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Last week as I struggled to come up with any ideas for the video version of As It Occurs To Me I had a long bath, played some video games and read some news and suddenly found I had three or four ideas that would make the show work (hopefully). Today I was struggling to think of anything for the audio version, so employed the same tactic and again it more or less worked.
As I wallowed in my bath tub some news came in and I was delighted to find out that the writer AA Gill had died. Because that would give me two or three minutes of material. Sometimes the Universe just gives you a lucky break. I may not have like everything Anus Arsehole said, or most of the things he did, so I am not going to now pretend that I did - that would be awfully wanky. And as a man who said whatever he thought, no matter how pointlessly offensive, I think the real tribute to the man must be to say that I thought he was a massive tool, who didn’t even have the foresight after he knew he was dying, to be shot by a baboon to find out what it would be like to be shot by a man. Paul Putner reminded me of him being overheard at a party (something that I then put in one of my plays) saying, “Sometimes even I can’t believe that I actually AM A A Gill.†I mean presumably he was making some kind of joke. But still. Rectum Intercourse Penis, Anus Arsehole, Rectum Intercourse Penis.
Even with this little gift there was still a long way to go on the script when I finally decided to go to bed at 10pm. I had a couple of vague ideas that I hoped would percolate in my sleep. I had a few hours in the morning to wrap things up and I wasn’t overly concerned. I used to fret over the AIOTM scripts in the old days, for fear of the humiliation that would come with failure, but now the audio scripts are just a bonus on top of the “proper†show, I am a bit more relaxed about them. And less concerned about taking a chance on something that fails. The deadline does concentrate the mind and I enjoy the fact that it makes stuff come out in a big splurge and am impressed by how much of that splurge is actually OK. It’s an awful lot of work, but it’s a bit psychological barrier to know that after tomorrow I will be two thirds of the way through. There’s a huge difference to having half the stuff to write and just a third. I think we can get there.
It looks like being the smallest audience of the run so far tomorrow, but we are nudging towards being half full and it looks like the final two are selling better and as I have observed many times this week, selling 150+ tickets is by no means a disaster. I’d hoped we might do a little better and that the old fans would return to it and make it the sell out success (that I perhaps misremember) that it latterly was back in 2011. It’s a shame that we can’t release the video episodes as we go, but there is so much behind the scenes work to do on them and I hope, ultimately, that they will do better released in one or two chunks, rather than dribbling out ever six weeks or so.
It makes it hard to know whether we’re achieving what we want and whether everyone’s hard work is going to be worthwhile. I hope people will enjoy the weird mixture of wilful shoddiness and more crafted stuff. And realise how much we have achieved for what is (in TV terms) actually a ridiculously tiny amount of money. Whatever happens I am massively proud of and grateful to the huge team of people working to get this together.
Chris Evans (not that one) is of course right at the top of the Christmas tree, having dedicated long hours to the show and to the various kick-starters we have done. And at some personal cost. For the RHLSTP campaign we were creating postcards of the fantastic Leon Edler designs and Chris had sent them off to Vistaprint to be printed. He got a message back saying that they couldn’t print the cartoon of Hitler being poked by a finger through time because it contravened their rules. I don’t know if that is because they are offended by Hitler being depicted (in a cartoon remember) or because they think it is disrespectful to Hitler to be poked. I can understand that the company might want to steer away from controversial images (though to be fair you can’t even see the complete swastika and also it’s a fucking cartoon where Hitler is made to look like a dick) but that seems a bit heavy-handed in censorship terms. This is often the problem with censorship anyway, that it relies on checking words or images off a list, rather than observing the way that they have been used. But as a consequence of trying to print these postcards Chris has been banned from ever using Vistaprint again. Which is gobsmacking, but also sort of hilarious. Chris Evans is now on a list and I suppose that could be a bad or a good thing for him depending which way history goes next.
But he's stuck now. Regular printers won't print it in case it's pro-Hitler and Nazi printers won't print it becuase it is an insult to the Fuhrer.
