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What a day. First up I got tweeted by Anthony Wiggle (courtesy of friend to all the stars Sanjeev Bhaskar) apologising for infecting my sleeping and waking brain with his music and then I get to do a RHLSTP with the legendary and wonderfully rude Richard E Grant. I was pretty giddy with nervousness for this one - it’s taken 215 episodes and finally we’d got a proper guest. No offence to everyone who has come before, but come on, you know you suck compared to him.
There’d been a bit of mix up about where we were meeting him and so he finally only arrived with less than 5 minutes to show time, which added to the nervous tension. But the audience was super excited and though he might have been mildly disorientated by not exactly knowing what was going on and the rapturous nature of his reception, it was an electric 75 minutes, which passed in a flash and in which I constantly worried that I might have pushed things too far, or expressed myself inarticulately and genuinely offended him. But he seemed to take it all on the chin and give as good as he got and managed to get more personal information out of me, than I did out of him.
There were some big laughs though and he’s an exceptionally witty and charming man. Plus he left a little spray bottle of the scent that he has created behind and I was able to spray the front row with it, masking their hideous scent like a modern-day pomander.
I’d say I got one interesting nugget of info out of him about Star Wars, but one of the highlights was a Doctor Who nerd in the audience being unable to hold his tongue as we discussed E Grant’s various contributions to that show and informing the actor that he was a non-canon doctor.
You’ll have to wait a little while to hear this one, but it’s right up there with the best, I think. Both for laughs and the foot in mouth moments that you’ve come to expect and love. What a cool and beautiful man he is.
It was similar to the Brian Blessed episode in that the magical electricity of true stardom was hard to follow and there was a weird feeling of spent energy in the room, which led to a laid back and thoughtful podcast with Tiff Stevenson, but some good laughs and a lot of interesting stuff about the battle for equality and the struggles to gain recognition for all newer comedians. But I think everyone in the room was spent by the end of it. I was knackered and thanked God I have one of those self-driving cars to get me home safe. Wait! What? It isn’t self-driving? How the Hell did I get back?
It’s not like I’m not doing nothing else, but this one day week of work is a fabulous thing for me (technically this week, I am doing two as there is another RHLSTP in Birmingham on Saturday - and I’ll need to prep for that on Friday too). I hope I will return to stand up at some point, though I am not missing it at all at the moment, and it’d be nice, at some point to sit down and do some proper (non-blog) writing on something new (and start thinking about series 3 of Relativity), but for now playing and improing with the kids and doing this crazy podcast is enough for me. I try not to think about what I am doing in the podcast too much, but I am creating this heightened version of myself for it, who can’t resist saying what is on his mind. In the intro to R E G, I mentioned something that happened to me this week that I didn’t put in the blog, because it felt too revealing. And that’s odd isn’t it? That I feel more capable of revealing a secret in front of strangers rather than in writing. There was more personal stuff later that might not make it into the final podcast, but it’s all part of this mildly disarming character that I am creating (or am, not sure) which does lead on to getting interesting and new stuff out of the guests.
E Grant is an inspiration though - he too is open and honest and properly cool, because he isn’t trying to be cool. He still gets star struck and still can’t believe his luck that things are going so well for him. He fucking sizzles.
Sorry you’ll have to wait a while to see this one.
