Warming Up

The Christmas holidays are over and the kids were back to school on a cold and frosty morning that froze the locks on the school gates. And as if by magic I was suddenly able to get some work done. I wonder if there might be a connection.

I have a lot to get done in the next few weeks - the deadline for my book about my bollock is supposedly the end of the month, though my editor has already said I can have more time, which I think I will need. But I am still going to attempt to hit the original deadline. I worked my way through a chapter today, but also had to prep for a remote RHLSTP with a surprise guest from America! Luckily it wasn’t a surprise to me or that would have made the prep work pretty difficult.

It was weird to be back doing remote shows - the last one was with Nigel Planer back in May (I think) and since then we’ve somehow managed to do them all live again. And it isn’t lockdown that’s making us do a couple more remote ones, we’ve just got a couple of weeks to fill before we can start broadcasting live ones again.

I had forgotten everything about doing them like this though and was pressing all the wrong buttons (before we started and maybe once during the recording), but after that slipped back into things quite nicely and ended up having a nice long chat with the guest, in which inevitably we sort of forgot it was for broadcast.

This is a terrific way to pick up guests who would be hard to get to the LST because they’re 6000 miles away, but also maybe to do a few interesting guests who might not be able to sell many tickets at a live venue. The Retro RHLSTPs have been quite a success, but I am toying with the idea of doing two shows a week, like some of those American podcasters and maybe a live one and a remote one might be a fun way of achieving that. I’ve also been thinking that I’d quite like to do a show where I interview celebs with Ally Sloper, my 130 year old (this month) ventriloquist dummy. If you’re not careful I might end up having a podcast released every day of the week.

Sadly we lost out on Twitch of Fun tonight as our transAtlantic guest (I am making it sound way more exciting than it is) had to call off on Monday as they weren’t feeling very well. But RHLSTP is the lifejacket that keeps all the other terrible podcasts afloat, so sometimes we have to make such sacrifices. It meant I had to do my material about the Nevermind baby and the woman who hospitalised herself because she was selling her farts in a jar without a puppet to interrupt me.

What a world we live in. And what a great idea to raise funds for the podcast. My farts are disgusting too, so I should be able to make real money - hers were going for $1000 a (literal) pop.