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Chris Evans (not that one) has made my life a living Hell with his mentally unbalanced gofasterstripe sale. The prices he has put things at are so low that I am fearful that he has lost all touch with reality. Who knows what this madman is capable of? He has slashed the price of the Talking Cock book from £12 to £3. Which is less than it cost us to buy them in the first place. What kind of business sense is that? The kind of business sense of someone who has literally lost his marbles. LITERALLY! Go and see him and ask to see his marbles and he won’t be able to show them to you.
Last year, due to low online sales, I took all the remaining books (well over 1500 copies) from his Cardiff lock-up back to my house, leaving him a few to sell on his site. But now, due to his utter insanity that is putting him and the people around him at all kinds of risk, I have to give him some of mine because he’s run out. Which meant packing up two bags with books today and then carting them across town at the start of rush hour to give to him at the Leicester Square Theatre. Even with just 50 books it was an arduous and tedious journey. And I fear that those fifty books will be snapped up by even more people wanting to take advantage of a man's breakdown and I will have to repeat the trek again. It was 100 times more difficult than Shackleton’s escape from the Antarctic and the bloke crawling down that mountain in Touching the Void and the bloke cutting off his arm from under that rock put together. I would have paid £150 to not have to carry these bags of cheapened books. So please, I beg you, don’t take advantage of Chris Evans (not that one)’s craziness. Do not go to his website to buy my cheap books and DVDs. Go and buy the full price ones and badges and hopefully snap this man back to reality. The only good thing about all this was knowing that he, in turn, would have to struggle to carry the 50 books to the train station.
The podcasts tonight were the usual mixture of fun and embarrassment, with Andy Zaltzman (who I was relieved to see had no entries on dirty britcom confessions - mainly because I suspected ones about him would be especially weird and involve cricket equipment) and Josh Widdecombe, another of the new generation of comedians on the verge of huge success (in fact in his case he’s already over the verge). I had some fun beforehand attempting to recreate the mainly lost backstage interviews with Sara Pascoe and Steve Coogan. Chris Evans, not that one, has done some sterling work in locating a lot of the footage from the main podcasts on the corrupted disc (or whatever it is that cameras have in them), so they will be able to edit together the main shows so they look as good as normal, but the backstage footage was mainly fucked. It was a shame as the Pascoe chat in particular was really good, but what we came up with today, between me Chris (not that one), George the sound guy and Craig the cameraman was entertaining in a different way and hopefully those of you who have paid a pound or more a month won’t feel too aggrieved. If you want to see these and the other non-lost backstage interviews, then it’ll all be on the secret channel you get access to when you pay a pound a month here.
I am really enjoying this series, in spite of my constant desire to humiliate myself (or maybe because of it). The guests have been uniformly excellent and we’ve still got some crackers to come. Andy Zaltzman is a safe pair of hands (as you’ll know if you’re listened to the RHEFP he did - he delivered his own baby) and Josh Widdecombe is another confident member of the new pack of wolves circling the citadel of television. I feel strangely proud of and avuncular towards this group, let’s call them the twat-pack (it’s in no way an accurate description, except perhaps that they include a higher proportion of actual anatomical twats than previous generations). They are solid comedians, decent human beings and starting to chip away at the slightly dull and tired old guard who have dominated TV panel shows for a bit too long now. I think the real issue with the slight stagnation of TV comedy is more to do with the people in charge than any of the people on screen. The problem with panel shows is that they are largely produced and conceived and written by the same group of people and running to formulas, so when they let a significant number of newer and fresher comics on (as was the case recently with Mock the Weak when Acaster, Widdecombe and Pascoe were on) it feels genuinely exciting. I fully understand that the predominance of a new wave of comedians will pretty much put paid to what remains of what might laughably be called my career, but as a comedy fan I am still pleased about that.
I hope they can shake things up a bit. I’d certainly like to see more TV shows that refused to rely on established favourites and took some chances. And some new TV shows produced by a different set of people. There’s been some controversy this week within the industry about this subject, but if, like me, you can’t get on any of this stuff (because, you know, the liberal BBC would never employ a white, middle-class man any more due to political correctness gone mad - as long as you ignore 95% of the people on TV), then you can easily make your own stuff anyway. Or realise that it’s all bullshit and give up and do some gardening (which is my other plan - though I need to get a garden first).
If I can carry on touring and doing my podcasts, if people still come and they’re as much fun as they are at the moment, then I will be more than happy. These two will be up in a month or so.
Anyway, perhaps we all need to look upwards rather than downwards when we look to those to blame for the way that the country/TV is at the moment.
