Saturday 25 October 2008

Will Do Fuck All For Food.

I was told yesterday that I would have to do 40 minutes of warm-up right at the beginning of recording a non-broadcast Sky One pilot for a TV show called Sell Me The Money. 40 minutes of warming up an audience just seemed insane, way too long for an audience who had come all that way to see Keith Chegwin, so I called my agent to query it. She didn't really know what to do as the comedy industry isn't really her bag so I turned up fully prepared to do 40 minutes at the top plus fill in the several breaks that they would have. I'd be earning my money, in other words. Anyway, when I got there I was given a dressing room (unheard of practically for warm-ups), as much food and drink as I could force into my pockets and I ended up doing three minutes of warm-up in total. Don't get me wrong, I got into this job to work and be challenged but ending up doing fuck all came as a lovely surprise. And everyone there was lovely too. Mark, the floor manager from 8 Out Of 10 Cats was there and I met the producer Zoe, who went to the same school as me. It was a 2 hour recording so they had to give me something to do so I became basically a contestant on the show (is that a downgrade or an upgrade from warm-up, I'm still not sure) which simply meant screaming my fucking head off, something I was planning anyway.

The format of the show is for contestants to ask other contestants if they know the answer to certain questions. Of course they might be lying when they say they know the right answer as money's involved. The highlights for me were a cheery, red-faced, fun-loving man called Mark saying that his recent holiday in Poland was "a bit Anne Frank" and a woman saying she knew the answer to What is Britain's Most Famous Heart Surgery Hospital because her father went there and he's still with us at the ripe old age of 94 (the evil bitch was lying). All in all, not the evening I'd anticipated.

My new iPod Touch is fantastic. There I was in my luxurious dressing room full of mineral water, fresh fruit and Cadbury's Buttons listening to The Collings and Herrin Podcast very loudly (I've backlogged three to get through, that makes me very happy) and annoying people in the next dressing room with the noise. They kept walking out of their dressing room because they thought there was a tannoy announcement. Maybe I could have closed my door but the new iPod Touch is a very cutting edge piece of tecnology so I wanted everyone to enjoy it. It has a speaker on the side now! I'm off to Southampton tonight and on the way I intend to laugh in the face of cutting edge technology by watching a Patrick Troughton era Doctor Who on the way. Fuck you, the future!

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