More Andrew Collings shenanighans. Tonight was the recording of the third show of Banter, a new Radio 4 panel show which starts on the 26th January. Andrew hosts and I am a regular and tonight we were joined by brilliant young upstart Russell Howard, brilliant old upstart Arthur Smith and officially the cleverest comedian in the UK (she won the Edinburgh comedians Mensa challenge, making her, I believe, a bona fide genius) Natalie Haynes.
Basically the concept is to choose out top three things in a given subject, but it's more of an excuse to arse around and show off. It's pretty much off the cuff (though we do know the questions beforehand as is the case in most of these shows - not that any pretence is made otherwise in this case) and there's lots of opportunity for arguing and banter in general, hence the name. Inevitably though this means that a lot of the best stuff will end up cut because of issues of taste and decency. Russell was very funny after being asked to retake a joke because he had compared Snarf from the Thundercats to a scrotum, doing an impression of a shocked Radio 4 listener almost expiring with shock at hearing such a word. I think it's a shame that we can't use the word scrotum whenever we want. What's wrong with a scrotum? Fifty per cent of us would be in a fine pickle without it.
I came up with a joke that I am particularly pleased with, that I fear might get cut on taste grounds so I will share it with you now. We'd been asked to choose our favourite mythological creature and obviously after my Herculean adventures I had quite a lot to say on the subject. But I also decided to champion the Sphinx, which I argued was better than the other monsters because it had a riddle. It's nice that a terrible monster would lighten the mood a little by having a little riddle to entertain its victims with. If the other monsters had thought of that they might not have got such a bad press. But who wouldn't love a riddle? It makes every day as exciting as a Christmas cracker. Yes, it's that exciting.
The riddle of the Sphinx is as you might know, "What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon and three legs in the evening?" And of course as everyone now knows the answer is Paul Mccartney and his wives.
Now I don't think that's too offensive, or at least any potential offence is deflated by the wittiness of the remark, but you'll have to wait for the series to find out whether our scrotum hating producer and the strange lunatics at Radio 4 agree with me. Scrotums or no I think it's going to be a top series so tell all your friends.
