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Ah UKIP - that embarrassing summer fling, where we thought we’d found love, but we just ended up with herpes. At least we will never forget you.
Democracy is close to being broken. The only thing that can fix it is democracy.
A quietish day as we made the surprisingly long hop from Scarborough to Leeds. I pushed on with the new Emergency Questions book, completing another batch of 99 questions, leaving me with around 270 to do (as well as a fair amount of organisation and thinking up fun interludes and special pages of questions for specific situations or ones based on what happened with certain guests). Thankfully I’ve been given until the end of the month to complete the book (and have already seen a proposed design for the cover - this thing is really happening guys).
The sitcom is not progressing as well. I am waiting for inspiration to strike as how best to tackle episode 3, but am in that place where it feels overwhelmingly impossible to progress. I have been in this place with every script I’ve ever written. But this time it’s REALLY IMPOSSIBLE. I have about 12 days to get first drafts of the last two episodes done for the read through. But then the luxury of another month before we have to record. So we will get there. But it’s going to be painful. But isn’t all great art painful? And so shit art is even more painful? QED.
The Leeds hotel was slightly swankier than usual. But I realised how tired I was when I got there. Welsh Ray had gone in first whilst I got my stuff from the car. I came in the revolving door and looked at him checking in and for some reason excepted the exit to be in the direction of the front desk to the left (even though I don’t think I’ve ever been in a revolving door where the exit wasn’t a straight line from the entry point. I couldn’t quite understand why I couldn’t exit or why the revolving door seemingly only had one way in or out. But the man who got in behind me then exited through exit that I hadn’t spotted and saw me looking annoyed and confused. We both laughed at my stupid predicament. Like people being on the luggage carousel at airports, I thought this kind of revolving door nonsense only happened in films (and I am not sure I have ever seen a scene in a comedy film set at a luggage carousel where someone doesn’t end up riding on the conveyor belt).
It was a fun return to a packed Leeds City Varieties, probably the perfect mid-sized (or as I pointed out, large for me) comedy venue in the country. It was a fizzling performance and I went off on some tangents. Tomorrow is the performance that gets recorded for posterity. I hope I can do it as well as I did tonight.
My niece and her friends came along and I had a quick drink with them afterwards. She seemed impressed, in spite of all the filth that I had just spewed. But she’s known me for quarter of a century so nothing can be that much of a surprise.
I walked back through Leeds city centre to my hotel. A police van was driving slowly along and an officer clearly having a word with some homeless people as he drove by. I was a bit put out as I assumed he was hassling them, but it became apparent that he was just checking they were OK and sharing a joke with them.
