6792/19712
It was an honour to meet the incredibly youthful, fit and fragrant Robin Askwith. I’d watched
Queen Kong on YouTube this morning. It’s become a bit of a cult, partly because it was not allowed to be shown at the time it was made, partly because it’s very corny and has poor special effects, but partly because in amongst the weird disjointed plot and various comedy styles there is something pretty interesting trying to come out. It reminded me in places of Airplane (though only in places) and Robin gets to give an impassioned speech about feminism towards the end. It might be having its cake and eating it a little bit given it is also aiming for a bit of titillation, but like Confessions it stands up (no pun intended) better than a lot of stuff from the 70s and the gender swapping of Kong and Fay Ray (becoming Ray Fay) is probably ahead of its time. It’s largely awful but it’s worth a look. 1970s Britain was a very strange place.
And Robin is a very interesting man with a rich past, even if you ignore all the scantily clad women both on and off screen. He talked about his experience of childhood polio, which was in many ways a horror story, but typically for this happy-go-lucky man he took a lot of positives from it and also about whether taking on Confessions might have stunted what could have been a more serious acting career. But there was no way of predicting what it would become or that people would still be talking about it half a century later and he is still working as an actor and now also as a story teller, which he might have been in the 70s had the right kind of comedy clubs been open then.
He was ace anyway and I have embraced him, which makes me just one step away from embracing pretty much every beautiful actress from the 1970s, which is good enough for me.
Acaster and Gamble were on fine form too. I didn’t make them Bella’s Pudding in the end, but we took the piss out of each other for an hour and I think they got the better of it - I hadn’t made the mistake of having them both on before, but they attacked me on two fronts and I was slightly at a disadvantage as I couldn’t really hear James at certain points as the stage was very echoey (it was fine for everyone else). Can you still watch it? Cazoo, yeah you can.
And my new book “Would You Rather?” is
now available to preorder (out on October 7th). More emergency questions for you to enjoy with about a dozen written by my daughter! Would you rather buy if from Amazon or somewhere else (I am sure gfs will have copies)? That’s up to you.
