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I don't get invited to many showbiz parties and I often choose not to go to the ones that I am invited to (I wouldn't go to any showbiz party with such reliance on the Z-list that it would consider me as a guest - cf this entry and then marvel at the terrible and tragic fate s of quite a few of the guests to this event - I wonder if Ian Watkins was actually the evil one, rather than the H one). But tonight I had been invited to Steve Coogan's 50th birthday party and I wasn't going to miss that one. What if Owen Wilson was there?
I was genuinely touched to have been invited and it was also a guaranteed rock solid night out for my wife and I and we don't get too many of those now. And with Catie's mum agreeing to look after Phoebe through the night and into the next morning it meant we could do something that we haven't done for at least 15 months, get spectacularly pissed together. Given I had to do podcasts tomorrow afternoon (including the tricky task of interviewing myself) I was professional enough to say I was going to pace myself. But then stupid enough to forget about that and just keep on drinking the wine which seemed to be magically refilling itself.
But it was a truly wonderful event, with guests from all eras of Steve's career (and 4/5ths of the dum show cast in attendance, that's what he's best known for) which meant catching up with some old friends (and enemies). One of the first people I saw was Vanessa who made me up as the driving instructor etc on Fist of Fun and who had been supportive and fun at such an important time in my career. She hadn't changed.
The place was also packed to the rafters with potential RHLSTP guests, though I didn't want to be a prick so followed a strict vampiric rule that I wouldn't ask anyone to come on unless they invited me to do so (and got one potential bite, who might be a slightly fitting replacement for Grayson Perry who has had to drop out of next week's recording - though will be doing the show next year). We've had a bit of an eventful time with the baby so I was pretty much exhausted at the start and didn't anticipate staying very late, but the fun and excitement and endless booze kept me going, so that when Julia Davis (who I've never met and am a big fan of) introduced herself to me I was struck down by a mixture of exhaustion, drunkenness and being starstruck and tried to talk about who much I'd enjoyed her show with Jessica Hynes, but found myself unable to recall the name of the show, or somewhat more embarrassingly the name of Jessica Hynes. She was very kind about my bumbling idiocy and talked to me for a good five minutes before leaving me to bumble alone, but we did have a good chat about whether it was possible to be a good comedian coming from a stable family background, which we both did. Hopefully she was as drunk as me and won't remember it. But I remember it quite well. Oh dear. This is why it's best I stay at home and only talk to famous comedians on stage where my bumbling idiocy can be dismissed as a kind of character.
I also talked to Patrick Marber for the first time in about 20 years. Perhaps unsurprisingly he wasn't delighted to meet me, as I have joked about him quite a bit over the last two decades and in my book renamed the anus, the Marber as a tribute to him. But I was still surprised by his coldness towards me. I had assumed that he would have understood that the jokes Stew and I had made about him were at leat 60% aimed at ourselves as well. He'd gone on to be hugely successful and our cracks clearly came from a place of jealousy and comparative failure and that the longer the “joke†went on, based on some past and largely forgotten slight, the more pathetic we would look. It turns out he hadn't entirely seen it that way, which is a shame because I was really pleased to see him and I do like him and have forgiven him for being somewhat over critical of my performing abilities in the dum show (realising with time, that I was wracked with insecurities from previous incidents) or for being ambitious (at a time when we were all ambitious and especially in hindsight, having seen that a lot of people in this business will choose their own progression over much more solid friendships). I think we made friends, but I also thought I would point out the intent of the Marber “jokes†in case anyone else thought they were more than 20% serious.
I was sat on the table next to everyone from The Day Today and it was apt that I had been just edged off it. After having worked on On The Hour, Stew and I had left the Day Today over a dispute over ownership of the characters. It had been a tough decision for me, as I was very poor at the time, was convinced (correctly so) that this show would be our generation's Monty Python and the 11 minute commission on a TV show would have made a huge difference to my life. But I reluctantly agreed with Stew and our manager that there needed to be clearer long-term contracts. But it's all water under the bridge and although I sometimes wonder about the parallel universe where I had chosen the Day Today and walked away from my writing partner and management. Have you seen the film Sliding Doors? Shit isn't it?
Different stuff would have happened, but you know, I kind of like the stuff that happened to me in this time line, even if (unless I'd died) both time lines would have converged tonight, with me sitting one table over and maybe having an awkward conversation with Stewart Lee for the first time in twenty years.
It was hard to know what to get Steve for his birthday. What do you get the man who has everything and has had everyone? I wish I'd gone with my original thought which was to write in his card, “I hereby rescind all rights to the character of Alan Partridge and promise to make no claim to his invention in future†which would in many ways be the same as presenting Steve with a million pounds for his birthday, which would be a generous gift. But then I thought there might be a time when I'd be desperate enough to take him to court and that card would bring my (admittedly mainly fraudulent) case crashing down around my ears. So we got him some posh chocolates instead. And now this blog can be used in the court case anyway, so it's a wasted opportunity.
We stayed out until after 1am and were dangerously and ludicrously drunk to the point where we were a danger to ourselves, though I'd been sensible enough to pull back from the booze for the last half hour, realising that tomorrow was going to be tricky. It was worth the pain and the craziness that ensued to have one night where we could behave like we weren't parents and was all the more enjoyable because we knew it was more or less a one-off. We danced, we embarrassed ourselves in front of people we wanted to impress, we bickered, we fell out of cabs. For one night I'd stepped back to the idiot I was when I first met all these people and it was really good.
