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I've had a lot of fun hanging out with the disparate group of celebrities who are working on the secret project I am doing. I can't see any other situation in which we'd be thrown together, but we're getting on well.
As mentioned before I do not really shape up to be a proper celebrity. A couple of them were discussing having to cope with being demoted from British Airways Gold members back to Bronze. I said that I felt pretty special being a Pizza Express Gold Member and thus getting free dough balls. But you get that for eating lots of pizza, not being a celebrity. Though I eat so much pizza that that might make me a celebrity.
So I feel like a kid who has won a competition to be on a TV show and sometimes wonder if someone mistakenly believes me to be terminally ill and has arranged all the stuff that's happened to me over the years (like being on TV at all) and then is surprised to discover I am still hanging on, so arranges one last experience for me. And so on. He has to die this time....
It's a surreal world to dip your toe into, but I am used to doing weird things in the name of entertainment. Did I really once race around a TV studio and then out into the street trying to defeat John Bishop in toy pedal cars (that one was never broadcast so I can't prove it wasn't a dream)? Did I really row in a mini Oxford/Cambridge Boat Race with disgraced MP Jonathan Aitken acting as cox? Was that really me who once drove a milk cart over Richmond Common, with scabs all over my face, whilst pursuing three Horsemen of the Apocalypse?
It smacks of the random crap that might run through your brain as you lie dying. Maybe I was killed when I fell off my girlfriend's little sister's bike on Shipham Hill when I was about 18. I wish my failing brain had imagined a slightly more successful career and a slightly less insane political situation, but you can't deny it's used its imagination.
The job this month launches me into another world that I shouldn't really be a part of, but which I get to experience by dint of... I don't know what exactly.... managing to hang around this long? Being available for most of November?
I did have to rearrange a RHLSTP and an oncology appointment, but that was it. It reminds me of a mean-spirited joke we had in the Ian sketch in the dum show (Edinburgh sketch show of 1992), where long-standing Ian Society President Ian Lavender had had to step down due to a TV commitment. Most of your youthful jokes come back to bite you.
I am Alan Partridge.
And yet don't get a penny from Alan Partridge.
Even though I created Alan Partridge.
And am him.
Where's my jelly?
I wish I could tell you more about what I'm up to, but there's someone filming it all, so you'll be able to see next year, if you're arsed.
The good news is that the RHLSTP gig got rearranged to December 1st and the even better news is that Richard Osman will be one of the guests.
So book here now. It's selling fast.
