Still buzzing from last night and very proud of the 400 people in the audience who seemed to be keeping their mouth shut about what had happened, I headed up to Glasgow. I am presenting six episodes of a new radio panel show "Bad Language" over the next four days. I have only once sat in the host's chair for one of these things (for a pilot I did in Edinburgh last year), but was quite looking forward to see how I did at the helm.
On the plane up I thought I might be sitting next to Cerys Matthews. The woman in question was dressed in quite a rock star outfit with a leather skirt and had hair very like the Welsh singer, but as I was sitting next to her and facing forwards it was hard to get a good enough look to verify if it was who I thought. I had to keep stopping myself humming the tune to "Road Rage" which would have been quite annoying if this was Cerys. Or even if it wasn't.
If it was Cerys Matthews I didn't want to disturb her, though I did have an in if I wanted one as am ex-girlfriend had pretended to be her on Celebrity Stars In Their Eyes. But again if it wasn't her then that would be an odd opening and might freak non-Cerys out. "Why did she choose me? I am an accountant from Peckham! I can barely sing."
In any case when you're trapped in a situation like that it can be awkward enough starting up a conversation. You're stuck sitting so close to each other that your arms are nearly touching and have to endure that weird silence.
As it turned out when she walked past me afterwards I realised that it wasn't Cerys Matthews anyway. Though I think she might have thought I was Charley Boorman. Imagine if we'd just gone through with pretending we were the person the other person thought we were.
By three o clock I was in the theatre in Glasgow eating a late lunch of vegan gnocchi from the CCA restaurant. As it's radio the budgets are not huge so we had to do quite a lot of the work on this new show in rehearsals. But that was quite exciting. Luckily there was a hard-working production team and some great comedians on hand. The team captains are Keith Farnan and Des Clarke, who I know from the Fringe and they both seemed up for some banter and piss-taking. There had been some jokes written for me, but some of them didn't really sound right coming from me and as we got through the first two records it became obvious it was better for me mainly to adlib stuff. The first show was understandably shaky as we got to grips with it all, but I thought the second one was pretty solid and had lots of good laughs.
Unluckily summer arrived in Glasgow at the same time as I did and it meant it was hard to get too much of a crowd in, but if my career has taught me anything it is how to perform to 50 people and the rest of the comics didn't let it get to them and were respectful enough to each other to ensure it was only competitive in a playful way. Some of it didn't work, but I think enough did to make an entertaining daytime show. It's fun upping my Englishness a bit with a Scotch crowd and a panel of mainly Scotch And Iristch comics. Some of the vernacular spoken in an English accent becomes rather ridiculous.
It was a very different day to yesterday and I was a little dazed and tired through lack of sleep and travel. And I then made the mistake of having some beer and whisky which ensured that I'd wake up early tomorrow too. But I enjoyed the experience and thought I did a reasonably good job and think we'll all only get better. You can get tickets for Friday
here. They're free!
