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On we fucking plod.
But what’s astonishing about it is the First Lady thinking that the whole thing was “part of the tripâ€and that this was just the way that they were disembarked. She says she didn’t realise what had happened until she got to America, even though she admits that in the 9 hours in the lifeboat she witnessed the ship sink. Mind-blowing stuff, though she may have been suffering from post traumatic stress.
I thought that was all part of it. Once they've used the ship once, scuttle it and build another one. Can I have my stuff? No, that's gone too. Ah well.
Thursday dominated by Twitch of Fun and Taskmaster. Heart-breaking scenes in the latter show as I (spoiler alert) slipped further off the overall series lead, came last in this episode and find myself in equal third after 70% of the episodes. It’s very exciting, but I remember being quite low after this one, as my dream of being champion had possibly slipped away. I had some bad luck in the studio tasks where in three or four cases I was just a fraction of a second away from success. I believe that Johnny beat me in the final round by something like half a second. On such margins are kings made and lost. But I am glad that it’s such a tight race and although I did want to win, by the end of this episode I realised I was happy for any of this magnificent lot to win. I know Daisy is coming down on me with righteous and usually unrighteous ire on occasion, but I really love her and her self-belief. The tarot reader predicted that I wouldn’t win but would be happy with the result, which seemed like an impossible contradiction at the time. But I started to understand that it might be feasible. And I was largely cool with that.
It was annoying that my marble got stuck in that divot too. I was up against the clock and panicking and thought the ball needed to go that way to have the best chance of a long run along the garden. Apparently when they did it again to get some more shots of it in motion it made it over the bump. Such tiny margins.
But the tape recorder task was my absolute low point, as I floundered and fucked it up. I still feel the embarrassment and shame hanging over me like a nasty fart.
Twitch of Fun continues to experiment with what is possible with limited time and budget. The sketch we recorded yesterday turned out to be over 10 minutes long, so I had some sympathy with Saturday Night Live. I had struggled with my lines when we recorded, but during the Taskmaster watch along managed to do pretty much perfect renditions of the complicated bit even though I hadn’t looked at the script for over 24 hours. We were able to do retakes at the time so it didn’t matter, but it’s strange how memory works. My ability to learn chunks of dialogue and weird technical bits of nonsense is definitely declining. I guess the pressure of performance makes it harder.
It was difficult for me to judge if the sketch was good or just slightly tragic (given it is a step back a quarter of a century), but Stevie Martin is brilliant in it (she’s a real talent) and the important thing about this project is that I am taking risks and trying things out. It’s as much about what it will become as what it is (and I actually think the show is one of the funniest things I’ve done and that the weirdness of whether it’s good or shit is one of the elements that makes it good - or shit) and it’s exciting that it’s possible to put something like this together. It might morph into something very different than what it started as, but it is already starting to fulfil a few vague ambitions I’ve been thinking about for years. I had been considering some kind of late night small scale Edinburgh show where a tragic Richard Herring tried to recapture the magic of his youth by doing a double act with a ventriloquist dummy, I’d thought about a sketch show where I did some new characters and some old and I wanted to try and do a topical show that was a bit different from the ones you get on telly. So this is all of that. Except weekly.
The King of the Show was back, but as much as I love him, I am worried that he unbalances the show. He’s very hard to follow. That’s not entirely a bad thing as it’s a real blow to Ally’s ego and him having to deal with that is quite an interesting avenue to explore. It’s enjoyable this week that there’s a long discussion about how stupid people are to like something so basic, followed by me just doing it and people (at least in the chat room) really liking it anyway. This show works on an awful lot of levels.
But I worry that the King of the World might be the thing that blows the show apart.
You can catch up on the podcast or the YouTube channel on Friday (or watch it in Twitch videos right now).
