7547/20476
Back on the telly and how!
I went into ITN this evening to appear live on ITN London news to tell London and the surrounding areas that I was going on tour and thus largely not doing the show in London. There was about three hours travel time and one hour waiting time for my 4 minute appearance. So hopefully it's sold loads of tickets for me. Checks ticket sales. Oh.
Fun to be on live TV though and know I could tell everyone in London (who still watches live TV) to go fuck themselves. If I wanted.
The cab driver who picked me up said "I've just been googling you. You're a comedian right?" I admitted this was technically true. "What was it like having your dad as your headmaster?"
"Wow," I replied, "You've gone deep. Little bit stalkery. You'll have to download the show to find out."
He seemed like a nice fella, but this didn't seem super professional. He does know where I live too. But he clearly didn't know who I was five minutes before he stopped to pick me up and I guess people google their dates nowadays, so it maybe makes sense for taxi drivers to google their fares. And then if they're picking up Leslie Grantham, for example, they can maybe rethink their options.
This fucks things for comedians though. Usually a taxi driver asks you what you do for a living and you tell them the most boring/complex job possible to avoid any follow up questions or them asking you for a joke or worse providing you with a joke (usually racist) but now they can google you and be all prepped for the free comedy show that you apparently owe them for being in their car.
I think I might once or twice have attempted to tell the taxi driver a joke, but they never laugh. They are not asking you because they want a laugh. They are asking because they want you to prove you're funny and they are determined to prove you're not. An audience of one who does not want to laugh is one of the worse comedy crowds. Believe me, I've experienced it a lot.
The same driver was taking me home and told me he'd pick me up where he dropped me off, so when I came out and saw a car the same colour and size as the car I'd been in, I tried to open the door and it was locked and the man in the car said he was not my driver. "You look just like him," I said, meaning that their cars looked the same. Then my driver pulled up right in front of the this car, so the drivers were facing. One driver was of Middle Eastern origin and the other of African heritage and I realised with horror that what I had said had made it sound like I thought these two men of different ethnicities, to me, looked identical. I was already walking to the actual car and it would have looked desperate to return to the wrong one and say "I meant your cars, not your faces." Their cars were indeed the same colour and shape, but that's not what I'd said.
So I ended up being a racist joke even if my driver hadn't told me one.
For anyone who was in Edinburgh 26 years ago,
this is a lovely (and occasionally sad) walk down memory lane. Amazing how many of the comedians with quarter page ads are still going in comedy (and tragic that are couple are no longer going at all). Stew and me really announced ourselves with half page ads!
