The beauty of the job is that you often get to gig abroad. Normally the gigs are lovely and if you go with lovely people it can feel like a holiday with a couple of gig thrown in. When I accepted these gigs on the French Riviera I thought it would be hot, because even though France is quite close to London, I’m a complete moron. It was actually t-shirt weather some days so my retarded geographical knowledge paid off to some extent.
I went with Paul McCaffrey and Stephen Grant, both excellent comedians and both excellent value. As Stephen had brought his wife Lucy (also lovely) with him Paul and I spent a dangerously large amount of time with one another; it wouldn’t have been inappropriate if I’d proposed to him on the last day. We were performing to ex-pat’s who mainly worked on yachts with the odd person owning a yachts. The owners were the hardest people to make laugh because there is not much they can relate to: if I went “you know when you’re on a train” they’d be thinking “nope”. With most of the gigs being at Irish bars and most of them allowing us free drinks Paul and I spent a lot of the time being Prince Naseem Hammered.
A few amusing incidents happened but the one and only I have to retell is about my encounter with a French man called Gheff. At 2am in yet another Irish bar me Paul, Nick and Ollie (the 2 guys running the gigs) befriended a random French man called Gheff purely because he called a Canadian man a tosser. Due to the fact that we all thought the same bloke was a tosser we assumed Gheff was not one. How wrong we were. Alarm bells should have rung when we noticed he was sporting a “Kickers” jumper, something only football hooligans and children wear. We walked with this French spy to another bar till about 4am and as we left he gave me a hug. This made me think he was definitely not a tosser. How wrong I was. Gheff then ran away very quickly with my mobile phone. Despite the potential dangers me and Paul gave chase, after 10 metres Paul ran out of breath, but it’s the thought that counts. All I had racing through my mind was that I didn’t want to set up one of those Facebook groups saying “numbers please”. After about 10 minutes I caught up with him in a park. Instead of punching him I shouted, “this is the last night of my holiday you’re ruining it!” I eventually managed to wrestle it off him.
I ran off and rung Paul, who didn’t believe it was me calling despite my name coming up on his phone. He drunkenly thought Gheff was such a git that he was ringing everyone in my phone to brag about robbing me. As the four of walk back to the hotel, stopping to get a cheeky can on the way, we discuss what a dick Gheff is and how he was lucky all 4 of us weren’t there. Then in a way you couldn’t write Gheff appear in front of us going “It’s me Gheff, what’s happening?” I’m there going “what’s happening? You robbed me you prick”. Ollie then without thinking ran in windmilling connecting precisely 0 times before Gheff ran away.
The weirdest feature of this whole story isn’t anything to do with Gheff’s Houdini-like reappearance; it’s the fact that for some unknown reason I have a photo on my phone of him urinating on a wall. I have to me the only human being in the world who has a photo’s of his mugger’s buried treasure on my phone. I wanted to report him to the police for the funniest police line up of all time. I tried to upload this photo to Facebook but it appears it now has penis recognition software so removed it before could even publish it. Gheff is the only criminal in the world who now needs to buy a knob disguise.
I know this story didn’t happen between 9am and 5pm but I think I’m allowed to bend the rules on this occasion.
Moral of the story: don’t befriend someone just because they call someone a tosser.
Wednesday 26 January 2011
10-14th January: Meeting Hamlet & Jumping on My Dad
This week I actually started to do vaguely constructive work again including have a meeting with an accountant. This was like a mid-twenties crisis signifier. If anyone had told me, as a teenager when I was on a school bus swearing at strangers out of the window, in a few years I’d be meeting accountants, I’d have spat my tropical Capri Sun out at them. The guy was absolutely lovely and in a weird sort of way learning loads of way to minimize your taxes is quite interesting: it’s like legal hustling.
The beauty of having nothing to do most days means I can meet up with people I haven’t seen for ages at random events no one else can get to. My old school tutor Sutters, who I hadn’t seen in two years invited me to a talk at the National Theatre at 3pm. I got the invite partly because we get on really well but mainly because I’m the only adult he knew who wasn’t at work. The talk itself was by Rory Kinnear, an awesome actor who Sutters used to teach, about what it’s like playing hamlet. Although the talk was belting a Q&A followed, which is an excuse for every self righteous, pompous idiot to ask banal questions that were previously answered just so their voices can be heard. The demographic of people that go to the theatre is very different to that of a comedy gig. The audience was 99% middle aged/old white middle class people, 0.5% teacher & 0.5 % comedian.
After the talk we went for a couple of drinks with my friend Nick Halewood, who also has nothing to do in the day: he is about to become a lawyer so will soon have lots to do in the day, including rolling around on bed made of crisp £50 notes. The best thing about Sutters is that he loves telling and hearing amusing anecdotes. Despite the fact he was technically my moral guidance tutor, he has got into some funny situations with me and my friends, especially one on my 18th birthday that heavily involved my dad. I cannot reveal too many details due to the public nature of the internet. Let’s just say it was very funny.
That is probably the worst end to a blog ever: I have a funny story that I cannot tell you. That’s the same as someone going, “I have a secret about Steve, but I can’t tell you”. I hate people who do that. I now hate myself. God day.
The beauty of having nothing to do most days means I can meet up with people I haven’t seen for ages at random events no one else can get to. My old school tutor Sutters, who I hadn’t seen in two years invited me to a talk at the National Theatre at 3pm. I got the invite partly because we get on really well but mainly because I’m the only adult he knew who wasn’t at work. The talk itself was by Rory Kinnear, an awesome actor who Sutters used to teach, about what it’s like playing hamlet. Although the talk was belting a Q&A followed, which is an excuse for every self righteous, pompous idiot to ask banal questions that were previously answered just so their voices can be heard. The demographic of people that go to the theatre is very different to that of a comedy gig. The audience was 99% middle aged/old white middle class people, 0.5% teacher & 0.5 % comedian.
After the talk we went for a couple of drinks with my friend Nick Halewood, who also has nothing to do in the day: he is about to become a lawyer so will soon have lots to do in the day, including rolling around on bed made of crisp £50 notes. The best thing about Sutters is that he loves telling and hearing amusing anecdotes. Despite the fact he was technically my moral guidance tutor, he has got into some funny situations with me and my friends, especially one on my 18th birthday that heavily involved my dad. I cannot reveal too many details due to the public nature of the internet. Let’s just say it was very funny.
That is probably the worst end to a blog ever: I have a funny story that I cannot tell you. That’s the same as someone going, “I have a secret about Steve, but I can’t tell you”. I hate people who do that. I now hate myself. God day.
Monday 10 January 2011
January 3-7th : Run Down and Running Out of Time
The title of this blog sounds like a sitcom about pensioners suffering from narcolepsy. That is mainly because this week I have felt like one.
After the fun and games of Christmas and New Year as well as a busy gig schedule the moment I got a few days off doing anything my body decided it fancied going on it’s own holiday. I had a siesta everyday of the week, I was like a primary school teacher except I didn’t get paid to nap. I never normally do this because I’m always paranoid that I’m missing out on stuff. In reality, the only thing I’m missing out of is a double bill of “Two and a Half Men” on Comedy Central. My only achievement in the daytime was working out how to get free Sky Movies on my Xbox. This is detrimental to anyone’s creativity: when you can watch a Steven Segal movie during breakfast, you know you’re going to learn nothing all day aside from a few cheesy quotations and that as a man you have to be double hard to pull off rocking a pony tail.
The highlight of my laziness was napping twice in one afternoon. Once during a film called “Thick as Thieves” with Freeman and Banderas and the other was during “Public Enemies”. That was pretty pathetic of me. Can’t wait to chat to some of my friends who are now qualified doctors. When they go, “I’ve just worked twenty hours straight, I’m shattered” I can go, “tell me about it! I just watched two middling movies and I can hardly keep my eyes open.”
We, also, still haven’t found a place to move into, which is perhaps because rather than looking for a place I’m snoozing. I’m now forever in contact with estate agentsto the point where I have two estate agents mobile numbers which is dangerous because when I’m hammered, the temptation to send an abusive text message will be so very great. Something along the lines of this, “this text message benefits from you being a stupid twat and is highly in demand amongst all the other human bellends that work in your industry.”
My mate showed me the best response to a spam email. After a man sent him an email advertising a product he had no interest in, he simply wrote:
“Fuck off”
This email was then battered back by the vendor with an email that simply said:
“Fuck you”
Pure genius. The details of the friend and product cannot be named for legal reasons.
As Rio Ferdinand calls all his Twitter followers tweeps, I’m going to bounce out of this blog by saying:
Laters Bleeps
After the fun and games of Christmas and New Year as well as a busy gig schedule the moment I got a few days off doing anything my body decided it fancied going on it’s own holiday. I had a siesta everyday of the week, I was like a primary school teacher except I didn’t get paid to nap. I never normally do this because I’m always paranoid that I’m missing out on stuff. In reality, the only thing I’m missing out of is a double bill of “Two and a Half Men” on Comedy Central. My only achievement in the daytime was working out how to get free Sky Movies on my Xbox. This is detrimental to anyone’s creativity: when you can watch a Steven Segal movie during breakfast, you know you’re going to learn nothing all day aside from a few cheesy quotations and that as a man you have to be double hard to pull off rocking a pony tail.
The highlight of my laziness was napping twice in one afternoon. Once during a film called “Thick as Thieves” with Freeman and Banderas and the other was during “Public Enemies”. That was pretty pathetic of me. Can’t wait to chat to some of my friends who are now qualified doctors. When they go, “I’ve just worked twenty hours straight, I’m shattered” I can go, “tell me about it! I just watched two middling movies and I can hardly keep my eyes open.”
We, also, still haven’t found a place to move into, which is perhaps because rather than looking for a place I’m snoozing. I’m now forever in contact with estate agentsto the point where I have two estate agents mobile numbers which is dangerous because when I’m hammered, the temptation to send an abusive text message will be so very great. Something along the lines of this, “this text message benefits from you being a stupid twat and is highly in demand amongst all the other human bellends that work in your industry.”
My mate showed me the best response to a spam email. After a man sent him an email advertising a product he had no interest in, he simply wrote:
“Fuck off”
This email was then battered back by the vendor with an email that simply said:
“Fuck you”
Pure genius. The details of the friend and product cannot be named for legal reasons.
As Rio Ferdinand calls all his Twitter followers tweeps, I’m going to bounce out of this blog by saying:
Laters Bleeps
Wednesday 5 January 2011
Dec 24th- January 1st: Christmas, New Year’s Eve and Noman’s Land
This time of the year is commonly known as the “write off period”. It is where I do nothing apart from eat, drink, nap and play football. It’s like being a cross between an 8 year old boy and a bear. I can’t really remember what happened on any specific day, so rather than retell the usual Christmas stories revolving around arguments and crackers I’ll share a few of the highlights.
Christmas eve: This is always a fun night where everyone from where I grew up goes to the pub and gets MC Hammered. The pub we normally go to slightly let us down as it had to close early for and I quote, “we don’t have enough glasses and a man got pushed out of his wheelchair”. Maybe he was pushed onto all of the spare glasses?
Watching the Darts: I went with 4 friends to watch darts at Alexandra Palace all dressed like complete helmets. In my fancy dress crew there was a Sonic the Hedgehog, Morph, leprachaun, monkey and crocodile. We got on television a lot; pretty encouraging to know that if I can’t get on TV through the medium of comedy all I need to do is dress as a chimp. The place was an absolute geezer fest, loads of funny things happened including a man picking me up, hugging me whilst jumping up and down shouting, “I’m shagging a monkey up the arse!”
Boxing day involved everyone wearing a Christmas jumper and getting munted. New Year’s Eve was a good fun despite everyone going “I’m not bothered what we do” until 3 days before when everyone panics and goes “we need something to do!” Noman’s Land is that week between Christmas and NYE where the real world is forgotten and all everyone does is watch movies, eat mixed nuts and touch themselves. It was a fun week but I’m still recovering. I can see how people become fat and lazy, once you get into the habit of lying on a sofa and snacking it’s hard to psyche yourself up for a trip to the toilet let alone doing any work.
Speaking of which, all this typing has knackered me out. In the words of Sou2Soul it’s time to get “back to life, back to reality”.
Christmas eve: This is always a fun night where everyone from where I grew up goes to the pub and gets MC Hammered. The pub we normally go to slightly let us down as it had to close early for and I quote, “we don’t have enough glasses and a man got pushed out of his wheelchair”. Maybe he was pushed onto all of the spare glasses?
Watching the Darts: I went with 4 friends to watch darts at Alexandra Palace all dressed like complete helmets. In my fancy dress crew there was a Sonic the Hedgehog, Morph, leprachaun, monkey and crocodile. We got on television a lot; pretty encouraging to know that if I can’t get on TV through the medium of comedy all I need to do is dress as a chimp. The place was an absolute geezer fest, loads of funny things happened including a man picking me up, hugging me whilst jumping up and down shouting, “I’m shagging a monkey up the arse!”
Boxing day involved everyone wearing a Christmas jumper and getting munted. New Year’s Eve was a good fun despite everyone going “I’m not bothered what we do” until 3 days before when everyone panics and goes “we need something to do!” Noman’s Land is that week between Christmas and NYE where the real world is forgotten and all everyone does is watch movies, eat mixed nuts and touch themselves. It was a fun week but I’m still recovering. I can see how people become fat and lazy, once you get into the habit of lying on a sofa and snacking it’s hard to psyche yourself up for a trip to the toilet let alone doing any work.
Speaking of which, all this typing has knackered me out. In the words of Sou2Soul it’s time to get “back to life, back to reality”.
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