The question comedians get asked most often (apart from “Can you please take your hands off me you filthy old man?�) is ‘Where do you get your material from?’ I normally say ‘I wait for someone who isn’t a comedian to say something funny and then steal it’. This is only partly true, normally writing material is a solitary and annoying process that doesn’t have any bearing on real life, but occasionally something will happen in real life that not only makes you laugh, but gives you a great new bit to put in your set. It’s free material – written for you unwittingly by someone else for you to profit on.
This happened today. I met Trevor for a drink in the Egremont Ferry pub over the water in Seacombe. He was with his friend Sully who’s very nice, and not in the least bit stupid 99.99% of the time, but he came out with a pearler today. First of all, we saw the ferry going past on it’s way to Dublin or Belfast, which is operated by a company called Norfolk Line, and indeed has ‘Norfolk Line’ emblazoned down the side. Sully looked at the ferry and said, excitedly and sincerely “Let’s get the ferry to Norfolk!�
It’s amazing that he thought the ferry went to Norfolk. He got mercilessly lampooned for it, but that wasn’t the thing I’m going to steal and entertain people all over the country with. He was talking about a recent trip to Galway, on the west coast of Ireland, and said “Galway’s fantastic. It’s like the Irish Dublin.�
The Irish Dublin!
This had us laughing, weeping even, for about five minutes. What he was trying to say was that it’s unlike Dublin because there are fewer tourists and so it’s more traditionally Irish, but the complete idiocy of calling something ‘The Irish Dublin’ was just too delicious for us to forgive. I’ve got this long story in my stand-up set now about Jane, who’s the stupidest person in the world, and so I give loads of examples of her stupidity. This can be a new one, I’ll just have her describing what Galway’s like. Thank you Sully, your slip is my pension.
We had a fine afternoon of drinking and this culminated in me insisting on watching the Soccer Aid match being played at Old Trafford. Basically it was a charity game in aid of Unicef, with two teams made up of celebrities and former players (or ‘legends’ as they invariably get called) battling it out in front of 72,000 fans, which is quite intimidating if you’ve only played a bit of 5-a-side before.
There were some rubbish celebrities I’d not really heard of, but the ‘legends’ were represented by a plethora of footballing royalty – the likes of whom I never thought I’d see on a pitch again, let alone lining up in the same team. Maradona was there, surreally. Gazza. John Barnes. Tony Adams. Marcel Desailly. I just wanted to watch Gazza play again and he didn’t disappoint – the man’s class. Troubled and wrecked, but class.
The set up was basically England vs. The Rest Of The World. Robbie Williams captained England, the chef Gordon Ramsay (who Scottish even though he sounds like the most English person ever) captained The Rest Of The World.
It was a very good match, against all odds. Some of the celebrities were very handy players and didn’t really look out of place. Jonathan Wilkes, the rubbish TV presenter / singer / mate of Robbie Williams seems to be almost professional standard and could probably do alright in the lower pro leagues. He scored an amazing goal, too. He should just play football for a living and stop trying to be a singer or whatever it is he does.
England won 2-1 and, as I say, it was a really good spectacle. I think they’ll probably do it every year because it’s the most ITV show ever (I’m A Celebrity Worst Hamstring Strains…Ever, Live) and they know when they’re onto a good thing. Because it allows the participants a week of good TV coverage (it’s on every night of the week leading up to the match as you watch them training and arguing) you’ll get a situation whereby exposure-hungry C-listers will spend all year practicing their ball skills in the vain hope of getting selected to take part in the series. You’ll get actors and singers realising that the way to getting their face in magazines a bit more is not through acting or singing, but being good at football. Celebrity culture is nuts.
Talking of which, is anyone watching Big Brother? I’ve glanced at it from a safe distance and it seems to be a completely charmless bunch of semi-humans making a great big noise for absolutely no purpose. They should bring that programme back to basics and have ‘normal’, everyday people in there. That’s the joy of watching Big Brother, getting to spy on normal people in an unnatural environment. Here’s how there should do it… Give each of the 10,000 people who turn up for the auditions a number. Then have a computer randomly pick twelve numbers. Done.
Okay, you might want an equal amount of boys and girls but that aside, the selection process should be random. That would also free up Channel Four from accusations of putting on a freak show and tormenting the clearly mentally ill, and I genuinely think it would be more entertaining. The downside is you might have selected some sort of serial killer to go into the house but what the heck? That would push the ratings up.
You could also very fairly argue that the sort of people that go to the Big Brother auditions aren’t really representative of normal people in the first place, and you’d have a good point. So maybe twelve people should be randomly selected off the electoral role and forced to be on Big Brother, a bit like National Service. That would be ace. And would bring Orwell’s original idea a little closer to fruition, adding to the mix nicely.
I should be in charge of TV.
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