4642/17301
This morning I was on Radio 4's Saturday Live, hosted by the Reverend Richard Coles from off Christianity and the Communards and Kate Silverton. It's an eclectic mixture of guests and features, including today Jonathan Lovett, a man who does a plague walk through London dressed up like an old-time doctor in leather coat and beak like mask, Hannah Campbell a woman who had been nearly killed in a mortar attack in Iraq and Noel Smith, an ex-gangster who had turned his back on crime and taught himself to read and write in prison and is now a published author. I felt like a bit of a fraud talking about how my 12 shows took me through mild depression and crises, when they were going to be talking to Hannah about losing her leg and Noel about being kept in solitary confinement. But then I am a bit of a fraud, so that's OK.
It was interesting to chat to the other guests both on and off air. Sitting waiting to go into the studio Hannah looked down at her feet and noticed that she had put on the wrong leg this morning. Apparently she has six different prosthetic legs, one ultra realistic one for best, one to wear with heels and ones with different tan levels. And she'd put on the untanned one, which was not the current shade of her actual leg. That is not a problem I would ever have anticipated. But Hannah was laughing about it and so were we. I wanted to tell her I knew how she felt, because in the darkness this morning, exhausted from the early start, I had put my underpants on back to front. It also reminded me a little bit of a producer I once knew (though didn't work with) who wore a wig, but had ones of different lengths so that he could say, “Just off to the hairdressers†and come back with the shorter one. And everyone had to pretend that they were unaware that he wore a wig.
I mean it's not the same and neither the leg or the wig are as serious as my pants issue, but it's a funny old world. Of course having worked in the armed forces and had to deal with nearly being killed and losing a limb, Hannah had a great sense of humour about what had happened to her. But when I'd just done a show in which I was unhappy because I had had to move into a big house on my own, it was hard not to feel a bit daft about ever thinking my life has been hard.
Then again, I did put my pants on back to front this morning.
Noel had some radical ideas about prison reform, having spent much of his life behind bars. He basically thought that prison should be reserved for a few thousand dangerous people and that it's ludicrous, expensive and counter-productive. I have thought the same for some time. We seem to accept that locking people away is justice for them having committed a crime, but we are paying to keep them in there and it seems to make them more likely to reoffend. If you're transgressed against society then maybe you should have to spend your time atoning by doing something useful for society, rather than just being shut away. And in all likelihood you've transgressed due to desperation, so if we're going to spend money on criminals, maybe it should be to educate and train them for jobs. I told Noel that I'd had the chance to kill Michael Gove, but he didn't think it would have been worth spending the rest of my life in prison - what would he know? Oh yeah, right.
So an interesting start to the day and I'd been up early with Phoebe, so I thought I'd be flagging by showtime. But somehow I had enough energy and the yoghurt show came back to me easily. I was able to do a bit more of the Pope routine than I'd budgeted for. And even though I hadn't learned it, the extra bit came out fine. I had to cut about 30 minutes of stuff, but I might do a best of the cut stuff before the final show, Happy Now? on the 12th September. I imagine that the trout sperm routine might make it.
Amazingly I sold 325 tickets tonight, so wasn't too far off a sell-out and I am a third of the way through the challenge. Although I think a section of the audience were bamboozled by the long routines about yoghurt and magpies, mostly it went down well. I am really enjoying the retrospective and selling enough tickets to justify the hard work that I have to put in to relearn these shows. The sweetness of the early shows is quickly seeping away and the next two have some very bumpy moments that have shocked even me. But are clearly, I hope, the scream of a lonely and impotent man trying to come to terms with things not going the way he hoped. I hope the momentum continues, both for me and the audiences, but it does seem that people are enjoying the rollercoaster ride. And though the memory test is far from easy, it's not as difficult as it might appear (for me at least, but maybe I've just got a good memory). Tickets available for all shows (amazed that my favourite, What is Love, Anyway? is the only one to not yet sell 100 seats), though certainly the final show is heading for a sell-out and others might go that way if today is anything to go by. Details here.
For those who saw the Hercules show last night (or if you want to see me hit a woman in the face with a big bit of wood and then jump out of a plane), the missing videos (without sound) have been uploaded to youtube.
