There should be aftershow counseling for Mastermind. It's a very traumatic experience, whether you do well or badly. I am still reeling from the after shocks of my appearance, reliving the stupid mistakes and trying to come to terms with what I have been through. Obviously I can't tell you what happened, though I have been going through it all with friends and family. Hopefully this will pass, but it's a very unusual circumstance to put yourself through. I've heard stories from some of the other people who were in the shows after me yesterday and it seems that at certain points their brains shut down or acted against them too. So I probably shouldn't be kicking myself for the dumb errors I made and yet much as I know none of it matters and all that's really important is that I made some money for SCOPE, I feel that the echoes of the four minutes in the spotlight will haunt my dreams. Whether I won or lost is not even the issue. I suspect I will have to wait a few weeks before I can discuss it, which is a shame because by then I will (hopefully) be over it all.
But a weight was off my shoulders today. It was the first time, probably since January, that I have no impending deadlines hanging over me. I have nearly six weeks until Christ on a Bike
starts its London run and although I will have to do a little bit of work on the script, even that is already pretty much written and learned. I can relax a bit and have a think about new ideas. It would be good to sort out what I am doing in Edinburgh next year before Christmas - I'd like to write a play and do a stand up show at least, though I am sure if you went back to August and mentioned that "at least" to me I would be shouting, "What the fuck are you thinking?" But I also want to have a think about ideas for TV and maybe another book and some different stuff to do in my stand up set. But that doesn't feel like work just yet. I can be casual about it and let the ideas come to me when they feel like it.
Today though, aside from having to do an interview for Talksport about the Hitler Moustache DVD I gave myself a day off. I walked from Southwark to Marble Arch, looking at London's beautiful buildings. Just over Blackfriars Bridge I saw some men coming out of a van belonging to the Water Board. There was a camera set up filming them, which was weird, but then I spotted Johnny Vaughan putting on some overalls and clambering into the van. Part of me wanted to shout out "Lunch marmalade" at him (as I think everyone should every time they see him for the rest of his life), but most of me was a bit scared he might spot me and have been told about my slight rudeness about him and come over and lamp me. Andrew Collings got called a cunt by him, because he had made a very tiny joke (really at Collings' own expense) about the sitcom 'Orrible, so how would he respond to my criticism of doing an awful ad when he's presumably already making loads of money from his radio show. Luckily he didn't see me so I was safe. But having seen that he is now working for the waterboard in his afternoons I think my criticisms of him might be unfair. He must be in real financial trouble if he is moonlighting. Maybe the radio show and the advert don't pay as much as I'd imagined.
