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RHLSTP record tonight, but I went into town early to record another comedy skit with the brilliant Bilal Zafar. The little clip from When Murderers Kill now has 2.3 million views and the team were keen to build on that, so I was going to take part in Bilal's latest idea in which he interviews supposed academics about a subject.
Beyond that there was no plan. If you stop and think about that it's quite a scary proposition. We've got an hour to sit down, mess around and somehow create something funny. With the serial killer one, I had had a slight idea of what I wanted to do, though a whole lot of new stuff came out in the improv. Today it wasn't until we sat down that (I think) the director Ben Mallaby suggested that I should be a royal correspondent, very firmly on the side of all the royals, who was here to talk mainly about the arrest of Randrew Andrew Montefiore-Barbara-Windsor-Davies-Thunderdome-Tropicana.
And magically we came up with some very good stuff, I think. It's quite a thing to just trust your brain to come up with funny scenarios, but Bilal and I have a very good understanding of each other and delight in pushing things as far as we can and Ben is excellent at picking up on notions that are worth exploring further. My character spends all his time with Prince Andrew, but was very keen to say he was just an observer and that nothing bad happened anyway and was very keen to say that Andrew had done nothing wrong, had been taken advantage of, because he is innately very stupid and that he shouldn't be taken out of the line of succession, as he's actively been role playing ways that the 7 people in front of him might be killed, so he can avoid that happening.
Anyway I think some clips will be going up on instagram in the next few days and hopefully lots of people in America will think it's real again so we can have another viral hit.
I then had the whole day in town to prepare for my chats with Jameela Jamil and Andy Hamilton in various Pret a Mangers in London. It was actually quite a good way to prepare, as sandwiches aside there were not too many distractions and I got a good seven hours of prep in. I watched videos of Jameela and Andy being interviewed and bits of Andy's amazing sitcoms. One of the ads that popped up on youtube was of an academic that might have appeared in one of Bilal's sketches. She said, "The only time you don't think is when you sneeze or when you orgasm"
I thought, that's definitely not true. When I sneeze I think "My wife if going to kill me because this will be so loud that she'll insist that it can't be real.... And the same when I orgasm."
Unbelievably I had written my one proper joke for 2026 before February was over.
I definitely think that starting the day with improvisation was a great way to activate my snoozing comedy brain - it's probably true of improvising with Ally too - who to be fair is a lot funnier than Bilal - as I have got more writing done this month than I probably did in the whole of last year.
Turn off your brain, turn on your mouth and hope for the best (and trust that whoever is in charge will cut out the career ending bits- not possible with Newsround!).
To get away from sandwiches I went into the National Portrait Gallery to see if that was a good place to work. It wasn't really, but I enjoyed the portraits of the Tudors and the beautiful clothes that old dukes and kings used to wear. The portraits of Elizabeth I were really impressive, but the artists were unknown. Seemed a shame after they'd captured the cloth and pearls so brilliantly. Always sign your work artists.
There were a couple of unfinished works, one of the Duke of Wellington and one by Freud (Lucian I think, not Clement) and I loved the stark contrast between the beautiful painted work and the rough pencil marks that would have been their clothes if the artists hadn't died. Sign your work and try to make sure you don't start something if you're feeling really poorly. Though those were my favourite ones.
The portrait of James I (or VI if you're reading this is Scotland) looked entirely three dimensional. Don't know if I caught that in the photo. I'm glad Guy Fawkes didn't blow him up. His painting would have looked a lot worse if he was in a hundred pieces and it would have ruined his fabulous garments.
It was cool to get a bit of culture before heading in to talk about poop and failure. Comedians, don't sign your work. You should be ashamed
Tonight's line-up at the Leicester Sq Theatre was insanely good and I knew this would be a classic. Sadly we weren't even half full, which seemed a shame. But the people who did turn up (including a good proportion of the pop band Darts who Chris Evans- not that one- is inexplicably friends with) were excellent.
Jameela, whose life is a whirl of success and embarrassing incident turned up with her two dogs, because one of them had been vomiting blood and couldn't be left at home. I've seen her tell so many unbelievable and potentially humiliating (but somehow heroic) stories from her life that I couldn't believe we'd get anything new. But there were at least three extraordinary stories that I hadn't heard before, one involving her friend's IVF treatment that should one million per cent be a sitcom.
Jameela is very much against inspirational celebrity stories, but her life is an extraordinary mixture of disaster and triumph, ludicrous bad and good fortune. If the Universe is a simulation then I am sure that she's the main player and the rest of us are peripheral characters who do not really exist. Which is a tough thing for us to accept. But if it leads to the tales that got told tonight then it is worth it.
Andy Hamilton brought no animals with him and was a calmer and quieter presence (and I love it when the two shows - I mean one show a week- come from completely different places), but still many fascinating stories and a stellar career and lessons learned from the rare occasions where things didn't go so well. Plus a terrifying story of someone pretending to be him. As you would fully expect, he's the loveliest of men. I also tried to write a musical called Hamilton about him, so that's got to be worth tuning in for.
A slow journey home due to another person under a train, but I sat in first class in lieu of claiming money back for my delayed journey and did some work. It was a long day, but I made a funny film, wrote a new joke (also read out my Randrew Andrew poem which went very well) and recorded two excellent podcasts.
