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I felt 1000 times better this week than I did last and it made me realise in just how much of a blur I had done my first two podcasts of series 10. I was a whole lot sharper and much more able to participate. I am not really getting any rest days, but still motoring on. Today before the show I had the added extra of interviewing one of the people who had donated handsomely to the kickstarter campaign and got their 15 minutes in the RHLSTP chair. It’s a bit of a double-edged reward, because that’s quite a nerve wracking prospect for some performers, but Simon did well and we had a fun chat and most importantly he didn’t turn out to be a stalker who wanted to make a pipe out of my winkie.
The proper interviews were fun too. First up was Dane Baptiste, a newer comedian who I’d never met before, who I’d heard great things about. The stand up I’ve seen has been solid and funny, but he’s a smart and quite earnest man, with a lot to talk about. He was eloquent and passionate and we covered some big subjects, as well as lots of stupid and frivolous ones. But in the back stage interview I got a sense of his intelligence when he managed to turn frivolous questions into serious ones, seemingly without effort. Monthly badgers and kickstarter backers at the relevant levels will be able to see that interview very soon.
My other guest was the UK’s Will Smith, Will Smith, who I know very well, but hadn’t seen in absolutely ages. He’s a fabulous stand-up but is nowadays concentrating on writing, with a novel out and some Emmy award winning scripts in the bag. He can also link any film to a specific episode of Bergerac in six or less moves. Even though that’s from a stand up bit from a decade ago - he can still do it. Fans of the Radio 4 show Banter must have been delighted to see us reunited after all this time, and we did have a lot of fun talking about silos full of baked beans and whether jumping into a sufficient density of feathers could kill you. Unusually I felt well enough and awake enough to go for a drink after the show with him, producer Ben and another Veep writer who’d come to see the show. We had a good talk about the importance of the writer, how UK broadcasters don’t seem to value us and the impossibility of getting stuff made - and if a two-time Emmy winning writer struggles to get his scripts on then what chance do any of us have?
We had headed to the De Hems pub, partly out of nostalgia for the Oranje-Boom-Boom comedy night that we both did stand up at in the 90s. Some of my memories of that club are so clear that if actually makes me feel a bit sick to think that 20+ years have gone by. I had a pint of the Boom Boom beer for old times sake. It was a fun night of lots of chat, soured by the fact that Will’s friend had his bag stolen from next to his seat as we chatted. It contained his laptop too, which is just a punch in the gut for any writer as the potentially lost work is much more precious than the (actually quite precious) computer. I try not to ever put my bag somewhere where I am not physically touching it, if not holding on to it, but to be fair, whoever had spotted this opportunity had been ridiculously surreptitious. To the extent that none of us could believe the bag could have been taken without us noticing, forcing us to search and research the same bit of chair and floor that we’d clearly established that the bag was not near.
And to think had we not been drawn back to our relative youths this would not have happened. Seems unfair of fate to punish an innocent by-stander for our misjudged nostalgia.
Watch out for bag thieves, London. They are sneaky little fuckers.
