This afternoon I appeared on the egg-head quiz show, "Mind Games" for BBC4 -
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/tvsites/mindgames/ (my second BBC job of the week. What's going on?). It's essentially a big nerd fest based on those kind of questions you get on Mensa IQ tests. I don't know why they asked me to be on it. I have done nothing of late to make myself look like a gigantic borderline autistic nerd. But now I've seen how these things are cast there is every chance that they were trying to get Richard Hammond and someone misread his name out of the Radio Times.
I used to be OK at this kind of thing, but after battering my brain with alcohol (using battering in both senses of the word there) for so many years I wasn't sure I would be any use at all. I knew I would be awful at anything that involved visualising and rotating 3D shapes and stuff, but thought I might be OK at some of the maths and language stuff.
I was on the team of academic sex-bomb Professor Kathy Sykes from off of Rough Science (which I chanced across by accident one night and got quite into - lots of geeks trying to look cool in a desert doing amazing experiments with minimal equipment. Amazingly they managed to make science look quite cool, despite slightly portentuous introductions from Kate Humble for what was essentially a big bag of geeks). Professor Syke is like the science version of Carol Vorderman without the over-riding desire to make money at every single opportunity by advertising anything that asks her. I expect. Maybe she just hasn't been asked. What could be sexier than a woman who can make a protractor out of some bark and a frog's tongue (it was something like that)? Some men don't like brainy women (usually I find blokes who are quite thick, but like to pretend they are clever adn know that they will be found out pretty quickly). One of my main fantasies has always been to be in bed with Carol Vordeman and asking her to do really hard sums in her head (c'mon fellas, I'm not alone in this one), but it may be usurped now by something similar with Kathy Sykes, but I'd be asking her to make a lens out of ice or something. Maybe it could be both Carol Vorderman and Kathy Sykes with possibly some kind of competition element and a "special prize" for the winner. Then I would engineer it so that the contest was a draw. So they would both receive the "special prize" - A signed poster of "The Twelve Tasks of Hercules Terrace". Then with the competition over it would be time for us all to go to sleep. Unless Carol has to get away to do a highly paid advert for the Nazi party or something.
Yes, I sure do have the best fantasies known to man.
Luckily I didn't mention my strange "in bed battle of the TV brainy beauties who then go to sleep or advertise a morally dubious product" fantasy to Professor Kathy. She will never know what I was thinking. You know, unless she looks herself up on Google and finds this. After which I guess I might not be invited on to "Mind Games" again. Which is why I cannot tell you my even more perverse fantasies about the other team captain, mad-eyed poet Michael Rosen.
The show was actually good fun and I managed to get the first question right (after the other team had got it wrong) so it didn't show me up to be totally stupid. Professor Kathy Sykes was extremely competitive, but I am sure she was just being like that because she knew it was getting me going.
To find out if we won and see those nerdy sparks of sexual tension fly (mainly between me and Rosen - it is too early to talk of marriage, but there's definitely something going on) you'll have to tune into BBC4 next month. You will also get to see me with balancing a piece of paper on a pencil, above my head, in the hope that the heat from my brain will cause it to spin round. Though clearly on the day, thanks to Michael Rosen, my brain was the second hottest organ in my body.
