As always I have left all my work until the last minute which leaves me in the unpleasant position of working all weekend long to try and get the two TWTTIN scripts that we're recording on Monday into some kind of shape (and have some kind of content). I've only had a month and a half to get them together, so of course it isn't at all stupid that I will be doing about 70% of the work in the last three days. No.
I will never learn. Or maybe this is how it has to be. Only blind terror and fear of utter humiliation can make the comedy juices flow. I wish I could do it another way though, but wishing it doesn't seem to make it happen. It's the same old story that you have seen over the last 4 years and 11 months.
There are only a limited amount of things you can do with a history based sketch show and I am trying to ring the changes a little bit this series, introducing more stand up elements (and thankfully some of my stand up shoe horns in quite nicely) and trying to play around with the form a bit. It's hard to know whether what I am writing is funny or self-indulgent or both, but usually the rehearsal on the day gives one a bit of an idea of what might work and what might not. Though if everything goes to form then by Monday afternoon I will be pretty convinced that everything I have written is excrement. And not even the funny kind of excrement.
I went down to Hammersmith to work with a nice coffee and to have a quick visit to the gym. When I arrived I saw a team of young people dressed up in Kit-Kat branded clothing who were merrily walking down the street handing out free four-finger Kit-Kats. I don't really understand the point of such a promotion. I believe Kit-Kat is the best selling brand of chocolate bar in the country - are they worried that some people won't have tried one? Or does giving people a free shot of this terrible drug really make them return for more? I am not eating chocolate again after a couple of relapses back into my old addiction, but I took a bar anyway for a friend who loves chocolate (and still manages to remain thin, the cow). I find it difficult to turn down something free in any case. It goes back to my days as an impoverished writer, when I was reduced to filling my pockets with food and bottles of wine at the occasional BBC party we would be invited to.
Yet I always fear taking food from strangers on the street. What is to stop someone giving out poisoned sweetmeats, with some slow acting venom in them that will cause everyone to die in the next few hours? Maybe I am paranoid (and God knows Hammersmith can do that to people), but it seems a possibility at least that Al Qaeda or a lunatic could get at us this way. Given the former organisation's lack of success with bombs of late, then maybe poisoned Kit-Kats would be the way forward. Not that I am encouraging them to do so, but at least if I think this way it will help me to refuse free chocolate.
But I wasn't going to eat this particular Kit-Kat, my friend was and I don't really care if she dies a horrible death, writhing in agony as acid eats away her intestines. That will teach her for being able to eat chocolate and not put on weight.
I will hate the world less when I have got these scripts done.
Talking of which.
