Secondly, Dean, I would like to see that school book yes, you could send it to my agent Cassie Mayer Ltd , Old Garden House, The Lanterns, Bridge Lane, London, SW11 3AD, if you don’t mind. I’ll send some sort of signed thing back if you do. I didn’t know my mother had gone around giving my stuff away. Or am I being old fashioned do you want to send it electronically somehow?
Now favourite sketch, though as a character I love Bobby the best, I have to agree with those who say they like the Bishop Sketch. They used to have this thing at TV centre called the “Ring Main” which was TV monitors in all the corridors and when we were recording that sketch I had to keep leaving the studio because I was laughing so much and they’d switched the ring main over to our studio so everybody in the BBC too was crying with laughter too, over that sketch as we were making it.
I also love the way it was written. David Renwick and Andy Marshall used to come round to our house once a week for writing meetings. At the time we had this ferocious tom cat called Dexter who was the love of my wife’s life.
So while we were writing Dexter would wake up and walk to the window and sit staring at it, so I’d say “Do you want to go out, do you want to go out the window?” Then he’d turn and walk back to his basket but then a few minutes later the whole thing would start again. And all that David and Andrew did was change a cat to a bishop which was brilliant.
I’m sorry the wooden head sketch was scary but there’s an interesting reason why its in the show twice. I haven’t seen it recently but I think the boy has been decapitated by a charging elephant and on the day it was due to be transmitted for the first time a woman in Kenya on holiday was decapitated by a charging elephant so we had to quickly take the sketch out and put it into another, later, show. Obviously what they’ve done for the DVD is to put it back in its orignial show and leave it in the one it was actually TXed in too.
It would be good if all my TV shows were for sale. The Stuff ones sell pretty well. I guess if you write/email to BBC worldwide they may decide to put the “All New...” on sale on DVD. I bumped into Edgar Wright a while ago and he said he’d love to do a director’s commentary for “Merry-go-round.” If they put that out on DVD. (That was weird as I typed Edgar Wright, he came on the radio, doing a trail for 6 Music. Spooky.)
Finally, my memoir is going very well thank you, out in September, and I'll be doing a live tour of readings but this first volume only goes up to when I’m seventeen and there won’t be any photos because I’m the sort of pompous ass who thinks he’s writing literature which doesn’t have photos, but I must get Tony’s book it sounds really interesting.
