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Next week I am heading to Bristol to take part in an impressive line-up of comics at the Colston Hall to raise funds for the City's Slapstick Festival. It should be a fun night, but I am not sure they have got all the information in my biography quite right. "He was discovered by Stewart Lee while studying at Oxford University".... The only positive thing about that is it makes it sound like I am much younger than him and that he saw me when he was trawling around Universities looking for fresh talent (topical song writers must all be hoping that Stew Lee with one day be caught up with by Yewtree - so far the police seem to have been ignoring my emails about the ventriloquist dummy). But that's a small consolation.
I feel a bit like Trotsky being slowly edged out of history by this comedic Stalin. How long before I am erased from all the photos of Stewart Lee's "Fist of Fun" and "This Morning without Richard but with Stew Lee"? Even in my solo work I seem to being side-lined by the Robot Voice created to read out the dates. It's quite a feat to be the less successful one in the work I do alone.
It was a fallowish day on the Rasputin script, but this evening I was at Broadcasting House to appear on a new Radio 2 panel show called Listomania. And in an act of political correctness gone insane it was not only presented by a woman, but two of the four panellists were also penis-less. And the other man was quite effeminate. Luckily I had enough testosterone, manliness and a big enough penis to keep the show amusing, but really the BBC, I think Women's Lib has gone quite far enough now.
I am joking of course. Everyone else was very funny (due to the fact that I have so much funniness that it can rub off on anyone around me, even if their genitals are internal). Susan Calman hosted with Lucy Porter, Katherine Ryan and Joe Lycett battling it out to be the best at lists. The average height of the participants meant that for the first time in my life I got to stand on the back row of a photo. So it was worth leaving the house for that alone. There was loads of funny stuff - I am not sure how much of it will be allowed to be broadcast on Radio 2, but you can find out next Thursday at 10pm. I really enjoyed it. My favourite bit was when I tried to mime how you might be able to have sex with mist, by putting it in a cake-making piping bag and inserting it in your bottom. The mime was strong enough that I think it will come across on radio, if this isn't too much for the BBC. But as I pointed out they've seen very happy to broadcast the views of UKIP over and over again for the last month, so if they draw the line at a man piping mist into his anus for sexual pleasure (though most of the pleasure would be felt by the mist) then their priorities are very much askew.
Afterwards we went for a drink at the Yorkshire Grey (I had a pint of water - my dry May looks like it will be completed and I am in no rush to start drinking again) and I experienced another timequake as I realised how many years ago it was that I was first drinking here. Over the next 12 months there are going to be a lot of entries about it being a quarter of century since stuff happened. It's only a little over 24 years since I first frequented this pub, with my mentor Stewart Lee. But if we were all zapped back a quarter of a century tonight then the only adults at that table would have been the Head of Radio Comedy and myself. And there would have been a few gametes seeping into the bar stools.
It's bewildering (in generational terms it's like a member of That Was The Week That Was joining us for a drink in 1990), but not unpleasant. I am glad that I am still here and enjoy looking at life from this vantage point. It's just a bit of a kick in the mind-balls sometimes.
