Warming Up

5545/18565

More tour prep today (though I didn't get as far as listening back to the show to see if I still remembered any of it) and it was time to turn my family people carrier into my cool tour bus where I will be partying for the next four months. And by partying I mean playing Addams Family Pinball, failing to write my sitcom and sleeping. I had to take out baby seats and transfer them into my wife's car and load up the boot with programmes and props and Emergency Questions books and for some reason I decided to hoover both vehicles. I can't remember the last time I vacuumed my car. I did one of the car seats once after Phoebe was sick all over it and I had to put bicarbonate of soda down. But my new turbo animal Dyson is made for jobs like this, so I tried to get some of the crud and detritus out of both vehicles. Some of this could be blamed on children spilling raisins, but to be fair, most of it was my mess.

I was a bit nervous about what I might discover. But anything too incriminating or disgusting got sucked into the belly of my hungry vacuum cleaner. The cars are filthy on the outside though (who knew that the countryside was so muddy?) so vacuuming the interior was like polishing a turd from the inside.

It still hasn't quite sunk in that my pastoral idyll is coming to, if not an end, then to a point of severe interruption. I am generally only doing two or three gigs a week (plus a RHLSTP for the first 9 weeks), but I will be away from my family for longer than I'd like. I will miss a few bedtimes even though I might be around in the daytimes. So I cherished my daughter hiding in her tent when I was trying to get her pyjamas on and insisting on smearing my face in the body moisturising cream that was supposed to go on her. 

I threw together a pretty amazing lentil pie and watched Inside Number 9 (though for once got the twist almost straight away). Having sat on a Bafta jury and found the whole thing to be a basic crock of shit, it was entertaining to see it pastiched. I have gone back and watched the first two series of this show on Netflix and although it was good to start with, it is maturing and improving with age and this series is definitely superior to the others. The BBC have rightly given all the League of Gentlemen guys the free rein to try out their imaginative and sometimes expensive ideas and I wish they would do it with more visionary comedians (obviously I'd have loved to have that level of support too, but there's a queue of people who I'd put in front of me). Reece and Steve work hard, harder than people in TV have to and the rewards of their endeavours and commitment is that the work gets richer and better. So often you see some work going into a first series and then everyone starts to coast on their success. 

But as I hoover up TV series on Netflix (more regularly and efficiently than I hoover up hard raisins) I am just struck by how much competition there is out there, how many people are working on stuff that even though it has the wonder of being made, might not be seen by many people or feted or come anywhere near winning awards. You have to work so hard and the chances are your hard work will never get made, but even if it does, it might never get seen. Do I want to shovel more shit into this trough?

Of course I do. Just on the off chance that I am lucky enough to get something made and then even luckier to get people to like it. Until I am unlucky enough that someone doesn't like it any more and it's gone.