Just what I needed on AIOTM (AIOTM) writing day. I was going to be doing an 8 hour round trip to the Hay Festival in Wales to be interviewed about my book. Fortunately Ebury had arranged for me to have a driver, so I could, in theory at least, work in the car. But would I be able to. "If this works out," I told Richard the driver, "I might hire you every Sunday to drive me around." After all there would be fewer distractions for me. It was also a nice tester to see if it will possible for me to work on the road on the next tour when I will have a tour manager to drive me around.
Maybe I'd have the whole script done by the time I was home.
Or maybe I wouldn't.
Alas it wasn't the perfect environment and on the way home particularly working at the computer made me feel sick. Though I did have a chance to think of some ideas and make some notes and even though by the end of the day I had less on paper than I think I ever had before, I kind of knew pretty much everything I wanted to achieve in the show. But I was going to have to get up early Monday and hope it came together as usual.
It was a shame to be in the middle of something like this because it would have been fun to hang around at Hay for a couple of days and see some of the other authors - but I was in and out very quickly.
The Festival, unsurprisingly, was astonishingly middle class, set up in a field amongst beautiful Welsh countryside, in super posh tents, with people selling a lot of books of course, but picnic blankets and organic lamb burgers and lovely ales. I couldn't resist have a burger and a pint of beer in the sunshine, even though maybe I should have been working at my computer.
Then I was interviewed in a hot tent (more of a large canvas room) by Fiona Lindsay in front of a couple of hundred people. After doing so many solo chat and readings it was a pleasant change to have the conversation led by someone else and the hour flew by. And after signing a few books I was back in the car and heading home. I kept up with the BAFTA results on Twitter and realised that three quarters of the main cast of Lionel Nimrod's Inexplicable World were up for awards. Which idiot was letting the side down?
And two of the three won their awards. I was absolutely delighted that Rebecca Front got the recognition she has deserved for years. I have worked with her many times and she was awesome in Time Gentlemen Please and especially You Can Choose Your Friends. I was very surprised and pretended to be delighted that Stewart didn't win. But he was most certainly robbed.
I got home earlier than I expected, but rather than get on with the script I watched the last two episodes of 24, realising that aptly enough AIOTM 2:4 would be finishing in exactly 24 hours. I came up with one joke I was very pleased with about how I had been to the Hay Festival and was disappointed to find out it was mainly about books. From it's name I had assumed it would be a celebration of the life and achievements of the Fonz.
I like the gag, because it nicely wrong-footed expectations. The audience would think I was going to make a quite obvious gag about straw type hay, but then it's an unexpected leap away from that. And also the idea of people setting up a festival to the Fonz in the middle of Wales is nicely surreal too.
But just before I went to bed I arrogantly googled "Richard Herring + Hay" to see if anyone had blogged about me. It was quite unsettling to come across an entry which seemed to be aware of the joke I had literally just written. It gave my tired head a bit of a jolt. How could someone know about that joke? The entry said "28 Apr 2010 ... Richard Herring has been involved in radio his whole career, ... asked to appear at the Hay festival. It's a festival dedicated to the Fonz. ..."
I was a little apprehensive as I clicked on the link. Was I about to see that I was merely the Truman show style creation of someone on the internet? But the entry was from
a blog about the recent Sony Awards in which I was mentioned, as was Frank Skinner and John Osborne the writer had merely chosen to highlight one of Frank's joke, which was essentially the same one I had just come up with about the Fonz. It was an odd coincidence and supremely annoying that the joke had already been done. Especially as it was pretty much all I had (though I had written a sprawling opening about Tiny Andrew Collings).
It was a case of two people coming up with the same joke independently, but I couldn't do it now. And if not for my own self-obsession I would never have found out about if and could have done the joke in good conscience.
Vanity, thy name is Herring. One more joke to write for tomorrow.
