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A tricky night with my snot-filled daughter, but somehow lack of sleep hasn’t hit me so hard this week, probably because I haven’t had too many tricky late night gigs or driving to do. I am old. I can get by on 5 hours sleep. I mostly just felt really sorry for my confused and sad infant. And then enjoyed cuddling her to sleep. Sympathy rather than annoyance. Not how I would have predicted I would have felt. But fatherly love is the most impressive love in the world (cf What is Love, Anyway?).
I swapped with my wife at 7am, hoping I’d get back to sleep, but to no avail. I ended up watching an old episode of Time Gentlemen Please (unbelievably from 15 years ago). It was called “Day of the Trivheads†which is a pretty strong title and involved the Guv’s team taking on the Queen of Hearts. It’s an OK episode. I am in it, but I don’t have much to do and I do that little quite badly. I still have a lot of affection for this show. We deliberately went against the grain of the then trend of ultra-“realism†in sitcoms and wanted it to have the feel of an old style sitcom but with swearing. But as usual I am ahead or behind my time and it would take another decade before the public was ready for all shows to be like that, as the ever swinging pendulum of comedy taste went in the other direction, bit its top swing and then started heading back again. I hope it never crashes into the pendulum of offence in comedy, though they sort of run in tandem so it will probably be OK.
My favourite bit of Triv about this Trivia based episode is that the young boy playing the Rainman like prodigy would later appear as Magnitude in Community. Pop Pop.
What a stressful time that was for me and how hard I worked on it. I don’t know if that was one of the episodes that I wrote in a week (I suspect not), but if so I did an OK job. My ability to write at speed seems to have deserted me and I am struggling to get anywhere with my current script, even on the rare occasion when I have four or so hours uninterrupted to think about it. But I hope I can write some more sitcoms. No one really seemed to notice this one at the time, or be impressed by my ability to write an American length sitcom almost on my own (Al and Stew did help out, but I ended up with more than the lion’s share) and I wasn’t inundated with work offers. But the experience also burnt me out a bit and I failed to hit deadlines for scripts, so maybe I should do what no other creative person in the world seems to do and blame myself for my own failures.
There’s still time to pull things back (perhaps) but not today when after getting my blog and Metro column done (pretty much simultaneously as it turned out, as the column is based on yesterday’s blog), I had to look after the snot-machine that I made with my leaked testicle fluid and she wasn’t in the best of moods (but wait until she finds out what I made her out of). I read a bit of Richard Bacon’s entertaining autobiography. I think it’s going to be an interesting chat on Sunday (and I am also massively looking forward to talking to Cariad Lloyd, who is definitely one of the funniest people of her generation and that is saying something). Come and watch it. I can confidently state it will be the last one we do on a Sunday afternoon.
I have a feeling we might end saying some stuff that we can’t broadcast on this one, so the only way to enjoy it in its full glory is LIVE! And it’s even better that way anyway.
