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Already exhausted from my long week away and late night drive home, I was woken early by the men who were coming to repair my dishwasher. Predictably they were arriving at the earliest possible moment of their 8am-11am timeslot and had rung me at 7.30 to let me know. And it turned out that they couldn’t even fix the thing as they didn’t have the right part. So they will be back on Thursday to ensure maximum disruption. They seemed like nice guys though - one of them had already been out to mend our washing machine a couple of months ago. An impressive failure of both products within the first year of warranty. That’ll teach me for buying Siemens just because it has a funny name (to be fair they have been pretty excellent at swiftly repairing their faulty products).
Later another friendly workman would come to see what was wrong with our Sky Box. It turned out that both the box and the satellite dish need replacing and he wasn’t able to do this, so another visit is required. How people cope with this kind of disruption when they have to go out to work I do not know. The Sky man kindly fixed up a scart lead to our sky box which meant we could at least get a picture on the telly. But braver men with ropes and ladders and drills need to come next week to make the thing work as intended.
I was giddy and loose-lipped with tiredness by the evening which was either going to make my podcast interviews genius or a car-crash or a terrifying combination of the two. I was talking to Sarah Millican, who I totally adore, but with whom I have got into a verbal wrestling podcast clash with which I am currently winning 3-0 (talk to anyone, they will all agree with this score). Before tonight’s show we agreed that we shouldn’t go in too hard at the beginning, both feeling that the last Edinburgh Fringe podcast had left some of the audience confused as to whether we really hated each other or if either of us had been hurt by the other’s meanness. But even so we were pretty much straight back into it from the start. It’s fun to know that we trust each other enough to let our conversations go this way. I think (well I hope at least) that you can only do something like this when you really respect each other and it’s actually a very giving environment. We’re both setting up the other to top what we’ve just said.
My other guest was the equally lovely Rebecca Front who I’ve been working with since the early 1990s, though in my research realised that the Venn diagram of shows that she’s been involved with that have won awards and shows she’s been in that I have worked on involves two almost entirely separate circles. Which might mean that I am no good, or that she has just wrecked everything I have done for her. She was very complimentary about “You Can Choose Your Friends”, our last televised project together (though the Evening Standard critic said it was pretty much the worst TV show of all time - see who is right here).
Although I loved being filthy and rude with Sarah Millican, it felt wrong to do the same with Rebecca, who I have always seen as a (slightly) older sister. But my hands are tied with this format and I think much of what makes the show work is the way that the repeated jokes return to embarrass and humiliate me when I would rather they weren’t loitering around. And further awkwardness at reading out her dirty britcom confessions came from the fact that her teenage son was in the audience. But I ploughed on, my mouth loosened and my brain disengaged by fatigue, leading me to discuss some very strange things about myself with both guests. I left the theatre not feeling sure whether we’d done something great or if I’d just embarrassed myself. But again this is kind of the point of the show.
