Along with all the stuff I do for charidee (which I really don't talk about, so I never talk about it) and my giving away money to anyone in an audience too "stupid" to understand me, I also like to give up a lot of hours to secret work helping to educate the young people of Britain. Given the fact that along with that I seem to do no actual work at all, it is amazing that I manage to keep up with my expensive boiler habit or have any food or clothing. But somehow God provides for me and we have to thank Him for that. It's very magnanimous of Him, particularly bearing in mind how much time I spend slagging him off. He just turns the other cheek, which is big of Him. If only all the arseholes who claim to follow him and believe in what he says could act so honorably. But they are cockwits and thus don't bother practising what He preached. I hate God, but even I have more respect for Him than most actual religious people.
Anyhoo, because of my general selflessness and wonderfulness and the fact that I will take any excuse not to have to do any real work I headed down to Bournemouth today to lecture the students there about my interesting career, before slepping over to Portsmouth for a gig. You'd think the organiser might have found someone more successful and celebrated than me to give his students what a life in the business of show is like, but I think he wanted to prepare them for the possibility of failure and I was there as a kind of dire warning to these youngsters with their eyes overflowing with hope.
I hadn't really prepared anything in advance and just hoped that I would think of the right things to say. About 20 to 30 students showed up at the lecture hall to hear my pearls of wisdom. I feel I was a bit dry and boring, especially after finishing thinking I'd done about 45 minutes (including Q and A) to discover that I had been prattling on about myself for more like 90. Still only two people walked out - had they stayed a bit longer they would have heard me talking about the guy from last night and realised that they could have been paid for leaving, but they walked out for nothing - the numskulls!
It's clearly a time for looking back (I suspect that in a couple of days I will be getting retrospective about the last half a decade) and despite the various ups and downs of my career and the fact that after 20 years I am far from guaranteed to get anything I create into production, I am still very glad I do what I do. And we can't make any complete analysis of my achievements of lack of them until I am done. Which will hopefully take us on another 20 years. But I still remember being the age of the people I was talking to today and how I judged success and failure then and how I almost certainly craved instantaneous triumph and wanted to be acknowledged as the funniest man in the country if not the world, I now have a little more perspective on it all and realise that those things are not important or really attainable. But if a 40 year old man in a leather jacket had come along to tell me that I should be patient and that a successful career was about longevity and integrity, then I would probably have looked as bored and dismissive as the lads in the back row. We think we know it all when we're 20 and sometimes I wonder if we actually do and that in getting old we actually get more stupid and miss the point. But obviously most of the time I think that I know more now. And the more I know the less I realise I actually know.
After the tortuous analysis of my career trajectory I was taken upstairs to record a short interview for the Bournemouth University student TV station (I can't imagine such a thing having existed when I was younger - how cool is that?). It went OK and then a young man in a straw hat who was in charge of raising funds or publicising the various enterprises at the University (who really reminded me of Colin from Press Gang) gave me a promotional silk gown and shorts from the film Rocky Bilbao to thank me for coming down. A bit like Jesus, I care not for worldly wealth, but just wait for the world to clothe and feed me (I had also been given lunch for coming along).
Then off to Portsmouth to do my gig, which went fine and which did not require me to pay off the audience to leave.
Life is good.
