The Collins and Herring show rolls onwards. This was originally a six week appointment, filling in for Adam and Joe who were busy elsewhere, but nearly ten months later and we're still here. There had been rumours of the return of the 6Music heroes in November, but it seems that these were only rumours. Either that or it's going to be a bit embarrassing when we turn up next week to discover them sitting in our (or more accurately "their") chairs. Are the bosses just too nervous to tell us what is going to happen and so will leave us to find out for ourselves? It seems not.
Although I am a big Adam and Joe fan and on that level am missing them and their podcast terribly, it has been a wonderful opportunity for me and the soot eating Northampton idiot and the three hours usually fly by each week. This week more so than ever, though that was mainly because I was slightly out of my mind with tiredness. I didn't feel in total control of my mouth and feared that for once I might say something that might lead to reprimand. But luckily, even on auto-pilot, even when casting fresh (and less fresh) insults at the star of "I Love 1983" I managed to stay firmly of the right side of the line and not say "fuck".
Collings was also a little out of sorts, perhaps and I thought I saw that same madness behind his eyes that I had seen during the recent Cardiff live podcast - and this time he didn't have the excuse of having just done 80 minutes of stand up. He is a man on the edge. I am fairly convinced that one day he will snap and kill someone. In all likelihood it will be me. But don't punish him too harshly because I deserve to die and also he doesn't really have the intelligence to understand what he's doing. You wouldn't imprison a lamb if it committed murder and similarly you can't lock up Collings. If he should kill me then let his punishment be to sit in a television studio for the rest of his life, remembering things from 1983 and talking about them to a camera and if he every falsely remembers something from a different year he should get a mildly dangerous electric shock and not be allowed to eat soot or dirt or any carbon based snack for a week.
This week before we started he claimed that he had always wanted to be a benign dictator. Which he thought made him nice, because he wouldn't be cruel and nasty. But what was interesting to me, and quite telling if you really want to get to the heart of the enigma that is Collings, was that he still dreamed of being a dictator. It doesn't matter if he would be a nice or inadequate one. It's the fact that he would want to be one at all. Who would want that? Only a strange and arrogant megalomaniac who will one day snap and kill anyone in his vicinity.
Even when someone texted in to tell him that he probably had meant to say that he would be a benevolent dictator, as there is no phrase "benign dicatator", he refused to admit he had made a mistake and insisted he had known exactly what he was saying. That's the kind of man we're dealing with. After three years of podcasts (and including the radio shows we're done nearly 200 now) I am nowhere nearer understanding this complicated and increasingly mentally ill man. Hopefully as he stands over me, about to deal the final blow of his bludgeoning, he will explain himself and his motivations to me.
In the meantime I am left wondering if it is ethical for me to continue to work with and mock someone with such burgeoning mental issues, let alone goading him more and more every week. But to be honest, I think he might be thinking the same about me. Together we shall chart our physical and intellectual decline, hopefully (murder permitting) until we are old men. I think maybe I am preventing him from a more rapid descent by being there to tell him how crazy he is. This is a man who has spent too much of his life sitting in a room, talking to no one about nothing in particular. The fact that these thoughts are broadcast to literally dozens of others does not make him any different than the lunatic in the padded cell.
I love him though - you know that - and I hope we don't turn up to find better presenters sitting in our swivel chairs for a little while yet. But tune in while you can. I feel our days are numbered.
