Damn, my brain got two years older today. At this rate it will be degenerate as quickly as that skellington at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
About two days ago I saw a trailer for "Brainiac" and with the Steve Irwin tragedy fresh in my mind started wondering how long it would be before one of these laddish explosion and fast car shows ended in someone getting badly hurt. I think it was seeing Pete Doherty at the wheel of a spinning car that probably put this thought in my mind, but we'd also done a joke in TWTTIN last week about cars being dangerous things, yet Jeremy Clarkson still being OK (I think the final line was "Where's a road-bound stingray when you really need one?" It was a comment that I thought BBC Radio compliance would expurgate immediately, but apparently they laughed and thought it was great - what's happened to them?)
So it was with a bit of a jolt tonight that I read the news that Richard Hammond had been seriously hurt in a televised car based stunt. Not only was there the surprise and shock at such a horrific event (despite my own Nostradamus style prediction of it), but also there's that stupidly human moment of thinking that somehow this was partly my fault. By thinking about such a thing happening and also making a joke about it I had somehow inadvertently magicked the crash into happening.
We humans are stupid and arrogant and too keen to leap to these kinds of conclusions. It's ridiculous that I was slightly spooked by these coincidences, because when you think about it, the idea that someone might get hurt are at the heart of these shows, so it doesn't take a genius to put those subliminal thoughts into words.
Another selfish part of me was struggling to think whether the episode with the Jeremy Clarkson joke had already gone out, because if it was in the upcoming episode then we'd have to re-edit the show. The joke about people being killed on Top Gear would have a different context now. But I worked out that it had already gone out, though anyone listening on Listen Again might have a little jolt of uncomfortableness now. Strange that it is OK to make a joke alluding to the recent death of another TV presenter, but that this would seem too tasteless.
And then there was a part of my brain thinking "Richard Hammond seems like a nice bloke, what an awful shame, why couldn't it have been Jeremy Clarkson?"
But of course I don't mean that. Jeremy Clarkson is like a pantomime figure and I wouldn't truly want him to be hurt.
It's strange the way tragedy and comedy can collide like this and the way that priorities get mangled in an incident like this. I remember when we doing series 2 of TMWRNJ and had filmed a load of sketches about the fake Rod Hull dying due to his refusal to admit his arm was false. We were on set rehearsing show 1 when someone came into the auditorium and whispered to the director, who stopped us and said, "Sorry, there's news coming in that Rod Hull might have died".
I had met Rod Hull and liked him and this was an awful senseless, ridiculous tragedy, but my very first thought was, "Oh no, we won't be able to do those sketches now!
Thought one. Not "Oh dear, how terrible for him and his family!" No, it was all about me. The instinctive first response.
People are horrible. Or maybe just I am.
So with Richard Hammond my first thoughts were also about myself, wondering how it would affect my show, worrying that I had some terribel Medusa Effect kind of powers, but my more reasoned response is to wish Richard adn his family all the best.
