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My Brain Ejaculates in Here!

Check here for discursive thoughts and reflections about my existence. A sort of open diary; a metaphysical leak into your inbox.

Okay, it’s a blog...
man writing at desk

 

 
Blog: 27th November 2009
 
     
 
Not possible: have I really ejaculated a total of 24 minutes bespoke humour about people whom I knew nothing? I might have a twisted thyroid and a bucket of compulsions, but with stand-up knuckling down I’m usually lazier than Columbo’s eye. I’ll write between 20 - 60 minutes a year. If I’m lucky. And here I am emitting globule after globule on Kim Woodburn et al. Maybe the pressure of live telly has liberated me. Am interested to know if the same prolificness will translate through to my Edinburgh thrustings.

Another surprise. On this project I knew I’d have only 2 hours of life a day - thus I assumed I would just veg in front of movie or book: but no - have been clicking away at second draft of novel. I needed a new narrator to complement my drier, male, primary narrator - and she came to me in a torrent of bitchy asides and half-finished sentences. I’m running with it. Have never attempted to write first person female before - so tricky, but fun.

Am enjoying life in jungle immensely - but homesickness for family and pets sits inside me like a sort of thick undigested soup. Longing for Blighty and loved ones occasionally detaches me from my sunny Aussie day. I sometimes feel like I am watching play in another language. That’s love I suppose. It’s a bastard, a good bastard, but a bastard. It makes you mate and do the best you can, and the best you can takes you away from your mate. That’s what happens if you cross-breed Western economies with the heart.

Joe Swash and Caroline Flack keep me sane. Fantastic energy from two very lovely beings. Swash’s parade of fry-ups and silly jokes are my rainbows even though it’s night-time when I’m up; and the banter between him and Flack is phenomenal. A pantomime tennis of mockery, joke spiders, and recriminations. It lights a touch-paper in rehearsal which burns all the way through the live show.

Nicola McLean has left now. I found her to be an absolutely brilliant person. Her laugh was like a Kookaburra - and I provoked it whenever I could. I think pregnant women are gorgeous. It might even be a fetish. I feel sorry for Sadie if we ever get pregnant - as I fear my pervy stalking of her will only increase.

Sadie (been visiting me in OZ for five nights) goes back home tomorrow. My heart wMy heart will break. So will my broadband.
 
     
 
Blog: 20th November 2009
 
     
 
Is that really five shows already? It’s rewarding but odd - performing stand-up live on telly - you get all the self-doubt and nerves of regular stand-up, but without the full theatre audience to assuage them; paradoxically, in reality there’s much more audience than, say, Bracknell Theatre (not that you weren’t 200 of the loveliest human beings ever to pullulate from the soil of Berkshire). That’s the pant-filling thing. Wednesday’s show went out to 1.1 million - on ITV2. I’ve already had to consult with the jungle’s Medic Bob about my Imodium consumption. It’s amazing how public speaking can refute toilet science. It felt a little uncomfortable doing impression’s of Danish dancer Camilla Dallerup while she looked on - but I think it went down okay. Do they have irony in Copenhagen? Someone please check.

The other incongruity is how joyous I am at being scrubbed, buffed and delivered to various sanitized magnolia cubes of showbiz, contrasted with a kitschy emotional longing for little Westcliff-on-Sea’s high street; even more for the faces (one in particular x) of home. I gaze out from my ridiculously un-pikey suite onto alabaster sand, King Parrots, plovers, a shimmering topaz sunrise and a à point warm ocean; but just when that rush of human completion, oneness and restful being is about to be achieved; I feel the spasm. The gripe. The illogical lust for the parochial November sleet of Blighty; the predictable cynicism of the Co-Op’s pre-Christmas prices on the corner of Ramuz Drive. The thoughtless dog-poo in bags that is still essentially a poo on the street, only in a bag. Am I just romanticizing the other; cursed to ricochet between two Schopenhauerian points of longing for what one currently does not have. Or am I just a dick who can’t enjoy a beach. Much more likely the latter. I never want to have sand in my prepuce.

It’s fun hanging out with Joe Swash and Caroline Flack - although our shifts are different - so we only socialise for an hour or so each day. (60 minutes is a long enough period for a stand-up to label it a social life).

Janice Dickinson has been keeping me amused. Our ad-break banter is the filthiest imaginable - I only wish we could broadcast it online or something.

One last thing. Read the journals of John Fowles - but in a jacuzzi. And, gents: once, just once, experience the primordial pleasure of drying your scrotum in sunlight.
 
     
 
Blog: 13th November 2009
 
     
 
What a temporally strange week of my life it’s been. It began when I managed to gain access to the Business Class lounge at Heathrow T3. I Skyped my mother and showed her pictures of unlimited buffet - whoops of working class, delight came out of the speakers.

I was one of the last people to find out who was going into the jungle - and there is still one mystery guest. They tell us nothing. Tis torture - but hopefully that curiosity will make good live telly.

It’s very odd staying on UK time. There’s an scoutish frisson in abandoning onself to nightime solitude; but a kind of wasteful loneliness about it too. I get 2 hours of social life before everyone else goes to bed and I am left alone to wonder in sepulchral paradise. Something ominous about hearing the ocean but not seeing it. I’ve taken to running at sunrise (7pm our time); there seems to be nudist spot on the beach. Quite a surreal image - king parrots scudding past hairy men as I jog on.

Meanwhile, onset, the jungle is a sinister place at night. The one thing that doesn’t come across properly on telly is the sound. A malignant serenade laid on by nature.

We’ve been making pretend shows all week just to practice. I even did a bit of trial action against Joe Swash. I thought I was being all cool and above the task, until I humiliated myself in the most unmitigated way. Am too tired and spaced to put interesting tangents in for blogees. It will all hot up next week though.

Swash and Flack are sociable, funny, and blokish - I’m like a little Rain Man reading in my room and waiting for Sunrise. They woke me at 9am this morning. They had just been for dinner - I went to Swash’s room and had two mind-fuck cocktails for what was my breakfast, then retired to my room to watch a movie in my pants. I can’t remember the last time I actually wasted a day. Indolence is actually hard work; perhaps I self-medicate with tasks. Even this blog is a little hit of to-do. Maybe I should write a short story and post it in my blog space. A Creative warm-up. Title suggestions anyone?
 
     
 
Blog: 7th November 2009
 
     
 
Exhaustion. If I’m doing pleasurable, enjoyable things, but my body reacts with tiredness, sluggishness - sadness even, does that mean that on some molecular level, I reject exciting events; or is it, more banally, that the truism ‘too much of anything can be too much’ is mawkishly true. Maybe it’s the driving. I’m one of a group of comedians who drive home no matter what the distance - very rarely do I stay over. Even Newcastle - I find myself jumping into the Prius (he name- drops his eco-activity as though it’s nothing) and pootling 4 hours home. Audiobooks, specifically audible.co.uk, must take some blame for this. We live in an era of blissful unabridged audio reading. No more staring at the road wishing away life so that there might less A1 between you and Lincoln - no - instead a nerdish leap into the driving seat, and a literary frisson as Timothy West begins carefully enunciating the trials of Dr Wortle’s School (Trollope, of course - effing brill read). Yes. It’s this. I do the show, in itself unnecessarily energetic, and then the syrens of unalloyed fiction- speaking trick me into a journey when I should be resting. Too much of good things. But things are good. Things like books, laughter, and Sadie making gammon and desiree potatoes. That was my final lunch today. The last couply meal before I find myself on another continent altogether; a journey for which I might even need a Tolstoy.

Russell x

PS. I am a curry addict. I have been fixated on Garam Massalla based dishes since the age of 5. It is then with gravitas that I declare my favourite Indian Meal of the Tour. It’s The Spice Lounge, Telford. Oh my. Click here, and believe: http://spice-lounge.org
 
     
 
Blog: 30th October 2009
 
     
 
Yes. Okay. Topman’s change of fabric in their ‘spray-on’ skinnies might look good. Indeed, they fit wonderfully - a kind of leg-ins for boy-men. But I am double jointed, and these jeans don’t seem to match my genes. Three pairs. Three pairs of jeans split at the crotch in one week of touring. And always when I’m opining about something which should have gravitas. If I dare attempt my Palestine routine, then: screeeerrrrrrccchhh - my balls flop out and 400 people laugh awkwardly. Maybe it’s a metaphor from some unknown force that I should stick to knob gags; even attempting post-structuralist comedic devices will result in the punishment of genital exposure. And no - I’ve not been splitting them on purpose. This is supposed to be my new wardrobe for I’m a Celeb Get Me Out of Here Now - and yet I’m tearing it up. Should I stop misrepresenting myself, get back in my flares and give in to the tyranny of audiobooks and tea - rather than pathetically manufacturing a facade of skinny-jean’d cool. Christ. I am so uncool for even just typing that. How does one achieve Cred? Not long to the jungle tho. Oh. I jig with merriment.
 
     
 
Blog: 22nd October 2009

 

     
 
The tour has been going splendidly. 400 lovely Welsh people came to see me in Cardiff. 400! A woman with a stick started the show, and a man with silver hair and a miserable face finished it. 100s more succulent beings all over the country. You lovely bastards. Really has been a tub-thumping week. Support acts Chris Ramsey and Miss Sadie Hasler have been awesome too. For those of you that don’t know Chris Ramsey www.chrisramseycomedy.com you soon will. He’s won Most Chipper Geordie of The Year seven times, and always comes out with classic quotable lines backstage.

Say the following in a Geordie accent whilst being chipper and that.
“Where’s my shoe?”
“This lamp is lovely.”
“Hummus is lush like.”
“Have you see this cushion? It’s fucking mint like.”

Few more dates to go before the Oz jungle subsumes me. I’m getting wee-jets of excitement about I’m a Celeb Now. Of course there’s the homesickness to contend with. I’ll be in an Aussie jungle; Sadie’s homemade sausage toad-in-the-holes will seem like a remembered language from a forgotten planet; the idiotic whinny of Cooper my Cocker Spaniel dog - an elegy from childhood - but fuck it - I will have fun, not only that, I will attempt to leak it back down the telly box to Blighty.

Looks like the wedding is on too. I’m getting married. Shit. I’m getting married. Wow. January 9th. A winter wedding in a medieval hall, followed by a knees-up in a pub; literary vows and a boozy party - what better metaphor for the gusty sociology that has carried me to this place. Shall I shut up now? Why don’t egomaniacs edit??

Rx
 
     
 
Blog: 14th October 2009
 
     

 

Hello, weblings.

My website is up and away! Do you like it? The lovely Laura Hasler is responsible and I kiss her head in thanks. So: the first blog!

It has been an intense month. I love touring - that’s why us monkey people get into comedy; to pelt around the country and bespatter different towns with our comedy mucus. Oh the joy of seeing a Coventry forehead speckled with the moist evidence of humour. It is intense though. Madness sets in on the interminable journeys. I now regularly drive the middle lane of the motorway, pretending that the white road markings are lasers coming out of my bumpers. I make rally car engine noises - my throat offering a convincing guttural gear change effect. I even descend into lame beatboxing over various Radio 4 theme tunes. Did you know that The Archers rocks when your lay a Junglist snare and bass drum on it?

Intense but fun. The mystery of it. What is in Andover? Who are Andoverians? I get to find out; all these place names which seem to suggest something about the people. Word-parts and stresses which might reveal the inherent, say, Birken-ness, of Birkenhead. Humans are just so different and interesting. Is there really such thing as a boring person? No. Just a bunch of succulent freaks waiting to leak their stories and beings into yours.

As if all this were not enough - and here’s the big announcement - I’m off to work on I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here Now - on ITV2. I wee jets of feculence with excitement. There’s a top female presenter - and I will be her apish sidekick providing observations and wotnottery. And yes - I’m going to Oz to do it. That rocks. It truly does. My ass will be in a Qantas seat in early November I’m taking the unabridged life-correcting essays of Michel de Montaigne, Alice Munro’s pathos-ridden short stories (plus some Murakami of course) and the world is right with me.

Homesickness for Sadie (Human Female), Keith (Burmilla Cat), Wayne (Tonkinese Cat), and Cooper (Cocker Dog) will be my only enemy. May the internet defeat it.

Hopefully I’ll be in your town soon, as I love comedy, and wish to shove it up you.

R x

 

     
 
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