Edinburgh round this time of year gets a little crazy and strange incidents are likely to occur. I was sitting enjoying some wine with a couple of friends who had come to the show (more people in tonight than Friday, unpredictably and I seem to be having proper fun with the material again).
A man with a red face (either he was very embarrassed or has been enjoying drinking alcohol continuously for the last twenty years) came up to us with a video camera and said with a slur that suggested his ruddy complexion was not down to mortification, “Would you mind looking after this whilst I go to the toilet?”
It seemed an odd enough request as it was a fairly small video camera that he could easily have held whilst he did whatever business he had in the lavatory. Also, of course, it wasnÂ’t an inexpensive piece of equipment and it seemed a bit of a risk to entrust it to some people he had never met before. He seemed a bit shifty and over-excited and I wondered if he had stolen the camera.
He then pointed out that the camera was on and said something about trying to snatch pieces of peopleÂ’s conversations for some kind of project he was working on. He placed the camera on the table (pointing at nothing in particular which seemed strange if he was making a film) and then headed off instructing us to carry on talking about whatever weÂ’d been talking about. Not surprisingly we werenÂ’t that keen to have our private conversation recorded for a complete stranger, so I turned the camera off.
When the man came back he seemed surprised and disappointed that we hadnÂ’t gone along with his strange request. Had I been him I would have been surprised that we and the camera will still in the same place. If he was a clever man (and I donÂ’t think he was in all likelihood) he would have predicted this turn of events and altered his camera so that the on and off positions were the wrong way round. Thus in fact I would have turned the camera on when I thought I was shutting it down and the man would then have been privy to our juicy conversation about taking a few months off work to go round the world (which is something one of my friends is doing).
I don’t really know what he was thinking or what was going on. But perhaps it was all part of a bigger scam perpetrated by Dom Joly, my comedic nemesis. It sounds about a funny enough scam to be given its own Channel 4 series. They could call it “Leaving A Video Camera On A Table And Seeing What Happens”. Commission x 100.
