Even twenty odd years into my career I occasionally have one of those days that reminds me how ridiculous my job is. Prannying around should not be a viable and certainly not lucrative vocation, but prannying around has got me this far and with a bit of luck I can spend the rest of my life doing it. Even if occasionally I feel a bit guilty that other people have to do proper jobs.
I spent most of today in a florist with Susan Calman arranging flowers into baskets and then hanging them on a chandelier trying to make them balance. All the baskets had to be a certain weight which meant we had to stuff the baskets with torches and candles and roughly cut up flowers and twigs and force them into place. In any other circumstance the two of us would probably have been sectioned or at the very least an old lady would have tutted at us for our wanton destruction of beautiful and expensive flowers. But this was for a TV show, so we were being filmed and laughed at and paid. It was for a new series of
Dara O Briain's School of Hard Sums which will be out some time next year.
The only downside of this for us was that it took about eight hours to film something that will last for at most five minutes on TV and it was pretty cold. But people brought us drinks and sandwiches and the hardest it got was lifting a 7.5kg basket on to a hook, so I don't think anyone is going to feel sorry for me.
In this section of the show we are competing against Dara to see if maths is a quicker way of doing things than basic trial and error. Which was lucky for me, as although I have two A levels in Maths I can't remember any of the stuff I learned and now struggle to do quite basic addition and multiplication. So once we'd created out five weights we then had to try and hook them on to five of twelve hooks on a giant circular disc suspended from the ceiling and try and make it balance. Neither of us had much of a clue although we got it to a point where it seemed pretty straight on our first proper go. But we then struggled on for the best part of two hours moving the baskets around and seeing where that got us. I think this is certainly a case where a man with some simultaneous equations can probably sort out the problem in a couple of minutes. We found another solution that looked pretty close, but we'll have to wait until we do the studio part of the show in January before we get the answer.
My favourite moment of the day came when I read Susan part of the script that had been provided for us. We'd both already agreed that we weren't going to use the script which was there just in case we couldn't think of anything to say. But it seems odd to employ two comedians and then not expect them to be able to ad lib their way through the item. And whoever had written this script didn't seem to know too much about us or our comedy personas. I am delighted a writer earned some money for jotting down some thoughts, but mostly he (and I am pretty sure he was a he) missed the targets. At one point I was supposed to wish for something unlikely and then Susan was meant to say "Well I wish I had 32 inch legs and tits like torpedos, but I don't."
The chances of getting any woman to say that line was pretty small, but it made me laugh an awful lot to think that anyone could have imagined for a second that Susan would be happy to perform that (or indeed that she might ever make such a wish). She took it quite well, although the director was apologetic when it was pointed out and I think she might well have found herself a new bit of stand up, but it was so inappropriate on so many levels that I was almost impressed by it. I did point out that I was then meant to say "So do I," which obviously took the sting out of the sexism!
We just made up our own rubbish jokes instead. And then increasingly focused so much on the maths problem and getting the weights of the baskets right that we forgot that our job was mainly to be funny and not be flower arrangers/chandelier balances.
I am hoping there will be five entertaining minutes from the four hours of footage. But if not, just imagine Susan saying that line and I am sure you'll laugh.
