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I got back from the gym as my wife was popping out with Phoebe to see a friend. She asked me what I was going to do with my late afternoon and I said I thought I might play a frame of snooker against my self. She seemed disappointed with this choice, suggesting that my time might be better spent working on my sitcom. But what if the sitcom turns out to be about a man who plays himself at snooker in a basement? I imagine in that case Channel 4 will be quite annoyed as that is not what they have commissioned. Until they read it and realise that it’s the greatest thing ever and decide to dedicate their entire Channel to self-playing snooker, 24/7/365/100/1000/infinity (with a day off for leap years). She thinks that I am an idiot because I am swapping my cow for some magic beans. But what no one seems to have learned from that story is that the beans WERE magic. It was a brilliant swap made by Jack and he became a millionaire off the back of it (and also probably got to eat some really massive beans). Has anyone told this story from the perspective of the person who swapped his magic beans for a useless old cow? What happened when he got home to his wife and she found out what he’d done. “We had some magic beans and you just swapped them for a non-magic cow? What were you thinking? We could have been having adventures in a castle in the sky, but now all we’ve got is a ready supply of warm milk. Plus the beans needed zero husbandry, whereas this scrawny cow is going to need somewhere to live and daily feeding and milking."
“Yeah, but by giving the beans away in this clearly unfair swap I will have created a brilliant story for that young lad, plus given loads of children the message that they should swap their most prized possessions for things that a stranger says are magic. I mean 99 times out of 100 they won’t be magic and their lives will be ruined, but it gives them hope."
Anyway, my wife ended up looking like an idiot because it turned out that frame 59 was one of the most exciting frames in the history of self-playing snooker. You can hear it at
the British Comedy Guide or on
iTunes. And I thought of a way to make her eat her words and prove that self-playing snooker is not a waste of time. I am going to set up a kickstarter to raise a million pounds for self-playing snooker so I can build a proper arena with cameras and my own TV station to broadcast the results. Or we could just keep the money. If each of the 5000 people still listening gave just £200 - just £3.39 per frame (and there will be many more frames so that per ep fee is only going to decrease), then we would reach our target and it would show my wife that self-playing snooker is not a waste of time. If all 30,000 people who listened to the first frame joined in we could have 6 million pounds. And then my wife would have to come on the podcast and apologise for doubting me and self-playing snooker. And everyone who gives £200 also gets some beans that might very well be magic. So that £200 investment starts to look pretty good when you take into account everything you’d be getting and the creation of the world’s premier facility for playing self-playing snooker. Who’s in?
