Deceivingly Unhelpful

Thank God its Friday eh? Though if there is a God it must be pointed out that he/she/it/they/Quango Destroyer of Worlds also created Mondays and therefore you can’t just be passing thanks without thinking it through. Today I shall be spending time helping my friend Wendy move house. She’s not going anywhere, she’s just asked a bunch of mates to push her 3 bed three inches to the left. Arf. No seriously, I have offered to do such things as it requires carrying and being a man and stuff. More likely I will hurt myself picking up the first box, fall halfway down the stairs and then just sit and point a bit while others do everything else. I am essentially one of those people where I appear to be hugely helpful and kind but its often quickly realised I am useless at most things and I’d be less in the way if I just wasn’t there. No one seems to have learnt this yet and so I just end up being asked to do stuff, and I of course say yes ‘cos I think it’ll be fun, and then when someone their most important possessions are being run over by the removal truck because I’d ‘just put it down for a minute’ they get all upset. I should really operate like how I did at one of my day jobs before I did comedy full time. There it would be a different person’s job to make the tea everyday. I very quickly learnt that if I made the tea really badly, no one would ever ask me to do it again. Instead the one person who made it really well would end up making it everyday while I sat, looked at Facebook and generally neglected my work loads. Go team! Today should be actual fun though and I am very good at lifting things really. Sometimes I lift instead of stairs, and occasionally when people come to my gigs I lift their spirits. By that I mean I steal their whisky when they’re not looking. Arf.

Even if today involved being set on fire while being prodded with sticks by mutant men, it would still be slightly more fun than the rubbish run through I had to endure yesterday. Actually that’s slightly unfair. All the other comics involved made things fun, but ultimately the show was huge piles of dog turd, the type you’d try and step around but they’d just topple on you and you’d drown in them and cry. I won’t go into details, mainly because I’m hugely shallow and anyone from the telly company may read this and get all angry at the expense of my non-career, but it appears that comedians have gone full circle from being the comedy experts, guests or commentary from shows, and somehow ended up doing the work of the idiots that usually enter the Big Brother house. Our aim yesterday was to do the sort of tasks that were reminiscent of that bit in The Word (for those that remember it) where some arsehole would do anything to get on TV. No as much as I’m shallow, and I probably would get set on fire and poked with sticks by mutant men just to get on TV, there is also an awful lot of stuff I wouldn’t do. Ok, a few things I wouldn’t do. However, there are still lots of arseholes out there who would do it, without any chance of it ever damaging whatever sort of lives of careers they would be entering after having a billboard up across London of their face and the word ‘Paedo’. I didn’t play ball properly yesterday. All my suggestions were mostly things I would never actually be able to do. For example the question ‘In 24 hours I will become…’ my answer was ‘…more powerful than you can possibly imagine’. Actually I say that’d be impossible but I am not very powerful at all, and people probably don’t imagine I am either. So one can of Red Bull and I could have won that one. Hmm wish I’d thought it all through.

This slight blip in the world of comedy was further increased by having to fill in a Q+A last night for a tabloid about my Edinburgh show. One of the questions that they felt the need to ask, despite it being the literary equivalent of the sort of thing Fearne Cotton may say when her brain has only just been turned on at the switch, was ‘If your show was a well know celebrity, who would it be and why?’ Well its not though is it? I mean, its a show. A well known celebrity is a well known celebrity and my show is definitely my show. Frankly I feel as though that’s like someone piping up on question time asking Michael Gove if his face was a well known pot of jam, which pot of jam would it? He would have to answer whatever jam it is that looks most like a stupid stuck up baby, but still it would be pointless. So my answer? Well I gave this:

Adrian Chiles in that its hugely inoffensive and will go past mostly unnoticed. When it eventually leaves no one will miss it.

But apparently that’s too negative, so I’ve re-written it. Sigh.

Couple of other things:

– I received an email last night asking if I wanted a ‘cool radiator’. Surely this is the most useless type of radiator there is?

– I should never assume that after drinking four pints in the afternoon, that I will be able to anything of use for the rest of the day. Because if I did assume that, I’d be hugely hugely wrong.

– My podcast is slipping down the charts like something by N-Dubz when people actually listen to it and try and get a refund on their purchase. If you haven’t yet downloaded it, please do from here:

https://www.tiernandouieb.co.uk/28yearslater/podcast.htm

Off to carry/break things. Fingers crossed its the former. I am so a man. Just a very very weak man who’s crap at carrying things. Sigh.