Michael Mcintyre has been given the keys to the O2 after performing there 27 times. Seems ridiculous given all the business he's done for them that they expect him to lock place up at night too. Apparently I am being given the keys to the Slade Rooms in Wolverhampton, a 150 seater venue that I’ve played about five times and which I nearly always practically sell-out. Though they told me they never lock the place up anyway as there’s nothing worth stealing there.
Having failed to run the Royal Parks Half Marathon at the weekend (I pulled out a couple of months ago as I realised I hadn’t trained enough/at all to do it) I have realised I have to make an attempt to regain the fitness that I have lost in the eight months since our baby came along. I eat when I am tired and I can’t run when I am tired and getting fat makes me more tired, but it’s annoying as I tried to get healthy in the first place partly so that I’d be around to see my daughter’s 60th birthday. None of my nice clothes fit me any more and I have to either crack and buy some fat suits (suits I wear when I am fat, not like the ones that Monica has in friends when they’re laughing about what it would be like if someone skinny had been really fat) or I knock off a stone in the next month or so and get back into the zone where my expensive suits aren’t garrotting me. I did some walking and a short run today, but my friend Ben slightly set me back by bringing doughnuts round and then I was so tired in the evening that I had a couple of beers to help me through the difficulty last hour or so of baby-minding (it worked amazingly well). Having a baby has at least helped me get back into drinking booze without getting terrible hangovers. So that’s a positive. It’s amazing how a light smattering of alcohol helps you through the trickier bits of the day. I should have had some when she woke me up at 3.15 this morning. It’s only an issue if you start giving the baby alcohol right? And even then just a couple of slugs to get them to sleep doesn’t do any harm.
I think I probably exercised off all the additional calories today, but it will only really start working if I get on myfitnesspal again and I also managed to start thinking about my new sitcom script (in which I intend to fuse Sliding Doors, Goodnight Sweetheart and Quantum Leap into one whilst getting rid of all their illogicality and annoying misunderstanding of the effects of chance). It’s now over eight years since I’ve had a sitcom script made, even though I’ve felt the five or so I’ve written in the interim have been some of my best writing work and with the additional failure of “I Killed Rasputin†it’s very hard to work up the necessary enthusiasm. But I have to believe that I am a good writer (even if I am not) and hope that one day the multi-sided die used by TV executives to determine which script gets made will roll in my favour. This idea is another one that is ludicrously high concept and I think highly unlikely to get made, but I had some fun ideas today, as well as realising why stuff that deals with alternate realities etc gets so screwed up because it’s sort of impossible to keep a handle on the logic of it all. This is very much a script for me (to enjoy, not be in) and I should just write it for myself and then if anyone else likes it then that will be a bonus. It’s so much easier just to interview other comics and write stand-up shows so it’s tempting not to bother with the really hard stuff. But I’ve hopefully got at least another 15 years of writing in me, and maybe more. Be nice to think that this was the halfway point of my professional life, 26 years in, keep going until I die at 74. So there’s still time, even if I don’t quite have the unbending energy of the 22 year old me and have realised that comedy is not actually the most important thing in the world.
You’ve perhaps been through this with me about a dozen times now over the lifetime of this blog and seen the relative failure of my writing ambitions (though to be fair the blog started just after my most successful writing contract had come to an end). The terrifying thing is that I am probably in the top 20% of successful comedy writers and I still get paid for writing the scripts that don’t get made, so I am incredibly lucky. I am ready to give it another go now, but the recovery time for each failure gets a little bit longer. It’s 15th months this time. I might have to keep working til I am 106 if I am going to make it in this business.
A couple more guests confirmed for RHLSTP. On 25th October, joining Grayson Perry will be my ex-Edinburgh flat-mate and comedy award nominee, Sarah Kendall (she’s an utterly brilliant comedian) and on 1st November, along with Jack Whitehall is the behemoth that is Phill Jupitus. Both these shows are selling well so well worth booking ahead. Just got to sort out the line-ups for the final three now and hoping to secure a couple of really big names so buy tickets now if you don’t want to miss out.
