed) and it also took my mind of the chemo tomorrow. There's a very good chance that it won't cause me many problems at all and it will do a lot of good in the quest to stop this bastard returning, but it's still a little scary. And it's much worse than it sounds. I think when people hear the word cancer or chemo they tend to immediately leap to the worst outcome. I am sure I did too. I know I did. Because I did when I first heard I might have it.
But they wouldn't do chemo if chemo didn't work at least part of the time and my particular cancer is far from a death sentence and it's reassuring to keep getting messages from people who've beaten my kind of cancer and the other kinds too. And I hope this blog, and the slew of diseased ball work that I am going to be doing for the next few months, will help dissipate some of the fear. And maybe also make you all a little keener to keep an eye on your bits. As if I need to encourage my fans to touch themselves.
Talking it out with puppets, including one who is very close to the whole process, is probably not a bad coping mechanism, as much as on screen me questions whether this is the way to process the situation. Maybe I've processed it in the best way possible.
Yeah, probably not. I'll carry on living in denial. I'm just not the kind of one in two people who gets cancer.
