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I am hitting Welwyn Garden City HARD this week - my third visit in three days as I dropped my wife at the station and then attempted to do some work in Starbucks. I have just over two months to write six episodes of Relativity and have very few ideas so far, plus a lot of podcast and parenting stuff to do, but the sitcom bubbling under my cranium as I attempt to think what adventures the Snell family might get up to this time. I am tempted to have them all wiped out in a gas explosion at the end so I can escape this writing Hell. Or maybe I should just do that in episode 1 and the other five episodes are just silence or the sound of people picking up the rubble and searching for their corpses.
I felt similarly bleak about the prospect of writing series 2, but that somehow came together. But that was only four episodes and I still had a few of my own stories to mine.
The Starbucks at WGC has a little balcony that was bathed in autumn sunshine, so I decided to go out there. There was a sliding door betwixt the cafe and the outside, but when I stepped up to it it didn’t open as I expected. I tried to prise the doors apart but to no avail and then embarrassed by my failure turned to walk away. A helpful man stood up and pressed the button that opened the door. Of course, if they were activated by movement then those doors would open and close all day long making the inside very cold in the winter time and annoying anyone sitting nearby.
I thanked the man and pretended that I was looking for the button. Because him thinking I was an idiot was too humiliating. Even though he now thought I was an idiot who was also lying as it had been very clear that I had been stumped by the doors.
Imagine how different my life would have panned out if he hadn’t got me outside and I’d sat inside instead. I should write a film about the two possibilities. But what would I call it?
It reminded me of a niche bit of observational comedy that I’d been thinking about. When we retuned from the Fringe we stayed overnight at a hotel at a services on the M6. This hotel had sliding doors that opened automatically, but then a second set of regular doors from behind them that took you into the lobby. The confusion of having one set of doors open automatically and then a second one that didn’t could have made it a good round for the Krypton Factor. I wondered how many people breezed through the first set and then stopped confused and perplexed about how to get through the second. Like they had travelled from a distant future where all doors opened themselves and so they had no idea what to do with the door you had to push or pull like a Victorian.
I didn’t say it’d make a good bit of observational comedy. But it was an observation.
And again today I felt humiliated by a door that I expected to slide and that didn’t.
I didn’t get much work done. My brain won’t kick in until the prospect of utter humiliation is so close that I can see the whites of its eyes. And even then I’ll probably have a quick game of online poker.
A lovely RHLSTP with the legendary Jimmy Cricket is now up
