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Stewart Lee has been talking about t
he time he once nearly wrote a sitcom for Ant and Dec (he may well be lying - it's what he does), but accompanying articles have pointed out that we did work with the arguably more successful double act back in the day. We had a running joke about jumping out of crates at the start of our show (not sure why) but the wrong one would be delivered each week. I think I ended up in the Grandstand studio one time. You can watch the DVDs if you want to see what else we did. In the last ep, the PJ and Duncan crates came to our studio and we chased them out of the studio as if they were rats (or something like that).
In return we agreed to be on Ant and Dec's sketch show, playing policemen and you can see a very shaky copy of the result in the link. Although I know we did this I have absolutely no memory at all of doing it, which is strange, because we didn't do many other TV shows and I remember a bit about most of the rest of them. But this material is entirely unfamiliar to me and I can't even pull up a single memory of doing it. Sure it happened nearly 30 years ago, but still. Getting to work with Ant and Dec and not even remembering it. How rich and incident packed our lives must have been.... nope, this was an unusual highlight.
Nice kids though - glad they've done so well. And I am less judgemental of their choices than my erstwhile partner. None of it is their fault or their responsibility. You do you.
Though I have accidentally been in a comedy sketch with Nigel Farage and had to sit in a green room with him and it was one of the most sickening things that's happened to me, so like most people in entertainment, the boys have strong stomachs. You could argue by trapping horrible self-regarding people in a jungle and feeding them shit they are doing some kind of modern version of the stocks though, but it gets complicated.
I am glad that they went on to be the successful double act, just as I am that the damp squib of my career means that I spent tonight talking to a ventriloquist dummy in front of an audience of less than 200 for no money.... hold on.
