I've been doing more of those Talking Head style TV appearances recently than usual. Believe me, I am still turning the vast majority down at quite a pace. This week, for example I politely declined an appearnace on the unbelievably rubbishly named "Now That's Embarrassing - The 80s". Can you imagine how bad that is going to be? And then to call it "Now That's Embarrassing" - not asking for trouble at all! They also informed me that Sam Fox and Toyah Wilcox had already accepted the gig. Hmmmm.
I have always thought carefully about which things I accept and which I reject. I have been used to being in control of my TV appearances and so going somewhere, talking for an hour and leaving someone else to choose the best bits is a bit of a risk. They only need to take a sentence or two out of context or broadcast an unguarded moment and you're screwed. I will generally only talk about things that I have an interest in - such as the Simpsons, Derek and Clive and controversial comedy - all things I can talk about without having to watch a clip beforehand and then pretending I have remembered a specific moment twenty years later. "The Comic Side of 7 Days" was a bit more of a risk for me, but I figured that if I wrote my own material then it wouldn't matter if there were things that other people did in the show that weren't to my taste. (As it happened they only seemed to use two bits from my 45 minutes of chat, neither of which I had specifically written for them and I was a bit disappointed that they missed out some of my better stuff, so that's why you have to be careful.)
Today I went to Avalon to stand in a corridor next to a poster of myself to talk about the way comedy changed in the 1990s. It was something I felt qualified to discuss and the company involved had some pretty good other contributors, so I gave it a go. As I got there the interviewer asked me if I wanted a coffee and I said I did and he handed me a big mug which I was to hold as I was talking.
It struck me that I was standing there with a hot drink in my hand, discussing how good comedy had been in the past when I was on telly. Which wasn't a million miles away from something we did in our last series where we parodied comics of the eighties talking about how they had invented comedy, whilst drinking from the same SDP mug. This made me laugh. Luckily I did say a lot about comedy of today and of the past being good, but no doubt it will be edited to make me look stupid and hopefully be played in a split screen with me being Algernon Nerd from the old sketch.
It wasn't a great place to stand either as we were right by the coffee making facilities and blocking the way to the toilet. Frank Skinner had to walk through and interrupt the interview at one point because he needed (I am guessing from the amount of time he took) a wee. I hope they put that in the show too. Not the wee. The interruption. Unless they had another camera in the toilet.
