No night time palsy of belly or brain tonight, just a good long much needed sleep in which the worst that happened was a dream where I played poker against John Sergeant and made him angry when I criticised his play. He might have got angry, but he played like a dumbass. Victoria Coren then gave me a copy of a new book about poker by Jon Ronson. My real life might be down to earth, but I mix with all the celebrities in my dreams.
Then we enjoyed a restful day at home without having to entertain or interact with any in-laws or distant friends or relatives. It's been fun to do that over the last few days, but today was much more peaceful and less excessive. Sometimes two is better than ten.
We watched a lot of episodes of "Community", an American sit-com we've just discovered which is a lot of fun and worth a look. Chevy Chase is in it and he's really good, back to the good old days of.... actually I am not sure if he was ever in anything that was all that funny before, but he's great in this. I am told that the second series is miles better than the first, so am looking forward to catching up on that, though apparently as with many great shows, it's currently in hiatus and may be about to get cancelled. Boooo!
We managed to get out of the house to see the Lyric Hammersmith panto, Aladdin. It wasn't quite as good as last year's
Dick Whittington, though I think that might have been down to the slightly sluggish post-Christmas crowd. The actors seemed to struggle a bit to get any energy into this audience full of pudding and chocolate. And I guess the actors might have found it hard to get up too much energy as well. This time last year I was performing Christ on a Bike to a quarter full Leicester Square Theatre, so I felt for them and admired their attempts to inject life into the walking (or rather sitting) dead. And by the end they had achieved a certain degree of success. It's worth going just to see the amazing flying carpet sequence, which genuinely bamboozled me. The carpet went up, turned around 360 degrees and reached out over the audience in what I consider to be an impossible way as there were no strings and only dark emptiness beneath. But my girlfriend said that they were clearly using some kind of crane to do it. Nonsense. I believe in magic Aladdin.
I was still a bit under the weather I realised and it was hard to join in with the shouting. I was glad to go home and watch a couple of episodes of Great Expectations and eat a moderate amount of chocolate. Christmas continues. I love the character of Joe Gargery in the book, but in this adaptation he was a bit more morose than I imagined him and he never said, "What larks, Pip!" which is my favourite bit. I kept saying it and then saying "Say, "what larks Pip!"" whenever the character was on screen. I did it a lot, like some kind of Keith Herring, until my girlfriend was annoyed. Suddenly (spoiler alert) Joe's wife had been attacked and was brain damaged and I hoped that as Joe looked at her he might remark, "What larks Pip" but he didn't. I hope someone at the BBC will be sacked over this. I mean the adaptation is really brilliant and beautiful, but how can they have no "what larks, Pip!" Is it some kind of a lark that the writers are playing on us. Were they saying, "What larks! We haven't put, "What larks" in the script. Ha ha ha. Richard Herring will be furious."
Well I am furious and I don't think that is a very good lark. Come up with some better larks for episode 3 (I assume you write and record them on the day).
