As a
sad and lonely teenager, I wiled away many an hour playing with myself. “Who
didn’t?” you might reply. But you have
wilfully misunderstood me and I am disgusted with you. I would play myself at
Subbuteo (very much a two-player table football game) or darts or (my absolute
favourite) snooker. I would divide myself into two different snooker-playing
personalities and compete to find out which was best in an unlimited frames
contest. And then divide myself further by also providing the commentary and refereeing.
It was the kind of perfectly normal, multi-personality disorder pastime that
surely all children went through.
Unless
they had some friends.
A
couple of years ago I decided to revisit this world by resurrecting the snooker
players who had lain dormant for nearly three decades, calling them Me1 and Me2
and turning my snooker matches into an almost unlistenable and infinitely
irritating audio podcast called “Me1 Vs Me2 Snooker”. Me1 is is conformist, a family man, smugly being seen
to do and say the right thing, but Me2 is a renegade who hates authority and
rules and lets his heart rule his head and refuses to grow up and settle down. It’s
almost as if the me of now is fighting against the me of ten years ago. Is it
ever possible to extinguish the person we once were?
Like
my shoe idea from last week, I see it as a work of conceptual art. It speaks of
the loneliness of the human condition, the dichotomy of personality within us
all and the futility of competition. It voices the ultimate truth that our
greatest opponent in life is always ourselves.
But
mainly it’s just a very annoying half an hour of a man who isn’t very good at
snooker or commentating at snooker, playing snooker and commentating on it. I
am not even really that clear on the rules of the game. It’s even more surreal
if you the listener don’t know anything about the game of snooker, like the
handful of fools who listen to this in the USA.
The
joke (if there is one) is that everyone’s time is being wasted. Subscribers are
as stupid for listening to it as I am for doing it. Ultimately I hope to put
out a podcast with zero listeners. The first frame got 30,000 downloads, but
the latest, number 47 is down to under 4000. It will be hard to shift these
dedicated idiots, as determined to make me continue to produce these as I am to
shake them all off. It’s a war of attrition and there ultimately be no victors,
apart from whichever Me has won the most frames (and so far, I have to say,
they are proving extraordinarily equally matched opponents). You can’t dip in
and out. It only counts if you listen to every single second of every single
frame.
This
certainly is not my most accessible work. If you want something with some
actual jokes in it then I’d suggest you download my Leicester Square Theatre
Podcast (where I interview big guests including forthcoming appearances from
Steve Coogan and Stewart Lee) or Richard Herring’s Meaning of Life, in which I
solve all the mysteries of the Universe. All of my podcasts are free, though
you might feel that is still too expensive for the snooker one.
Bizarrely,
I have found the Me versus Me template very useful in other aspects of my life
and at least one Olympic hopeful used it in his training. Me versus Me sports
psychology could change your life. See next week’s column for details.
