5114/18034
Happy Fourteenth Birthday Warming Up. Let persistence be thy watchword,
But now hold on, have I got the numbering of these wrong still. This means I have done 365x14 entries plus four leap years. Given I started on 25th November then shouldn’t today be number 5115? Any mathematicians help me out with that? Why is my numbering always wrong?
Anyway whether I have now done 5114 or 5115 consecutive days doesn’t seem to make much different. It’s still a crazy, solipsistic exercise and a swirling vortex that I seem incapable of escaping. But I have Stockhausen Syndrome now and I want to keep this going. Even though my life gets ever less eventful as I descend into old age, parenthood and mainly sleeping.
How can I say that? Today I went to the Defector’s Weld in Shepherd’s Bush for the last day of filming on my Sex Robot series of sketches. We had planned to do episode 5, a pick up for episode 1 (involving an appearance by Dan Tetsell as a robot salesman, which I hope all fans of Humans will appreciate) and then another quick sketch. But the director wisely and correctly decided that we wouldn’t have time for all that, so we are holding over the additional sketch for another time. Our budget is running low and I might not quite manage to get everything I want to film filmed (though you can help us do more by either buying tickets to the remaining shows, or a pass to the AIOTM channel which will be packed with extras, out takes, behind the scenes stuff and longer versions of the shows and some of the sketches), but we’ve already achieved a hell of a lot with the money available.
Because we weren’t rushing we had a bit more time to do this relatively short episode and from an acting point of view it felt like the best one (for me at least). As well as putting these out episodically in the shows, I think they should cut together nicely to a longish short film. And maybe we can turn it into a feature if I manage to impregnate the toaster robot, or if a future toaster robot comes back through time to destroy the original.
In the end we had to decide what to do with the cumbersome toaster robot. I usually like hanging on to props - you never know when you might need them again, but if not a nice souvenir, they can also be ebayed for additional funds. But I didn’t fancy lugging the robot back home, so we dismantled her bit by bit. We were very close to the library which has a recycling bin for small electric items and so I disposed of most of Gemma in there, like a cyborg serial killer. The library staff did not comment on the fact that I was bringing in so many toasters, or ask why they had odd bits of pipe and wire attached to them or baulk at the chest piece complete with Madonna-like funnel boobs. So maybe this kind of thing happens a lot.
I held on to the head of Gemma the toaster robot. That’s the best bit and I can still enjoy myself with that. But also, in the future, when toaster robot technology has advanced I can reanimate her with a new body, like she’s been cryogenically frozen.
Once again amazing work from the young crew and great fun working with director Ben Mallaby and actor Rachel Stubbins and nice to see Dan Tetsell too, now sans moustache. It leaves me with three more studios and about four more sketches to write and record. And then there’s a lot more work in terms of editing. But we’re getting there.
Not many tickets left for the final RHLSTP recording of 2016 with Lucy Porter and now added Peter Serafinowicz. Come along if you can. All the deets are here.
