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I spent all day in my pyjamas and dressing gown, but this time I was working. This week we are filming the remaining five sketches in the toaster robot sex double trilogy for AIOTM. And we were doing this in my house, so there was no need for me to get properly dressed, as the character of Richard Herring had just got out of bed too.
Once again the enthusiastic young team worked very hard and we got an incredible 15 pages of script in the can, and two whole sketches done. We are working on a very tight budget and the kickstarter money is close to running out, so working at speed is the only option. The brilliant Rachel Stubbins is playing my wife, which is odd when my actual wife was in the house for most of the day. But I don’t think my actual wife could play my wife, mainly due to the fact that the frustrations and anger would be too real and there would thus be no light and shade to the performance. It would be a good way for her to vent, but might not make for a great watch.
Anyway she was also filming for her documentary about comedy, so the house was a hive of filming activity. You should never let people film in your actual house- it’s a nightmare and stuff will get broken and lost- but here we were letting two crews in. And they had a phenomenal amount of kit. It was hard to move.
And it came the time to use the toaster robot that has been slumped in a pile on the floor of my lounge for the last few weeks. We’d looked into lots of ways of doing this. A puppeteer guy had been interested in creating it, but he wanted way too much money and ultimately we decided that as it should look like I had feasibly created the thing myself, it needed to look a bit rubbish. The person who made it for us trod the line very well: it looks crazy and home made, but it’s actually kind of brilliant. It looks terrifying on camera, which is correct and luckily we got through the day without me losing a finger (or worse) inside it.
What I have always loved about filming high-concept comedy sketches is the way the crew have to take it all very seriously. So there were earnest young people discussing the best way to make it look like the robot was shooting toast into Rachel’s face or working out how to make some toasters react. All the time, given the toaster robot is not actually a robot (even within the logic of the sketch) I was doing the voice for both me and the robot and carrying on conversations on my own.
I am always tired on Tuesdays, post podcast and this had been an early start and I was lying on the floor in the afternoon as the character of Richard Herring hid behind the kitchen counter to pretend it was the robot who was speaking and I really, really wanted to go to sleep. And I realised how hard it was to learn this stupid script. But it was loads of fun, as much as I felt like the architect of collected madness. I don’t know what I am going to do with the toaster robot. It’s not something that will really fit in a cupboard and it’s a bit too scary to leave sitting out anywhere, especially as we’re still showing prospective buyers round our house, but increasingly my home is full of ventriloquist dummies and puppets of crows with their head falling off or naughty dogs. Maybe I should just turn the place into a museum to madness.
Anyway, you will be able to decide if this was a waste of your money when you watch it. But believe me we are getting this at an almost unbelievably cheap rate and I think, regardless of the quality of the script and the idea it’s going to look really beautiful.
It will probably be the spring before these become available to view but if you come to the live recordings you will hopefully get a chance to see some early cuts of some of the filmed stuff. Tickets here (and your ticket money will go into the pot and allow us to make more sketches).
