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I decided to do a long dog walk this morning and went past the Hitchin cum bin site. Wolfie had just done a poo so I had it bagged up and ready to put in the cum bin. Not in the cum section, I'm not sick, that's for cum, but there's another receptacle for the rare non-cum refuse.
I walked up to the place where this work of art stood, but I couldn't find it. Had I misremembered its position? I retraced my steps and it became clear that the cum bin had gone.
Someone had taken the cum bin away. Possibly a thief recognising its worth to the artistic community, but more likely North Herts Council. Another bin with no cum receptacle had been placed a few yards up the road.
Where am I supposed to throw away my used cum now?
One of the things I liked about HItchin when I moved here was that there wasn't cum everywhere. I suppose that's all about to change.
It's not just the loss of a valuable cum receptacle, it's the loss of the work of art. This is equivalent to trying to scrub a Banksy off the wall (not a euphemism). Worse, because a scrubbed off Banksy is still art. Is the footprint (and presumably some misaimed jizz) left behind in Hitchin an art work in itself?
The British Comedy Guide informs me that it was the 25th anniversary of the first episode of Time Gentlemen Please today. I miss my boy that's all. He'd be in hid thirties now I guess.
It's nice to have that milestone marked as TGP didn't get too much attention at the time - not sure we even got reviewed and we didn't trouble any awards committees. But I heard from a producer friend the other day that he'd been talking to someone high up at BAFTA at the time and he'd been waxing lyrical about how brilliant and inventive it was. "Sadly, we could never nominate it, of course."
I didn't fully understand the reasoning there. Was it because it was on Sky? Or seemingly too lowbrow for the early century BAFTAs (they don't seem to be so highbrow now)?
It was both good to hear that it had some recognition, but also upsetting that it had to be kept secret.
I can't complain too much- the thing actually got on telly, which is not the case for the vast majority of things I've written. Although it only had two series, it had 37 episodes, making it equivalent to over six series of sitcoms written by other lazy UK writers. I don't buy into the 12 episode is the perfect sitcom length bullshit. A good sitcom can run for 100 episodes. A really good one can run for 500 (though the last 400 episodes won't be as good as the first 100).
I know in writing the majority of a 22 part sitcom series I achieved something that possibly no other writer has managed. Because the first series was extended halfway through I had to write something like 10 episodes in 10 weeks (with no wiggle room as they were being recorded as we went along). It suited my essay crisis way of writing and I don't think the second half of that series is any worse than the first half (possibly better). Not sure how many writers would be capable of doing that. I certainly couldn't do it now.
We deliberately set out to write it so that it should work in the future (and outside of the UK) with the only real reference points being things that we were pretty sure would be remembered for a while (like Lady Di).
Possibly it's more relevant now than it was then.
