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A very packed day of streaming. I thought I'd be on a bit of a holiday after finishing the book and Taskmaster but Twitching has expanded to fill the gaps. But it's an enormously fun job, if a not very well paid one, so it's all cool.
I prepped for my RHLSTP with journalist, psychologist and pro-poker player Maria Konnikova. I finished off her audiobook on the dog walk this morning - it's highly recommended and you don't have to play poker to enjoy it. The high winds in the night had scattered acorns along the road by the church and a branch had come down from a Horse Chestnut tree, totally blocking vehicular access. The conkers weren't quite ripe yet, but what a score this would otherwise have been for the 10 year old me.
The countryside danger of being splatted by a falling bit of wood (or entire tree) is one of the pieces of jeopardy that helps keep you feeling alive. You know until one hits you.
Maria was as charming and smart as I had hoped. I like that occasionally RHLSTP gets to just dive deep into an intelligent book and not worry too much about being silly (though there was some stuff about changing DNA and self-playing snooker to lighten the mood).
You can catch up on the video here or wait a few weeks for the podcast.
We recorded at 3pm UK time or 10am New York time (that's where Maria was) and I do quite like the afternoon record, as I am usually not too tired out at this hour and also the rest of the day becomes mine. Though I wasted it by doing a Twitch of Fundraiser for the stone-clearing kickstarter, promising surprise guests if we hit certain targets. I read what turns out to be a somewhat lengthy first chapter of “Everything Happens For No Reason†and we also met Gugus the French Dog for the first time and became reacquainted with Histor from TWRNJ and even got to meet Ally's wife, Sally. Will she get to appear in the Twitch shows? It did feel good reuniting them and unsurprisingly they had quite a good rapport (after all these years of marriage) and left me like a bit of a gooseberry in the middle. Things turned a bit steamy by the end,
so don't watch this video unless you're into very old puppets fucking.
It turns out I have an awful lot of broken puppets. I don't think I am terrible at looking after them - they're mainly pretty old. Either that or there's a doll serial killer on the loose.
But the good news is that we were well over £18000 by the end of the show and the target, which I thought was going to be beyond us, seems within reach now. If you want any of the merch
you only have til Friday evening to bid. It won't be available elsewhere
In other puppet news I have a 5 minute commission to write for the new series of Spitting Image (though not sure they are going to run my Prince Andrew sketch), which feels like a nice closing of the circle. I wonder how many people from the original run of shows will be involved in this new series. Writing for puppets is at least a proper job, but maybe I should go in and get some coaching for the real puppeteers. I do feel like taking the art a bit more seriously. This is what I have become.
