At the start of 2020 it felt
like this could be a very good year: I had already started filming for series
10 of Taskmaster, Sir Michael Palin had agreed to be a guest on RHLSTP and I
had a few really big live RHLSTP gigs lined up, including one at the O2 (in the
bar, but it still counts).
Of course things did not
progress quite as well as hoped when the world went into lockdown due to Covid
19, but the cancellation of all live performances sent me scurrying to my attic
and I managed to create more content than ever and some of it wasn’t completely
insane.
I managed to get a few things
in before lockdown – we recorded the third series of Relativity for Radio 4 in
January (six episodes this time, broadcast in July), my episode of Roast Battle was broadcast on 3rd
February, I recorded my fourth attempt at Pointless (and was delighted to be
teamed up with Les Dennis) and had the utter joy of interviewing Michael Palin
in front of a very excited audience in early March. Aisling Bea was the other
guest, but aside from a special episode 300 in October, this would be the only
RHLSTP in front of a live audience in 2020.
On March 8th I
took part in my final International “When’s International Men’s Day?” Day,
streaming most of the day on Twitch (where it got something like 300,000 views)
and earning about £75,000 for Refuge. I have decided to hang up my hat on this
one and put my final efforts in trying to stop the tide of idiots by writing a
short book called “The Problem With Men” which was written during lockdown and
published on November 5th. In October I recorded the audio book along
with Alistair Green playing the voice of the International Man and Deborah
Frances-White who chatted about some of the themes of the book with me.
Chris Evans (not that one)
came round to my house the weekend before lockdown and helped me set up the
cameras I needed to broadcast from home. I don’t think we’d anticipated how
much we’d use it.
Also I filmed my final Taskmaster
tasks a few days before lockdown, eating melon out of the hand of Daisy May
Cooper who had a mysterious cold at the time…
Lockdown led to me cancelling
the rest of the Leicester Square Theatre run (and two subsequent attempts to
reschedule), sold out gigs in Norwich and a huge gig in Birmingham (where my
guest was to be Noddy Holder). We nearly did the O2 gig in the O2 offices (with
guest James Acaster) but lockdown started the night before (in the end we did
it remotely a couple of months later).
But though I lost some
income, I discovered a whole new platform for my work and started doing live stone
clears, filmed on my phone most mornings and expanded Me1 vs Me 2 to 16, then
32 and finally 40 players in four tournaments played throughout the year). An
edited frame appeared on the BBC2 show Comedians: Home Alone, so incredibly Me1
and Me2 had finally got actual TV coverage and earned money too.
In the latter half of the
year I did two kickstarter campaigns with stone clearing and snooker merch including
membership cards and booklets and for the snooker a Punani sticker album featuring
32 players, the refs and commentators with photos by Steve Brown and design by
Stephen Newman.
The profits from the snooker
kickstarter (of over £10,000) were donated to live comedy venues.
I also appeared in several
online shows including Off Menu, The Guilty Feminist, My Time Capsule and Dan
Schreiber’s show and in November interviewed Al Murray about his new book and
was interviewed about my book by Rich Wilson for the Chortle Book Festival.
I managed to do a few stand up
gigs for charity, online but also live at the Clapham Grand and the Hertford
Theatre. In lockdown I made the decision to abandon all pre-lockdown stand up
material and start with a clean slate. I have done a couple of gigs with Ally.
I was able to carry on RHLSTP
remotely too and guests over the year have included Bill Burr, Nell Scovell,
Adam Buxton and Rhod Gilbert. I made a conscious decision to try and highlight
the work of newer comedians as much as possible, or those with an online presence too.
We recorded episode 300 at
the Bill Murray pub in front of an audience of 20. I was the guest and was
interviewed by John Robins. The show was made available early as a paid download
with extra content and we raised £10,500 for Refuge.
I had used Ally my 128 year
old ventriloquist dummy in the snooker streams and after appearing on the
improvised Twitch shows of Bilal Zafar and Stevie Martin and enjoyed the leap
of faith, so decided to see if I could learn ventriloquism on the job and put together
a show with Ally called Twitch of Fun in July. This developed rapidly over the
next 20 or so weeks to include a vast slate of characters, from a dead wasp I’d
found on the desk to a brilliant Prince Andrew doll made by Richard Ison and
sent to me unsolicited. Towards the end of the year we started filming some zoom
sketches for the show including the supposed writers’ room for the show (featuring
Bilal, Stevie, John Kearns, Dan Tetsell, Lou Sanders and Chris Evans (not that
one) and his son Ben. Having grown a moustache for Movember I started realising
how much I resembled my 1990s driving instructor character, Peter Dibdin and
that I was now the right age to play him, so I wrote and recorded a few
sketches with Stevie doing a brilliant job as the long-suffering student.
In September I recorded an episode
of the Chase which was shown on Christmas Day on ITV. I was offered £89000 to go high
and couldn’t resist it. Amazingly I got through with just one wrong answer and
then along with Kay Burley and Eni Aluko went on to win an incredible £150,000.
I gave my share to Scope.
I also wrote a few sketches
for the new series of Spitting Image, but none of them were used.
My episode of Tipping Point:
Lucky Stars that was recorded in July 2019 was finally shown on November 29th 2020. I saw off the opposition and won £6000 for Scope.
In December I was a guest on
Russell Howard’s Sky One show and acted in an independent film, Giddy
Stratospheres and an interactive game, Darkcode (I had also done another short film for the director Craig Griffith in the first few weeks of Lockdown called "Lockdown").
We recorded the studios of
Taskmaster at the end of July as the first lockdown ended. I have never laughed
so much and was in tears of joy for most of the time. It was a huge catharsis
and I got on very well with the other contestants Johnny Vegas, Katherine Parkinson,
Mawaan Rizwan and (failing to recognise unrecognisable hippos aside) Daisy May Cooper. It was an incredibly
tight contest. I won five of the shows (and tied for the lead in a sixth, but
lost the tie-breaker) and ended up winning the series on the very final task.
I had won three game shows
seemingly in the space of a month, which was very off brand for me.
It was a very strange year
with many negatives, but I managed to make some positives out of it and it
might well be my most inventive comedic period for many years.
