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It hasn’t happened before, as much as I have feared and expected it, but today we had a late drop out of a guest for RHLSTP. Al Murray rang me two hours before showtime to tell me that he couldn’t make it due to illness. I am sure we will get Al back another time and these things happen, but it added a little bit of a frisson to proceedings. Would I find another comedian within time and within range. Al was meant to be going on first.
Paul Chowdhry happened to be in the theatre at that exact moment, prepping for his shows there this week. Would it really be that easy that a replacement guest would be twenty metres away from me. He’s even recently been called xenophobic by Brian Logan from the Guardian (not like him to throw around wild accusations) so we would have had something to talk about. Paul was keen, but had his laundry in at a launderette right at the end of the Jubilee line and if he didn’t make it back there before 9 he’d have no clothes to wear. This is the kind of story women used to tell me to gently let me down that they didn’t want to come to dinner with me, but I think it was true in this case.
Luckily Richard Osman was contactable and proved amenable to going on first, which gave me a bit more time, but I had by then had the genius idea (via someone on Twitter) of asking Michael Legge who I knew wouldn’t be encumbered by doing any actual work and who would be glad to spend an hour or so out of the cold Thankfully he readily agreed and the crisis was averted.
My brain was a bit sluggish tonight, which is a problem when up against the massive brain of the massive Richard Osman, who delighted in taking the piss out of me for my Pointless Celebrities disaster and also saying some extraordinarily offensive things about my mother (who had managed to spot an error in a recent episode of the quiz show, bad enough, I believed, for Osman to offer his resignation). Next week I get a chance to make amends as I am back on the quiz show, but with my failing memory and middle-aged brain I am not holding out too much hope. The only good thing is that I shouldn’t be able to do any worse than I did last time (having said that I’ve just seen an episode where a team managed to get 300 in a round - due to two teams getting 200 and then them giving a third wrong answer in the tie-break, so you never know).
And given that I had had 20 minutes to prepare and booked him a couple of hours before the Michael Legge podcast was perfectly adequate (I am joking, it was actually quite good). It showed me that I am totally wasting my time booking guests weeks in advance and spending the day reading wikipedia. I should just turn up, ring round and see who wants to do it. Someone did tweet the fact that if “Guests of RHLSTP” was a future round on Pointless then “Michael Legge” might well be a pointless answer. This second podcast reached that fun state where the evening has gone on too long and the audience and me and the guest are shell-shocked, but we press on through to find greater laughs on the toehr side of this no-man’s land. And I was amazed at how few people remembered Murphy’s Mob. In fact once home I was sent the link to the opening titles with one of the punkiest theme songs to appear on kids TV (and pretty much all that I remembered about the programme) (can’t believe that I forgot it had clapping in it too, which would have worked very well for the running joke of the podcast) and then ended up watching the first episode again. Given this was a throwaway piece of kids entertainment it’s rather well put together, with some great acting and the late Lynda Bellingham is in it too, which I had forgotten. I might watch the rest of them now.
