Alan Davies: As Yet Untitled (2014–…): Season 3, Episode 10 - And Then He Deftly Grabbed My Cervix - full transcript
I can't believe it.
I've finally arrived.
I'm a star,
I'm a guest on the Alan Carr show.
Alan Davies? You're joking!
That guy from Gangnam Style,
is he here?
No. Thank God!
Is my hair all right?
Hi!
If there isn't Wagon Wheels
in there, someone's getting it.
APPLAUSE
Hello, I'm Alan Davies,
welcome to my show.
This show is called
As Yet Untitled,
because there isn't a title,
there's no script or questions
or agenda, or anything...
it's really lazy.
So...but what I do is, I get four
hand-picked, brilliantly funny
guests to help me come up with
a title which we'll try
to do at some point during the show.
So please,
will you welcome my guests?
APPLAUSE
Welcome. Welcome.
APPLAUSE
Here they are.
Marvellous!
All right, let's see who's here.
Ellie Taylor is here.
Ellie Taylor did her little
bit for Obama. Ellie Taylor is here.
APPLAUSE
Johnny Vaughan, Johnny Vaughan
is with us.
Johnny Vaughan almost died on
an oil rig. Johnny Vaughan.
APPLAUSE
Sally Phillips is here,
nice to have Sally on.
Sally opened for Coldplay in Mexico
and knows a lovely pair
of Italian hookers.
APPLAUSE
And Charlie Higson, welcome to
Charlie Higson, who is a
stimulating talk-show guest and has
spruced up Stephen Fry's interiors.
Wonderful!
APPLAUSE
Shall we tell them about
the shirt incident?
I went in the...
I went in the dressing room just now
and Johnny and Charlie
were sitting there.
We had to share, actually.
Yes, you had to share.
Everyone else got their own.
That's right.
"Charlie and Johnny, sling them
in together."
It's massive though, isn't it?
It is big, yeah.
And it has got hair-washing sinks,
which we thought you would...
Very good, Alan. Sorry.
But unfortunately it was rather
clogged, you'd obviously been there.
And I walked in,
and I was wearing this shirt,
but I had a...kind of a...like,
a flesh-coloured undergarment.
It was weird, actually.
And they both thought I was
wandering around with my shirt open
to the naval...
No, I just...
..greeting the guests.
And both of their heads tilted down,
which I imagine must happen to women
more often.
Yeah. It just, honestly,
looked like your flesh,
and I suddenly thought has he had,
like, a monstrous tattoo of,
like a gooner, or the entire
squad of the double-wings,
something on there, and you were
covering... Just covering it up?
..feebly with a...
like, "Salmon Davies".
Salmon-coloured T-shirt, it was...
Were you wearing Spanx, Alan?
Was that what it was?
It was like Spanx, it was.
Pulled all the way up.
It was the only T-shirt I've ever
seen that was actually disturbing.
I would wear Spanx if I was a girl.
You can get them for men.
You can get corsets, give you a
little bit of a waist. Shut the
front door, can you?
Yeah. I once got my dad a pair
of boxers, actually.
They're boxers, but they have, like,
a layer, like, a girdle
attached to them.
Such a great daughter!
And does he like them?
I don't think he's ever worn them...
that he's told me.
The comfort factor?
Is that comfortable?
I would think something pulled...
I like something pulled right up.
Do you?
But I'll tell you what's really
unattractive, is a man in...
just, only in his underwear,
pulled right up.
The trick, though, of pulling
your underpants right up,
and pushing your gut right out.
Yeah?
It, it...women do find it
surprisingly entertaining.
LAUGHTER
It works every time, you kind of get
them laughing and then you're away
That's the first good
idea for a title.
What do you mean, "You're away"?
When you say, "You're away," what's
that? Is that like foreplay?
No, what do you...
Have you never been, "Away"? No!
Not recently, no, what do you mean?
Oh, we're away now. Shirt unbuttoned
to the waist.
Hello! We're away here,
I did the old pant routine.
That's foreplay, in we go!
What do you do?
I'm not going to tell you what you
do next, you should know that bit.
I know about the birds and the
bees, Charlie!
I've told you the underpant trick!
OK, I've got to go out with that.
When did the era end?
When, when, when...men used to
really hang down one leg
and were kind of proud of it?
No, I'm just saying, there was an
era...
No, everyone's so conscious now.
Everyone's bulking up and yet
clothes are getting baggy.
So, there's a body shyness.
I'm saying when was that
John Wayne era and that...?
You look at a Robert Mitchum film
and he's packing heat down one leg
and he doesn't give a shit.
You know, he's...
Ronnie Reagan in the
golden era, John Wayne...
they were just going down one leg.
You could see the outline of a cock.
Men at their best.
You could see men at their best,
I mean you could see literally
what religion they are.
Even the '70s, you look at, like,
The Stones or Robert Plant
and people, they were, they would
surely say, "Yes, I'm here and look,
check my cock."
It came back in, when Linford
Christie was in the Olympics.
You're obsessed with Linford.
Don't you remember? Yeah.
That was also, I think
it was the first Olympics where
they had the head-on shot,
and they seemed deliberately
to have the camera at a low...
Yes. ..angle.
He found that very offensive.
Well, to a young Alan Davies
they did.
That's all I saw, anyway!
And he hated Linford's Lunchbox.
Yeah.
He hated references to it.
I watched a documentary about him
the other night. About Linford?
About Linford Christie,
cos as a comedian you spend a lot
of time in hotel rooms by yourself.
So, yeah, he was very offended by
it, he found it very,
sort of just very mean, bearing in
mind he was, like, a super champion,
and then people were just
talking about his...dick.
But your...but your...your athletics
career is very short-lived,
but if you've got a huge cock it's
with you for your life.
You know?
Give a man a cock, he can...
Hence you'll show you do.
If you've got it, flaunt it.
Lucky he wasn't a hammer
thrower or something,
cos he could have got all kinds
of entanglement.
Don't think it was that big, was it?
No, but Alan's right, it was at the
era, the start of the bicy...,
of the tight shorts.
Swinging the hammer
at the beginning, you could snag it,
and then by the time you've
gone all the way round
it would be like a cartoon
stretched...
Noing, noing, noing.
Stretch Armstrong.
With hilarious consequences.
Did Stretch Armstrong have genitals?
They never brought that one out.
I don't think he did.
I don't think he did, no. That will
be in Ann Summers next week.
The Stretch Armstrong with
a...bendy cock.
With his arm that's strong.
Yeah.
But, yes, I haven't got any tattoos,
we established.
OK, Well, I thought you did, I
thought you'd had some work done.
I've got a tattoo...
Have you got a tattoo?
I got stabbed by my child.
Oh, you have, too!
I've got the smallest tattoo.
I thought it was a child stabbing
you, in the tattoo, I thought
very odd!
My mates did think it was
a prison tattoo.
"Look at my tattoo,
it's a child stabbing me."
Great, Sal, that's really nice.
Is that a permanent mark?
Yeah, it doesn't seem to...it's
several years old, it doesn't seem
to be going.
What did she stab you with, a pen?
A pen, yeah. Prison tat.
I once met a guy once,
and he had, "Bastard" tattooed on
his forehead in big bold...
"Bastard",
that's all it says, "Bastard", and
he was in prison, and I saw his kid.
Not for that? No, he wasn't in
prison for that. You can't go to
prison for that.
Can't go to prison for that. There's
no law against having "Bastard" on
your forehead.
But this guy's turned up at the
prison visits, and his kid's there,
and his kid's like four-years-old
and his kid's brought a drawing
of Daddy.
And it was a stick man
and he just had, like a mark,
on the forehead
because he couldn't spell it yet.
Thing is, as the kid
goes on in life, he's going
to draw Daddy and every time he does
at school it's going to get
more realistic and every time
he draws his dad it's just going
to say "Bastard"
on the guy's forehead.
And I was thinking the teachers
might think
call the dad in, he's got some
real issues here.
"You'd better come in, I think
your child's got some
serious father issues.
"Cos every time he draws you,
he writes
"'bastard' on your forehead." I mean
he wouldn't obviously say that.
But as the dad actually came in,
and the teacher saw him,
what's he going to say?
They'd have to style it out.
Yes, style it out.
I don't get...
I'm not sure about tats.
Everyone's doing them, aren't they?
Full sleeves. Yeah.
I just think they look messy,
they look dirty.
Have you got any work done.
No, no, no, no...I couldn't do it.
Charlie's had a bit of work done.
I've got a skull there.
I went...
I have got a skull.
Have you really? Yes.
Really got a skull?
The last thing you would expect.
Yeah.
My father moved to Hawaii,
and I went out there
in the early 90's and...the
South Pacific is the birthplace
of the tattoo and I thought, I'm
in Hawaii and I should get a tattoo.
Turned out my wife quite liked
men with tattoos.
Did she realise
when she'd got to Hawaii?
"I like some of these men."
And I thought, yes, if
I have a tattoo, I'd be like them.
A friend of mine has got, "Come and
have a go if you're hard enough,"
in Latin.
Oh fantastic. Across her stomach. so
it's incredibly cool, and she's got
these sort of...
amazingly cool writing and then
she got drunk in Australia and has
also got a really shit one of the
Sydney Opera House on her ankle.
This really, really cool one
and then this, you know,
tragic, blurry...yeah, in Latin.
It says, "Come and have a go if you
think you're hard enough" - in
Latin? In Latin.
Does she get, like, hard Latin
scholars, classicists coming to her.
I haven't talked to her that
much about it.
"All right, I'll take you on!
I know what that means."
Has she ever been pregnant?
Wouldn't it get bigger and...
Oh, I get it, it's different, OK.
I saw...there's Amanda Seyfried,
Seyfried? The actress?
She's got on her foot...
I can't remember,
she was working with a British actor
and he told her a funny
English word that she thought was
so amusing she go on her foot.
The word is "minge".
She's got "minge" written on
her foot, for all time now!
That is, go and go...that is
true, go and Google it.
She's mislabelled.
She has.
Minge written on her foot? She's a
very beautiful Hollywood superstar.
She likes minge!
She's got minge?
If she had it written over her minge
that would be, would that be
better or worse?
You'd turn into, you know
the way primary schools were sort
of labelled "cupboard", "chair",
"basin"...
"minge", "tit one",
"tit two".
"Tit one", "tit two"?
"Arse", "arrrrrssee", in my case.
No, it wouldn't be, don't put
yourself down.
Yeah, I know, sorry.
So, tell me about opening
for Coldplay in Mexico.
Yes, well, you know how...
when you're...ten years ago,
I was relatively, a bit famous and
you get charities...
approach you
and ask you to be
ambassadors for different things, so
if you're really, really successful,
like, you know, Angeline Jolie has
really big, serious things like
rape, but if you're my kind of
level...
What's yours?
She gets all the glamour.
Yeah, well, I was rung up
by Oxfam, "You know,
"we'd really like you to
work with us."
"Of course, you do great work,
Oxfam, I'm very keen to work
with you."
And they said, "We'd like you to be
our Fair-trade Maize Ambassador",
which...maize is essentially
sweetcorn. It's a long way down,
isn't it, the scale?
It's quite a long way down the
scale. I don't want to put a downer
on it.
But you know what?
I was not going to spit at that,
I was grateful, you know?
And I thought, yeah,
you know what,
I'll do what I can for the world of
sweetcorn, I will...
In a manner of speaking...
I've had Smack The Pony, I want to
give something back.
And so they said, "We want to send
you out to Mexico, where the
"farmers are suffering, because of
Nafta, the North American
"Free Trade Agreement, you're going
to meet some of the farmers
"and then write an article for Marie
Claire." Actually, what it turned
out they wanted to do, they wanted
to write the article for Marie
Claire and just take some pictures
of me holding a piece of sweetcorn.
Really? But I'm quite serious,
I'm quite literal
and I thought, "No, I want to find
out about it myself."
So, they groaned a bit,
but anyway went out there,
and took all these books on
free-trade agreements and the
Zapatistas and what would happen is
I would go...
go to a field with the Oxfam person
and I would meet the indigenous
people of the area, talk
to them about maize and then they
would kill a chicken in my honour.
In front of me.
Weird thing is,
I was the Chicken Ambassador.
Yeah, you, I don't know...and then
they'd role it in some cocoa
powder and like half cook it
over a bin, but I...
Mmmm!
LAUGHTER
Nom, Nom, Nom, Nom, Nom.
I didn't want to be rude, you know,
these people didn't have very much.
Like, I really, sincerely wished
they hadn't killed the chicken.
Yeah. So, naturally, I got
salmonella! Did you?
Yeah, I was extremely ill,
I was hospitalised in Mexico.
For the cause? For the cause.
And then it turned out, I don't know
if you remember but there was a big
G8 meeting in Cancun and Coldplay
were going as guests of Oxfam, and
they weren't Fair-trade sweetcorn,
they were Fair-trade everything.
You ate all the bad chickens...
I did exactly the same
trip as Coldplay a month before.
But Coldplay turn up, they say,
"We'd love to give you a chicken
but we've killed them!"
And they said, Coldplay said, they
were all vegetarian.
You're like the trial run.
I was the trial run for frickin'
Coldplay.
Hiding in all these
trees are snipers in camouflage.
And they were going,
"Come down from the tree".
I once paid quite a lot to go on
a...what's it called?
A falconry day.
Cos I got quite into falconry
for a while, and um...
Did you seriously get
"quite into falconry"?
I quite liked it, yeah, I did.
I'll tell you what happened,
I was filming with them, yeah?
And this peregrine falcon, the only,
cos it used to be in Britain,
the more aristocratic you were
the more you were entitled to a
better class of bird.
And... Damn right!
It's true. Nothing's changed.
Um...but if you had
one above your station,
it was the death sentence,
that was it, you were killed.
I just said that, I got the wrong
show for a second, I thought
it was QI, but anyway.
But this...
I believe you, cos you do all that
History Channel stuff,
I believe you.
This peregrine falcon, he said,
"He won't come for you, he won't
come, he won't come, he won't...
"Doesn't like people, he won't
come." I was like that I was going,
"Brrrr. Come here, good girl,"
I made a pigeon noise.
Very good, very good.
And sure enough, this peregrine
falcon came over, just landed there.
And he said, "You must be a natural.
"You must be a natural,
he doesn't come for anyone."
And I felt really sort of chuffed.
I didn't realise it was part of
his pitch...tells everyone...
So, I went on this,
I thought I'd up my game.
I went on this course to learn how
to handle eagle owls.
Cos I looked them up and they're
the biggest bird of prey of all.
I didn't realise they're incred...
as the guy said,
"I've got you down here for
eagle owls."
I said, "Yeah". He goes,
"Why have you gone for eagle owls?"
"Cos I've heard they killed a man."
He says, "No, it was a child,
and it was a tawny owl."
I said, "Well, I'll stick with
the eagle owls."
The tawny owl's actually killed
a child, but the eagle owl hadn't.
I said, "I want to take the eagle
owl." He said, "You want to take on
an eagle owl, you sure?"
"They're heavy,
they're heavy as fuck."
I'm going, "Yeah." And he says,
"Uh, I think Bernard will suit you."
How old were you at this time?
I wasn't listening at the beginning.
This is eight months ago, it's a
different animal. It was eight
months ago? Eight months ago.
I thought it was when you were a kid
or something. No, that's when I
started the story.
So you've done falconry? You've done
a falconry course recently?
I've done a recent falconry course.
Where have you been?
Where have you been?
Sorry, he just dosed off, he just...
I thought this was one of the stupid
things he did when he was a child.
No, this is a stupid thing
I did as an adult.
But, ah, I paid all this for this
course, anyway, and he said
"You're going to love Bernard, this
is really exciting," and they all
got really tense and really ready
for it, and Bernard, I held up my...
MAKES PIGEON NOISE
..and Bernard he just got
off the stand and he just walked.
He just walked,
and then he got there and I went
and he just hopped up just like
that. And he goes, "He won't fly,"
he goes, "He's a lazy bastard."
And that was it, that's all I paid.
Did you get a refund?
No, that was it?
You should at least get a partial
refund. The guy looks at me and
says, "Do you want anothergo?"
I thought, "What's he going to do
now?" He goes,
"It's a good job it's
not his brother." I said "Why?"
He says, "I had a three-hour fight
with him in a field,
"three hours it was, just me
and him."
I go, "What happened in the end?"
"I punched his fucking lights out."
I'm not kidding,
he punched an eagle owl's fucking...
After three hours!
He said, "I went to fetch him
from Newark, yeah?
"And I knew, he was in my van,
I could hear him
"fluttering about, I thought
I'd let him out for a little bit,
"we've ended up going fucking
hand-to-hand in the..."
"Hand-to-hand?"
"Yeah, hand-to-hand in a fucking
field, three-hour hand-to-hand
combat."
"What did you do?"
"I punched his fucking lights out."
Oh, my goodness.
I had an event at Buckingham Palace
for the Queen's birthday once,
in my guise as a children's author.
For her birthday she had a big party
to celebrate children's
writing, which we're very
good at it in this country.
And a lot of us
children's writers were there,
and the kind of centrepiece
of the event was
they put on this big show,
this production, featuring
lots of actors playing famous
children's characters in literature.
They had the cast of Harry Potter
there, including Hedwig - the owl.
And, um...
The great thing about Buckingham
Palace is security there is
run by the Army, so it's actually
much more pleasant than
something where the police
are doing security.
They're all very pleasant,
call you "Sir".
It's very discreet, so you're not
really aware of anything going on.
They've been doing it for centuries.
And, in the afternoon,
they're rehearsing for this play
and Hedwig flew off and perched
up in a tree somewhere.
So, the owl wrangler,
he said, "I'll go..."
The owl wrangler!
I've met one.
He said, "Oh, I'll go and get him
back."
One guy said, "I'm not sure."
He said, "It's all right."
So, he climbs up this tree
and he's halfway up
and he looks down
and he suddenly realises he's got
red spots all over his body
and hiding in all these trees
are these snipers in camouflage.
LAUGHTER
And they're going,
"Come down from the tree."
And so he came down rather
sharpish.
Funniest thing, though, was when
they did the show and they had all
these stands, and the Queen was
there with Prince Philip and...
Having... Really enjoying it.
Well, she...
I mean she just so played up to her
image, it was fantastic.
Yeah.
I mean, it was a rubbish show.
But even so there was no excuse for
her expression.
It was just beyond grumpiness.
Like "What the fuck am I having
to watch this shit for?"
She sits through hours of it.
God's sake!
It's my birthday.
Like six hours of tribal dancing.
Yes, "Can't we get the snipers in
and shoot them all?"
LAUGHTER
That's a show.
That's a proper show!
Release them into the grounds.
It was the funniest thing.
You'd look round
and there she is up in the box.
So, Charlie.
Yes.
Please can you be a stimulating
talk show guest?
LAUGHTER
Um... I was once interviewed
by Jonathan Ross.
It was for an in-flight TV thing,
and we were in town,
in the basement of a Turkish
restaurant, I think.
It was a very, very hot day
and he turned up
and he'd obviously, um...
had quite a fun night
the night before, shall we say.
He was a little bit
the worse for wear
and I'm sure on his TV show
he works out in the gym and prepares
for it for days, but this one,
he hadn't quite.
So, he was a bit rough.
And we're sitting there, and it was
very hot and stuffy down there,
and he's very graciously talking
to me about my books,
and I'm involved in quite a long
story, as I am now.
That's all right, you've held us.
Well, you see,
I'm setting it up for you,
recreating the stimulating
environment that it was.
And I look up
and he was doing a kind of...
Oh!
And...
So, I said,
"Yeah, I'm sorry, Jonathan.
"Yeah, all right, it is a boring
anecdote."
And, I realised,
no, he had actually fallen asleep.
Really?
He was fast asleep.
Not ironically snoozing?
No irony at all.
It was the real deal.
He had fallen fast asleep.
Brilliant. That's terrible!
You couldn't rouse him.
Well, I eventually woke him up, and
he did that kind of... "Yeah..."
You know, pretending he hadn't been
asleep.
He actually fell asleep
during one of your interviews?
Yes! So, you know, this is why he's
never invited me onto his show.
I don't know who it
reflects on worse, him or me.
Oh, the flambes outside have gone
out! Emergency!
Is that a code word? No.
The flambes are out.
Sally, tell me about the lovely
pair of Italian hookers.
Well, I accidentally lived
in a brothel in...
LAUGHTER
Me too.
..in Italy, so I did Italian
for my degree, and for a degree
course you have to do a third year
in the country, and, um,
you were supposed to get organised,
and if you were organised then you
went and you'd already got a job
prepared for you teaching
in a school
or doing a degree, but I have always
been a complete admin disaster.
So, I'd done nothing. I thought I'd
better go to the country anyway,
so I turned up and I had to
look for somewhere to live
and I found a cobbledy street with
washing going between the houses,
and I thought, well, you know, this
looks good and...
Why? Sorry?
Why did it look good?
It just looked romantic.
OK.
Turns out the Italians live
in really clean places.
Wide roads, marble,
and this was all kind of old.
And, um, weirdly, in this
building all the doors,
apart from to my flat, had
a sticker on the door
with a picture of a pig on it
with a line through it.
So, I initially thought...
They were vegetarians.
LAUGHTER
Well, it took a while, right?
It took a while to work it out
because pig in Roman dialect,
"Madama" means police
and pig,
you didn't really understand it.
And there were these two women
who sat on the doorstep
all the time, you know, quite
butch looking women
who sat on the doorstep drinking
wine from a box from morning till
night.
And, um...
From the box?
So stylish the Italians,
aren't they?
NASALLY: "Eh-h-h!
"Caio! Come stai?"
"Va bene".
That's how they spoke.
And ,um...
ITALIAN SPOKEN
And so, you know,
I got myself set up there,
and I got a job in the only
language school in Rome
that you didn't need a TEFL
qualification to teach at,
and which was genuinely run
by a former ringmaster, and um...
What do you mean by that?
He used to be the ringmaster
of the Moscow State Circus.
Did he? It was all very strange.
This isn't really the story.
God! It's weird. It's good
though. The story is...
It's going somewhere. The story is
that I lived in a brothel.
We've got a brothel
run by a Russian ringmaster.
No, that was the language school.
Right. Sorry.
And it turned out that
this was basically a brothel.
There was three or four flats
and across the road there were
another couple of small rooms
and people would come specifically
to our road, and it still is a
red light road, Via di Cappoche.
Was it noisy?
No, and it was really safe.
Um, because no-one's going to...
All right,
don't do a holiday programme for it.
It's safe, the Via di Cappoche.
"If we take a stroll..." You're like
Judith Chalmers with the fucking
thing.
Yeah, they used to think I was too
young to be living on my own.
They used to give me food and...
Who did?
The women on the door.
What was the pig sign about?
The pig sign is, that it
turns out that in Roman dialect,
a prostitute is a "troilla",
which is a sow.
And so, this being Italy, to
show that there were no prostitutes
living here,
should the police come round...
There's no prostitutes here!
..they have a sticker on the door
that says, "No prostitutes here".
So, when the police would come,
sometimes the police would come
and they would just
go into one of the rooms with
one of the prostitutes and sometimes
they'd go, "Oh, you know, we're not
allowing any prostitution here."
There's none of them here.
No, look at the sticker!
Look at the sign, we've got
the sticker.
We've got the sticker and
everything.
Exactly, yeah.
It was bizarre. That year was
so surreal in retrospect.
I didn't...
Russian ringmaster,
pigs crossed out...
I taught Italian in the Ministry
of Defence during the first
Gulf War - that was my day job.
Teaching Italians to say,
"Hi, my name is Stefano."
Specifically?
My university career was very
different.
LAUGHTER
What? You didn't live in a
brothel?
I was in Norwich for three years.
All right. OK.
LAUGHTER
I'll drink to that.
Here's to Norwich!
To think when you're young you just
accept all this and just go with it,
don't you? Yeah.
My old university house used to be
a brothel, actually.
Did it? Yeah. In York, it's
a little bit different.
Apparently, cos we'd have taxi
drivers picking us up.
"Oh, have you finished work for
the..?" I lived with all girls.
"Have you finished work for the
night?"
We were like,
"No, we have not!
"I'm on the way to lectures,
thank you very much!"
I never went to lectures.
My friend, there was a, um,
you always go there to learn
the language and then just make
friends with Brits, and there was a
friend Cath down the road.
And I was, you know,
quite a feminist at the time.
I wore my Doc Martens all the time,
and I used to get really angry
and the Italians would slow down
and go, "Ciao, bella".
Kind of "Get in my car", and I was
constantly having fits about it.
And Cath went, "Sal, I really
don't know what your problem is.
"You get up in the morning looking
like shit, go to buy your milk,
"12 people tell you you're gorgeous
before breakfast."
And she said, "Just enjoy it!"
you know.
And I was... "Grr, it's not
all right."
But when I came back to
England I felt really weird because
I would leave the house,
"Hello, world!"
Everybody ignores you.
And for the rest of my natural life!
LAUGHTER
But Ellie, I would like to know,
what bit you did for Obama?
It was quite a little bit.
But no... When I...
This is Barack Obama,
the actual President of the...
Well, before I was a comedienne,
and after I was a model,
there were the awful years,
the dark times,
that was time when I worked in, sort
of, marketing and events,
and PR and that kind of nonsense.
Basically, if you needed a mouse mat
with a logo put on it,
I was your girl.
So, yeah, I was doing this job
and I was working for an
international news channel based
in London and they were putting
on a big event for the US election.
It was the first election when
Barack Obama was going to become
President.
Obviously, we didn't know
that at the time, but it was the big
party for that night, and so I was
there and I was very excited,
and we'd invited loads of different
Americans to come.
Like big Americans who were
in the UK,
so we'd...
Like Kevin Spacey and the like.
And I was there, and I was very
excited and I had a clipboard
and headset
so I felt terribly powerful.
And I'd be able to say things like,
"Emergency!
We're out of Arancini Balls!"
And things... One of the greatest
nights of my life, but um...
Did you really have a thing there?
Yes! Seriously?
Like the Secret Service?
Yeah, and I had an ear thing
and they were like,
"Oh, the flambes outside have gone
out. Emergency!"
Is that a code word? No.
The flambes are out.
The flambes...
Mr Sandman is in... Yeah.
So, I was giddy with excitement
and then, sort of during the
middle of the evening, up these
steps walks Josh Hartnett of...
Gosh! People are gasping!
Right, girls!
Girls have gasped.
Of Pearl Harbor fame.
We invited him, but we didn't think
he'd come and he just came by
himself
not with a publicist or anything.
And he was like the most beautiful
person I've ever seen in my life,
and he came in and I had my
clipboard, and I was like,
"Hm, what was it again?
"Josh? OK, I'll see
if I can find you."
Is that what you did?
Yeah.
Made him out as if he was a nobody?
Yeah, so Josh Hartnett's in the
party.
Yeah.
And the party's going very well.
Are you all right?
So Josh Harnett's there.
Got Josh in the building.
Josh is in the building, exactly!
And it's all going very well
and then I see he's about to leave,
and my friends are like, "Ellie,
you really fancy him, this
"is your only time. When are you
ever going to be in a building with
Josh?"
Don't let it go without giving him
your number.
Exactly, right.
So, I was like what I'm going to do.
Where you really up for it?
I was well up for it, Johnny.
Were you? Yeah.
Awesome!
Good for you, I say. Thanks.
That's exactly the right attitude.
Wait, wait.
I want to hear what happens next.
Well, Charlie, what happens.
You're giving him a husky voice.
Shut up, Johnny!
LAUGHTER
I just get excited.
Well, calm down.
All right, I don't get out much,
Chaz.
So he's going. I'm like, right this
is my moment, this is my moment.
I think, "Right, I'm going to
give him my business card."
So I get out my business card
to give him,
and he's just about to leave.
I take him by the hand
and I kiss him on the cheek...
Yeah? I give him my business card
and then I realise
I have not thought about what
I'm going to say.
So, I panic.
And end up saying, in quite,
sort of, a lascivious way
"In case you ever need
anything in London."
LAUGHTER
Then he just walks away thinking,
"Well, she's a massive prostitute!"
LAUGHTER
Shockingly, he never called!
I'm thinking he must have just lost
the card, that's the only
explanation.
AH!
So that's how I helped Obama.
If you had that moment again,
what would you say?
I'd just give him
a blowy in the loos.
LAUGHTER
Is the correct answer.
That should not get
a round of applause.
Are there correct answers on this
show? Can you win points?
I'm actually going to bring in
points tonight for the first time.
That sounds really good.
That sounds to be exactly
the right etiquette.
Oh, my mum's going to kill me
if she sees this.
Not at all.
A blowy! A blowy?
What's you favourite
terminology for it, then?
Oh, those were the days!
I don't know.
I don't even remember...
There was a time...
..what it feels like.
LAUGHTER
There was a time when the boys
where I'm from in Essex
called it the most disgusting thing
I've ever heard...
What?
A gobble.
A gobble?
Yes, I remember a girl who's...
LAUGHTER
When I... When I was talking to the
researcher before about...
I said, "Does it matter what
we talk about?" and he said no,
it's usually quite adult humour.
So, I thought OK, it'll be
jokes about James Joyce and ballet
and opera.
LAUGHTER
And I prepared my best ones!
Had I known it was all...
Give us one of your James Joyce
one-liners. Well...
He had syphilis, so he couldn't even
see his eyes hurt so much.
James Joyce was getting
a nosh one time...
LAUGHTER
..off a ballet dancer!
In the loo.
So, anyway... Please, the ballet
jokes that you have.
Back to ballet.
That's such a good title,
"Jokes about James Joyce and Ballet"
that I can't really think we'll use
anything else at the end.
We may as well just wrap.
Anyway, Charlie, I want you to tell
me about sprucing up
Stephen Fry's interiors.
I quite like saying that.
It's a...
Yes, you've made quite a dull
story sound intriguing.
LAUGHTER
He's a professional!
Yeah, no, it was in my days as
a painter and decorator.
When I left university
I was in a band for six years,
I was a singer for six years,
and...
The Higsons. I remember.
They were good.
Yeah, The Higsons - it was good fun.
But you never made any money,
so the bass player and myself
when we weren't touring,
we started doing a bit of decorating
because we had a bit of time.
And we started making good money,
you know,
there are a lot of houses in London.
And Paul Whitehouse, who I'd met at
university,
was working as a plasterer.
He did fancy plastering like running
cornices and mouldings and things.
So, we often worked together.
And Harry was also someone we'd met
and he was...
Harry Enfield. Harry Enfield.
Yes, sorry. Harry Enfield.
Did he have a trade?
He'd been working as a milkman.
We all ended up squatting in these
flats in Hackney, and, yeah,
he was working as a milkman,
Paul was a plasterer
and I was a decorator.
This seems absurd.
Well, it was a long time ago.
Paul was a good plasterer.
A very good plasterer.
He was on The Big Breakfast Show.
He came to do some plastering.
He could still do it. I was a very
decorator as well, I'll have you
know. Were you?
Well, you know,
we did posh decorating.
And, posh people, they don't
really like having working-class
people like Johnny in their houses.
Did you sort of front the crew?
"Hi. Good afternoon!"
We were all posh.
Paul's not posh.
He's posher than he sounds.
No, no, but...
No, he is not posh!
Well, you know, his mum...
No, he's not.
His mother's an opera singer.
Um...
She plays urchins.
No, no, he's...
He can do posh.
Yes.
But we'd get quite nice,
posh jobs.
And Harry was starting to do
the comedy stuff and he got to know
Stephen and Hugh and they said,
"We need someone to decorate our
house."
They were living together at the
time, just sharing a house,
and um...
Good save.
Stephen's fantasy life nearly
came true then.
Well, Stephen had made huge amounts
of money re-writing
Me And My Girl musical...
That's right.
A musical taking out all
the references, all the "N" words
and things like that that
were in it. Is that right?
I didn't know.
Is that how he did it?
So, they got us in.
Me and Paul went in and we decorated
their house top to bottom
and replastered it and spruced it
all up,
and, of course, we were
incredibly annoying because we were
starting to write a bit for Harry
and we were thinking,
"Oh, this looks like all right,
get in and do a bit of comedy."
So we would sort of do
comedy routines
and funny voices whilst...
Paul never stops.
Well, no, he is your archetypal
comedian.
You're the sort of more quietly
spoken, generally a bit more...
Yeah.
But Paul's just never...
He's nearly as bad as Johnny.
No, he's worse. I've worked
with him. I've worked with him.
He's miles worse.
He's miles worse. Seriously,
I don't even get a word in there.
No, he is. He's miles worse.
He is, you know,
he'll do voices and impressions.
He's incredibly entertaining.
Bloody funny, isn't he?
Brilliant!
You know, and I would try and keep
up and we'd do these funny...
"Oh, they're up!
Let's do another funny routine."
In the hope they might spot us
and say, "Oh, you two guys,
"you're terribly funny. You should
come on the television with us."
So, it worked!
We did get onto TV.
That is hilarious.
So, we did up the house,
we did a fantastic job
and then they were both rich enough
to move on, and Paul and I,
our career took off in TV
and we bought the house off them.
Was this the beginning of
Loadsamoney? The start of that?
Well, it kind of was,
because we started...
You know, "I can buy shoes!"
Things like that.
Do you know about Loadsamoney,
Ellie? You were a bit to young
maybe?
Yeah, no. Yeah, I've seen
it on the YouTube.
The YouTube facility.
The extraordinary thing about it...
So funny, wasn't it?
..was if you put all the TV
appearances of Loadsamoney together,
everything he did, it would
probably last about 20 minutes.
Yeah. That's all it was.
It was a brief thing, wasn't it?
You know, Paul and I doing those
jobs together,
that was one of the origins
of Loadsamoney
because we would often pretend to
be working class builders.
We would do these marvellous,
funny routines, talking about girls
and drinking.
No, we did.
So that was sort of one of the ways
that Loadsamoney came from.
It was extraordinary
because Margaret Thatcher in
the House of Commons actually said,
so we are in Hansard, she said,
"People have accused us of creating
"a Loadsamoney economy.
Well, what's wrong with that?"
Is that what she said?
Yeah.
I finished the link
and I just heard, clunk!
And funnily enough,
laughter rather like that.
Johnny, tell me about how you
nearly died on an oil rig.
Why didn't you die on an oil rig?
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
Very good point, very good point.
Very good point.
Well, I nearly did. I mean...
And there's, there's your...
Am I like, "Boo!"?
LAUGHTER
Do you know what I mean? I've become
the fucking bad guy!
You're not the bad guy.
You're lovely, we all love you,
but we want to know how you nearly
died. "Boo!"
HE HISSES
LAUGHTER
I'll kill you all!
Erm...
Well, I to... It's awful!
I never thought...
Anyone comes on this show and
becomes, like, a panto baddy!
I thought I was really... I thought
I was really opening things up!
LAUGHTER
And now it turns out I'm not
very popular!
LAUGHTER
Oh, my...
What happened to... So you're
on the oil rig.
Yeah, I went on this oil rig, cos I
was filming for this film show,
and it wasn't actually an oil rig,
it was an oil rig escape tower.
Now, these are things hundreds of
feet high, and when an oil rig
is burning, they stick you in, like,
a metal box about the size
of a minibus, and you have to get
strapped in,
they just literally drop it off the
side at great speed
in case the oil rig's about to burst
into flames.
And I got stitched up by this team,
I think probably felt the same
as you did about me.
LAUGHTER
It seems that they too wanted to
place me in a metal box
and eject me very fast. I...
Those are just the feelings
I engender.
And, erm... And... And...
it was terrible, because I was going
to do the opening.
There are times when you do telly,
you forget what you're actually
about to do.
You think, "I'm concentrating on
learning the lines."
There was a show called Moviewatch.
I was going, "Welcome to Moviewatch
"from Dundee. Today we're looking
at the city," and then the idea
was I finished, and they were going
to drop this thing off the tower.
I said, "Don't actually drop it.
We can film it from the outside,
"you don't need to see me in it.
You know we can just do that."
They go, "Yeah. That's
what we're going to do."
But again, you know the vibe
round me.
LAUGHTER
The vibe round me is... "Let's drop
the bastard!" "let's... Let's...
"Let's do him harm!
"Harm him! Harm him!"
And so I got in this thing and they
said, "Don't worry, we're not
"actually going to drop you in it,
cos we're not covered, anyway."
The director assured me.
And so I got in this metal box,
and they have to... And it's...
The impact is so fucking massive,
they have to strap you, you have a
special seatbelt for your head.
And you KNOW things are bad
when there's a seatbelt
going around your head.
And everything... It was like
when you see guys on a gurney,
about to be... The death sentence.
It was like that
but in a minibus seat.
And I was going, "Welcome
every... Er... And that's where
"we're coming from." And I was
meant to go, "Whoa!",
and then I was going to get out of
there and they were going to drop...
They had one
already on film from the exterior
shot, they were going to drop it in,
and then I just... I finished the
link and I just heard "clunk".
LAUGHTER
And funnily enough,
laughter rather like that.
LAUGHTER
From most of fucking Dundee,
and this thing just went, "Whoa!",
like this and I was like, "No! Jesus
Christ!", and you leave your...
Honestly, it's the most terrifying
thing, and it hits the..
The Scottish man says,
"You don't want to, Johnny,
"cos if you hit that water,
from that height,
"it's like fucking concrete.
You can just 'getdifuckya'."
And it did, and it hit so hard.
So, for the rest of the show,
I've got this sort of neck,
and my neck is just hurting so much
that I'm sort of looking round
like this. Anyway, I get fished
out the water.
I'm in this thing.
I'm the only one in there,
so I'm alone in this metal box
floating round in the North Sea.
They fired up the rig and just left.
Because I didn't think it was going
to go down,
I've loosened the safety belt.
I thought,
"I've got a bit of movement. I'm not
going to link like that.
"It's like Hannibal Lector
or something."
So, I've gone off this thing,
it's gone "Bang!"
really hard, and it's really hurt
and my head's really loose,
so I've got this stiff neck.
You know, one of those real,
"You all right there?"
"Not too bad. You all right?"
So, that's when I nearly died on
an oil rig.
There you go. It was fucking awful.
I had to go on a gurney thing...
No... I mean a be...
When I was in Jonathan Creek.
And the paramedic had to strap me
on this stretcher,
and they thought it'd be really
funny and they strapped my legs
incredibly tightly, pulled as hard
as they could
and then left me there, and then I
was out round the corner
and I had to wait for the camera
and the other actors to come,
and I was there for about ten
minutes, and it was...
After a while, I started going...
CHUCKLING: Saying, shouting...
"This strap is too tight! I can't
move my legs! Where are those men?!"
I know! "Someone release me!
"Help me! There must be a runner!
I can't move my legs!
"It's awful! Ow! Ow!"
But no-one would come. They were
like "Fuck it, leave him.
"What a wanker." It's actually
quite reasonable.
It's horrible! Yeah! I can't get
anyone's attention.
I know they can all hear me.
That was... You know, there's that
moment when you think everyone...
Well, I get that a lot.
"Everyone hates me."
It's, like, my factory setting.
LAUGHTER
That's not true at all.
I was just playing up to.
You were just playing up to it.
Just checking
the whole... Still being the bad
guy. Make way for the bad guy.
Uh... Well we've got...
We can finish. Erm...
LAUGHTER
Our work here is done.
Our work here is done.
Our work here is done.
You know how to end a show!
LAUGHTER
Whoa, you really do!
What a climax!
HE HUMS BOMBASTIC SONG
That's all, folks.
I don't know how I got the job!
It's the laziest show.
I have no understanding of a finale.
It's just,
"Well, that will be that, then."
LAUGHTER
I've done some of the laziest shows
on radio
and television over 22 years,
and I can tell you this -
this is bone fucking idle.
LAUGHTER
There's no preparation. You just
rely on people to turn up
with stuff and you do fuck all.
I watched you round the back, you
were sleeping in your dressing room,
eating Maltesers when you woke
up. Cos I opened them. I do!
You did? Oh, YOU opened the
Maltesers? I opened the Maltesers
cos I was having a piss, cos there's
not one in ours.
Charles has used my lavatory as
well.
Has he? Well, he had no choice.
That would be quite a good title.
Yeah.
Oh, titles!
Charles Has Used My Lavatory!
We have to have a title.
I quite like
She's Got "Minge" Written On
Her Foot.
LAUGHTER
"Minge" On My Foot - the new album.
My mum's going to be so cross
if she watches this.
Yeah. It's hard to get passed
I'd Give Him A Blowy In The Loo.
Don't!
"I'd Nosh Hartnett", I quite like.
Nosh Hartnett's good.
Yeah. I like "Jokes About James
Joyce And Ballet."
I thought that was one of my
favourite ones.
Is it a democracy or do you
have to choose it?
Well... Can we have a vote?
We could vote.
I mean, I'm open to suggestions.
I bet you are!
Cos you haven't written anything!
Unlike Josh.
LAUGHTER
Oh! Oh!
And the audience,
suddenly there was a new bad guy!
# Shot through the heart! #
SHE LAUGHS
If Josh is watching this,
he'll be kicking himself.
He really won't be.
Such an idiot.
LAUGHTER
Please, will you thank my guests,
Ellie Taylor....
Johnny Vaughan...
Sally Phillips...
and Charlie Higson.
APPLAUSE
I'm Alan Davies,
and you have been watching
Jokes About James Joyce And Ballet.
HE CHUCKLES
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Subtitles by Ericsson
I've finally arrived.
I'm a star,
I'm a guest on the Alan Carr show.
Alan Davies? You're joking!
That guy from Gangnam Style,
is he here?
No. Thank God!
Is my hair all right?
Hi!
If there isn't Wagon Wheels
in there, someone's getting it.
APPLAUSE
Hello, I'm Alan Davies,
welcome to my show.
This show is called
As Yet Untitled,
because there isn't a title,
there's no script or questions
or agenda, or anything...
it's really lazy.
So...but what I do is, I get four
hand-picked, brilliantly funny
guests to help me come up with
a title which we'll try
to do at some point during the show.
So please,
will you welcome my guests?
APPLAUSE
Welcome. Welcome.
APPLAUSE
Here they are.
Marvellous!
All right, let's see who's here.
Ellie Taylor is here.
Ellie Taylor did her little
bit for Obama. Ellie Taylor is here.
APPLAUSE
Johnny Vaughan, Johnny Vaughan
is with us.
Johnny Vaughan almost died on
an oil rig. Johnny Vaughan.
APPLAUSE
Sally Phillips is here,
nice to have Sally on.
Sally opened for Coldplay in Mexico
and knows a lovely pair
of Italian hookers.
APPLAUSE
And Charlie Higson, welcome to
Charlie Higson, who is a
stimulating talk-show guest and has
spruced up Stephen Fry's interiors.
Wonderful!
APPLAUSE
Shall we tell them about
the shirt incident?
I went in the...
I went in the dressing room just now
and Johnny and Charlie
were sitting there.
We had to share, actually.
Yes, you had to share.
Everyone else got their own.
That's right.
"Charlie and Johnny, sling them
in together."
It's massive though, isn't it?
It is big, yeah.
And it has got hair-washing sinks,
which we thought you would...
Very good, Alan. Sorry.
But unfortunately it was rather
clogged, you'd obviously been there.
And I walked in,
and I was wearing this shirt,
but I had a...kind of a...like,
a flesh-coloured undergarment.
It was weird, actually.
And they both thought I was
wandering around with my shirt open
to the naval...
No, I just...
..greeting the guests.
And both of their heads tilted down,
which I imagine must happen to women
more often.
Yeah. It just, honestly,
looked like your flesh,
and I suddenly thought has he had,
like, a monstrous tattoo of,
like a gooner, or the entire
squad of the double-wings,
something on there, and you were
covering... Just covering it up?
..feebly with a...
like, "Salmon Davies".
Salmon-coloured T-shirt, it was...
Were you wearing Spanx, Alan?
Was that what it was?
It was like Spanx, it was.
Pulled all the way up.
It was the only T-shirt I've ever
seen that was actually disturbing.
I would wear Spanx if I was a girl.
You can get them for men.
You can get corsets, give you a
little bit of a waist. Shut the
front door, can you?
Yeah. I once got my dad a pair
of boxers, actually.
They're boxers, but they have, like,
a layer, like, a girdle
attached to them.
Such a great daughter!
And does he like them?
I don't think he's ever worn them...
that he's told me.
The comfort factor?
Is that comfortable?
I would think something pulled...
I like something pulled right up.
Do you?
But I'll tell you what's really
unattractive, is a man in...
just, only in his underwear,
pulled right up.
The trick, though, of pulling
your underpants right up,
and pushing your gut right out.
Yeah?
It, it...women do find it
surprisingly entertaining.
LAUGHTER
It works every time, you kind of get
them laughing and then you're away
That's the first good
idea for a title.
What do you mean, "You're away"?
When you say, "You're away," what's
that? Is that like foreplay?
No, what do you...
Have you never been, "Away"? No!
Not recently, no, what do you mean?
Oh, we're away now. Shirt unbuttoned
to the waist.
Hello! We're away here,
I did the old pant routine.
That's foreplay, in we go!
What do you do?
I'm not going to tell you what you
do next, you should know that bit.
I know about the birds and the
bees, Charlie!
I've told you the underpant trick!
OK, I've got to go out with that.
When did the era end?
When, when, when...men used to
really hang down one leg
and were kind of proud of it?
No, I'm just saying, there was an
era...
No, everyone's so conscious now.
Everyone's bulking up and yet
clothes are getting baggy.
So, there's a body shyness.
I'm saying when was that
John Wayne era and that...?
You look at a Robert Mitchum film
and he's packing heat down one leg
and he doesn't give a shit.
You know, he's...
Ronnie Reagan in the
golden era, John Wayne...
they were just going down one leg.
You could see the outline of a cock.
Men at their best.
You could see men at their best,
I mean you could see literally
what religion they are.
Even the '70s, you look at, like,
The Stones or Robert Plant
and people, they were, they would
surely say, "Yes, I'm here and look,
check my cock."
It came back in, when Linford
Christie was in the Olympics.
You're obsessed with Linford.
Don't you remember? Yeah.
That was also, I think
it was the first Olympics where
they had the head-on shot,
and they seemed deliberately
to have the camera at a low...
Yes. ..angle.
He found that very offensive.
Well, to a young Alan Davies
they did.
That's all I saw, anyway!
And he hated Linford's Lunchbox.
Yeah.
He hated references to it.
I watched a documentary about him
the other night. About Linford?
About Linford Christie,
cos as a comedian you spend a lot
of time in hotel rooms by yourself.
So, yeah, he was very offended by
it, he found it very,
sort of just very mean, bearing in
mind he was, like, a super champion,
and then people were just
talking about his...dick.
But your...but your...your athletics
career is very short-lived,
but if you've got a huge cock it's
with you for your life.
You know?
Give a man a cock, he can...
Hence you'll show you do.
If you've got it, flaunt it.
Lucky he wasn't a hammer
thrower or something,
cos he could have got all kinds
of entanglement.
Don't think it was that big, was it?
No, but Alan's right, it was at the
era, the start of the bicy...,
of the tight shorts.
Swinging the hammer
at the beginning, you could snag it,
and then by the time you've
gone all the way round
it would be like a cartoon
stretched...
Noing, noing, noing.
Stretch Armstrong.
With hilarious consequences.
Did Stretch Armstrong have genitals?
They never brought that one out.
I don't think he did.
I don't think he did, no. That will
be in Ann Summers next week.
The Stretch Armstrong with
a...bendy cock.
With his arm that's strong.
Yeah.
But, yes, I haven't got any tattoos,
we established.
OK, Well, I thought you did, I
thought you'd had some work done.
I've got a tattoo...
Have you got a tattoo?
I got stabbed by my child.
Oh, you have, too!
I've got the smallest tattoo.
I thought it was a child stabbing
you, in the tattoo, I thought
very odd!
My mates did think it was
a prison tattoo.
"Look at my tattoo,
it's a child stabbing me."
Great, Sal, that's really nice.
Is that a permanent mark?
Yeah, it doesn't seem to...it's
several years old, it doesn't seem
to be going.
What did she stab you with, a pen?
A pen, yeah. Prison tat.
I once met a guy once,
and he had, "Bastard" tattooed on
his forehead in big bold...
"Bastard",
that's all it says, "Bastard", and
he was in prison, and I saw his kid.
Not for that? No, he wasn't in
prison for that. You can't go to
prison for that.
Can't go to prison for that. There's
no law against having "Bastard" on
your forehead.
But this guy's turned up at the
prison visits, and his kid's there,
and his kid's like four-years-old
and his kid's brought a drawing
of Daddy.
And it was a stick man
and he just had, like a mark,
on the forehead
because he couldn't spell it yet.
Thing is, as the kid
goes on in life, he's going
to draw Daddy and every time he does
at school it's going to get
more realistic and every time
he draws his dad it's just going
to say "Bastard"
on the guy's forehead.
And I was thinking the teachers
might think
call the dad in, he's got some
real issues here.
"You'd better come in, I think
your child's got some
serious father issues.
"Cos every time he draws you,
he writes
"'bastard' on your forehead." I mean
he wouldn't obviously say that.
But as the dad actually came in,
and the teacher saw him,
what's he going to say?
They'd have to style it out.
Yes, style it out.
I don't get...
I'm not sure about tats.
Everyone's doing them, aren't they?
Full sleeves. Yeah.
I just think they look messy,
they look dirty.
Have you got any work done.
No, no, no, no...I couldn't do it.
Charlie's had a bit of work done.
I've got a skull there.
I went...
I have got a skull.
Have you really? Yes.
Really got a skull?
The last thing you would expect.
Yeah.
My father moved to Hawaii,
and I went out there
in the early 90's and...the
South Pacific is the birthplace
of the tattoo and I thought, I'm
in Hawaii and I should get a tattoo.
Turned out my wife quite liked
men with tattoos.
Did she realise
when she'd got to Hawaii?
"I like some of these men."
And I thought, yes, if
I have a tattoo, I'd be like them.
A friend of mine has got, "Come and
have a go if you're hard enough,"
in Latin.
Oh fantastic. Across her stomach. so
it's incredibly cool, and she's got
these sort of...
amazingly cool writing and then
she got drunk in Australia and has
also got a really shit one of the
Sydney Opera House on her ankle.
This really, really cool one
and then this, you know,
tragic, blurry...yeah, in Latin.
It says, "Come and have a go if you
think you're hard enough" - in
Latin? In Latin.
Does she get, like, hard Latin
scholars, classicists coming to her.
I haven't talked to her that
much about it.
"All right, I'll take you on!
I know what that means."
Has she ever been pregnant?
Wouldn't it get bigger and...
Oh, I get it, it's different, OK.
I saw...there's Amanda Seyfried,
Seyfried? The actress?
She's got on her foot...
I can't remember,
she was working with a British actor
and he told her a funny
English word that she thought was
so amusing she go on her foot.
The word is "minge".
She's got "minge" written on
her foot, for all time now!
That is, go and go...that is
true, go and Google it.
She's mislabelled.
She has.
Minge written on her foot? She's a
very beautiful Hollywood superstar.
She likes minge!
She's got minge?
If she had it written over her minge
that would be, would that be
better or worse?
You'd turn into, you know
the way primary schools were sort
of labelled "cupboard", "chair",
"basin"...
"minge", "tit one",
"tit two".
"Tit one", "tit two"?
"Arse", "arrrrrssee", in my case.
No, it wouldn't be, don't put
yourself down.
Yeah, I know, sorry.
So, tell me about opening
for Coldplay in Mexico.
Yes, well, you know how...
when you're...ten years ago,
I was relatively, a bit famous and
you get charities...
approach you
and ask you to be
ambassadors for different things, so
if you're really, really successful,
like, you know, Angeline Jolie has
really big, serious things like
rape, but if you're my kind of
level...
What's yours?
She gets all the glamour.
Yeah, well, I was rung up
by Oxfam, "You know,
"we'd really like you to
work with us."
"Of course, you do great work,
Oxfam, I'm very keen to work
with you."
And they said, "We'd like you to be
our Fair-trade Maize Ambassador",
which...maize is essentially
sweetcorn. It's a long way down,
isn't it, the scale?
It's quite a long way down the
scale. I don't want to put a downer
on it.
But you know what?
I was not going to spit at that,
I was grateful, you know?
And I thought, yeah,
you know what,
I'll do what I can for the world of
sweetcorn, I will...
In a manner of speaking...
I've had Smack The Pony, I want to
give something back.
And so they said, "We want to send
you out to Mexico, where the
"farmers are suffering, because of
Nafta, the North American
"Free Trade Agreement, you're going
to meet some of the farmers
"and then write an article for Marie
Claire." Actually, what it turned
out they wanted to do, they wanted
to write the article for Marie
Claire and just take some pictures
of me holding a piece of sweetcorn.
Really? But I'm quite serious,
I'm quite literal
and I thought, "No, I want to find
out about it myself."
So, they groaned a bit,
but anyway went out there,
and took all these books on
free-trade agreements and the
Zapatistas and what would happen is
I would go...
go to a field with the Oxfam person
and I would meet the indigenous
people of the area, talk
to them about maize and then they
would kill a chicken in my honour.
In front of me.
Weird thing is,
I was the Chicken Ambassador.
Yeah, you, I don't know...and then
they'd role it in some cocoa
powder and like half cook it
over a bin, but I...
Mmmm!
LAUGHTER
Nom, Nom, Nom, Nom, Nom.
I didn't want to be rude, you know,
these people didn't have very much.
Like, I really, sincerely wished
they hadn't killed the chicken.
Yeah. So, naturally, I got
salmonella! Did you?
Yeah, I was extremely ill,
I was hospitalised in Mexico.
For the cause? For the cause.
And then it turned out, I don't know
if you remember but there was a big
G8 meeting in Cancun and Coldplay
were going as guests of Oxfam, and
they weren't Fair-trade sweetcorn,
they were Fair-trade everything.
You ate all the bad chickens...
I did exactly the same
trip as Coldplay a month before.
But Coldplay turn up, they say,
"We'd love to give you a chicken
but we've killed them!"
And they said, Coldplay said, they
were all vegetarian.
You're like the trial run.
I was the trial run for frickin'
Coldplay.
Hiding in all these
trees are snipers in camouflage.
And they were going,
"Come down from the tree".
I once paid quite a lot to go on
a...what's it called?
A falconry day.
Cos I got quite into falconry
for a while, and um...
Did you seriously get
"quite into falconry"?
I quite liked it, yeah, I did.
I'll tell you what happened,
I was filming with them, yeah?
And this peregrine falcon, the only,
cos it used to be in Britain,
the more aristocratic you were
the more you were entitled to a
better class of bird.
And... Damn right!
It's true. Nothing's changed.
Um...but if you had
one above your station,
it was the death sentence,
that was it, you were killed.
I just said that, I got the wrong
show for a second, I thought
it was QI, but anyway.
But this...
I believe you, cos you do all that
History Channel stuff,
I believe you.
This peregrine falcon, he said,
"He won't come for you, he won't
come, he won't come, he won't...
"Doesn't like people, he won't
come." I was like that I was going,
"Brrrr. Come here, good girl,"
I made a pigeon noise.
Very good, very good.
And sure enough, this peregrine
falcon came over, just landed there.
And he said, "You must be a natural.
"You must be a natural,
he doesn't come for anyone."
And I felt really sort of chuffed.
I didn't realise it was part of
his pitch...tells everyone...
So, I went on this,
I thought I'd up my game.
I went on this course to learn how
to handle eagle owls.
Cos I looked them up and they're
the biggest bird of prey of all.
I didn't realise they're incred...
as the guy said,
"I've got you down here for
eagle owls."
I said, "Yeah". He goes,
"Why have you gone for eagle owls?"
"Cos I've heard they killed a man."
He says, "No, it was a child,
and it was a tawny owl."
I said, "Well, I'll stick with
the eagle owls."
The tawny owl's actually killed
a child, but the eagle owl hadn't.
I said, "I want to take the eagle
owl." He said, "You want to take on
an eagle owl, you sure?"
"They're heavy,
they're heavy as fuck."
I'm going, "Yeah." And he says,
"Uh, I think Bernard will suit you."
How old were you at this time?
I wasn't listening at the beginning.
This is eight months ago, it's a
different animal. It was eight
months ago? Eight months ago.
I thought it was when you were a kid
or something. No, that's when I
started the story.
So you've done falconry? You've done
a falconry course recently?
I've done a recent falconry course.
Where have you been?
Where have you been?
Sorry, he just dosed off, he just...
I thought this was one of the stupid
things he did when he was a child.
No, this is a stupid thing
I did as an adult.
But, ah, I paid all this for this
course, anyway, and he said
"You're going to love Bernard, this
is really exciting," and they all
got really tense and really ready
for it, and Bernard, I held up my...
MAKES PIGEON NOISE
..and Bernard he just got
off the stand and he just walked.
He just walked,
and then he got there and I went
and he just hopped up just like
that. And he goes, "He won't fly,"
he goes, "He's a lazy bastard."
And that was it, that's all I paid.
Did you get a refund?
No, that was it?
You should at least get a partial
refund. The guy looks at me and
says, "Do you want anothergo?"
I thought, "What's he going to do
now?" He goes,
"It's a good job it's
not his brother." I said "Why?"
He says, "I had a three-hour fight
with him in a field,
"three hours it was, just me
and him."
I go, "What happened in the end?"
"I punched his fucking lights out."
I'm not kidding,
he punched an eagle owl's fucking...
After three hours!
He said, "I went to fetch him
from Newark, yeah?
"And I knew, he was in my van,
I could hear him
"fluttering about, I thought
I'd let him out for a little bit,
"we've ended up going fucking
hand-to-hand in the..."
"Hand-to-hand?"
"Yeah, hand-to-hand in a fucking
field, three-hour hand-to-hand
combat."
"What did you do?"
"I punched his fucking lights out."
Oh, my goodness.
I had an event at Buckingham Palace
for the Queen's birthday once,
in my guise as a children's author.
For her birthday she had a big party
to celebrate children's
writing, which we're very
good at it in this country.
And a lot of us
children's writers were there,
and the kind of centrepiece
of the event was
they put on this big show,
this production, featuring
lots of actors playing famous
children's characters in literature.
They had the cast of Harry Potter
there, including Hedwig - the owl.
And, um...
The great thing about Buckingham
Palace is security there is
run by the Army, so it's actually
much more pleasant than
something where the police
are doing security.
They're all very pleasant,
call you "Sir".
It's very discreet, so you're not
really aware of anything going on.
They've been doing it for centuries.
And, in the afternoon,
they're rehearsing for this play
and Hedwig flew off and perched
up in a tree somewhere.
So, the owl wrangler,
he said, "I'll go..."
The owl wrangler!
I've met one.
He said, "Oh, I'll go and get him
back."
One guy said, "I'm not sure."
He said, "It's all right."
So, he climbs up this tree
and he's halfway up
and he looks down
and he suddenly realises he's got
red spots all over his body
and hiding in all these trees
are these snipers in camouflage.
LAUGHTER
And they're going,
"Come down from the tree."
And so he came down rather
sharpish.
Funniest thing, though, was when
they did the show and they had all
these stands, and the Queen was
there with Prince Philip and...
Having... Really enjoying it.
Well, she...
I mean she just so played up to her
image, it was fantastic.
Yeah.
I mean, it was a rubbish show.
But even so there was no excuse for
her expression.
It was just beyond grumpiness.
Like "What the fuck am I having
to watch this shit for?"
She sits through hours of it.
God's sake!
It's my birthday.
Like six hours of tribal dancing.
Yes, "Can't we get the snipers in
and shoot them all?"
LAUGHTER
That's a show.
That's a proper show!
Release them into the grounds.
It was the funniest thing.
You'd look round
and there she is up in the box.
So, Charlie.
Yes.
Please can you be a stimulating
talk show guest?
LAUGHTER
Um... I was once interviewed
by Jonathan Ross.
It was for an in-flight TV thing,
and we were in town,
in the basement of a Turkish
restaurant, I think.
It was a very, very hot day
and he turned up
and he'd obviously, um...
had quite a fun night
the night before, shall we say.
He was a little bit
the worse for wear
and I'm sure on his TV show
he works out in the gym and prepares
for it for days, but this one,
he hadn't quite.
So, he was a bit rough.
And we're sitting there, and it was
very hot and stuffy down there,
and he's very graciously talking
to me about my books,
and I'm involved in quite a long
story, as I am now.
That's all right, you've held us.
Well, you see,
I'm setting it up for you,
recreating the stimulating
environment that it was.
And I look up
and he was doing a kind of...
Oh!
And...
So, I said,
"Yeah, I'm sorry, Jonathan.
"Yeah, all right, it is a boring
anecdote."
And, I realised,
no, he had actually fallen asleep.
Really?
He was fast asleep.
Not ironically snoozing?
No irony at all.
It was the real deal.
He had fallen fast asleep.
Brilliant. That's terrible!
You couldn't rouse him.
Well, I eventually woke him up, and
he did that kind of... "Yeah..."
You know, pretending he hadn't been
asleep.
He actually fell asleep
during one of your interviews?
Yes! So, you know, this is why he's
never invited me onto his show.
I don't know who it
reflects on worse, him or me.
Oh, the flambes outside have gone
out! Emergency!
Is that a code word? No.
The flambes are out.
Sally, tell me about the lovely
pair of Italian hookers.
Well, I accidentally lived
in a brothel in...
LAUGHTER
Me too.
..in Italy, so I did Italian
for my degree, and for a degree
course you have to do a third year
in the country, and, um,
you were supposed to get organised,
and if you were organised then you
went and you'd already got a job
prepared for you teaching
in a school
or doing a degree, but I have always
been a complete admin disaster.
So, I'd done nothing. I thought I'd
better go to the country anyway,
so I turned up and I had to
look for somewhere to live
and I found a cobbledy street with
washing going between the houses,
and I thought, well, you know, this
looks good and...
Why? Sorry?
Why did it look good?
It just looked romantic.
OK.
Turns out the Italians live
in really clean places.
Wide roads, marble,
and this was all kind of old.
And, um, weirdly, in this
building all the doors,
apart from to my flat, had
a sticker on the door
with a picture of a pig on it
with a line through it.
So, I initially thought...
They were vegetarians.
LAUGHTER
Well, it took a while, right?
It took a while to work it out
because pig in Roman dialect,
"Madama" means police
and pig,
you didn't really understand it.
And there were these two women
who sat on the doorstep
all the time, you know, quite
butch looking women
who sat on the doorstep drinking
wine from a box from morning till
night.
And, um...
From the box?
So stylish the Italians,
aren't they?
NASALLY: "Eh-h-h!
"Caio! Come stai?"
"Va bene".
That's how they spoke.
And ,um...
ITALIAN SPOKEN
And so, you know,
I got myself set up there,
and I got a job in the only
language school in Rome
that you didn't need a TEFL
qualification to teach at,
and which was genuinely run
by a former ringmaster, and um...
What do you mean by that?
He used to be the ringmaster
of the Moscow State Circus.
Did he? It was all very strange.
This isn't really the story.
God! It's weird. It's good
though. The story is...
It's going somewhere. The story is
that I lived in a brothel.
We've got a brothel
run by a Russian ringmaster.
No, that was the language school.
Right. Sorry.
And it turned out that
this was basically a brothel.
There was three or four flats
and across the road there were
another couple of small rooms
and people would come specifically
to our road, and it still is a
red light road, Via di Cappoche.
Was it noisy?
No, and it was really safe.
Um, because no-one's going to...
All right,
don't do a holiday programme for it.
It's safe, the Via di Cappoche.
"If we take a stroll..." You're like
Judith Chalmers with the fucking
thing.
Yeah, they used to think I was too
young to be living on my own.
They used to give me food and...
Who did?
The women on the door.
What was the pig sign about?
The pig sign is, that it
turns out that in Roman dialect,
a prostitute is a "troilla",
which is a sow.
And so, this being Italy, to
show that there were no prostitutes
living here,
should the police come round...
There's no prostitutes here!
..they have a sticker on the door
that says, "No prostitutes here".
So, when the police would come,
sometimes the police would come
and they would just
go into one of the rooms with
one of the prostitutes and sometimes
they'd go, "Oh, you know, we're not
allowing any prostitution here."
There's none of them here.
No, look at the sticker!
Look at the sign, we've got
the sticker.
We've got the sticker and
everything.
Exactly, yeah.
It was bizarre. That year was
so surreal in retrospect.
I didn't...
Russian ringmaster,
pigs crossed out...
I taught Italian in the Ministry
of Defence during the first
Gulf War - that was my day job.
Teaching Italians to say,
"Hi, my name is Stefano."
Specifically?
My university career was very
different.
LAUGHTER
What? You didn't live in a
brothel?
I was in Norwich for three years.
All right. OK.
LAUGHTER
I'll drink to that.
Here's to Norwich!
To think when you're young you just
accept all this and just go with it,
don't you? Yeah.
My old university house used to be
a brothel, actually.
Did it? Yeah. In York, it's
a little bit different.
Apparently, cos we'd have taxi
drivers picking us up.
"Oh, have you finished work for
the..?" I lived with all girls.
"Have you finished work for the
night?"
We were like,
"No, we have not!
"I'm on the way to lectures,
thank you very much!"
I never went to lectures.
My friend, there was a, um,
you always go there to learn
the language and then just make
friends with Brits, and there was a
friend Cath down the road.
And I was, you know,
quite a feminist at the time.
I wore my Doc Martens all the time,
and I used to get really angry
and the Italians would slow down
and go, "Ciao, bella".
Kind of "Get in my car", and I was
constantly having fits about it.
And Cath went, "Sal, I really
don't know what your problem is.
"You get up in the morning looking
like shit, go to buy your milk,
"12 people tell you you're gorgeous
before breakfast."
And she said, "Just enjoy it!"
you know.
And I was... "Grr, it's not
all right."
But when I came back to
England I felt really weird because
I would leave the house,
"Hello, world!"
Everybody ignores you.
And for the rest of my natural life!
LAUGHTER
But Ellie, I would like to know,
what bit you did for Obama?
It was quite a little bit.
But no... When I...
This is Barack Obama,
the actual President of the...
Well, before I was a comedienne,
and after I was a model,
there were the awful years,
the dark times,
that was time when I worked in, sort
of, marketing and events,
and PR and that kind of nonsense.
Basically, if you needed a mouse mat
with a logo put on it,
I was your girl.
So, yeah, I was doing this job
and I was working for an
international news channel based
in London and they were putting
on a big event for the US election.
It was the first election when
Barack Obama was going to become
President.
Obviously, we didn't know
that at the time, but it was the big
party for that night, and so I was
there and I was very excited,
and we'd invited loads of different
Americans to come.
Like big Americans who were
in the UK,
so we'd...
Like Kevin Spacey and the like.
And I was there, and I was very
excited and I had a clipboard
and headset
so I felt terribly powerful.
And I'd be able to say things like,
"Emergency!
We're out of Arancini Balls!"
And things... One of the greatest
nights of my life, but um...
Did you really have a thing there?
Yes! Seriously?
Like the Secret Service?
Yeah, and I had an ear thing
and they were like,
"Oh, the flambes outside have gone
out. Emergency!"
Is that a code word? No.
The flambes are out.
The flambes...
Mr Sandman is in... Yeah.
So, I was giddy with excitement
and then, sort of during the
middle of the evening, up these
steps walks Josh Hartnett of...
Gosh! People are gasping!
Right, girls!
Girls have gasped.
Of Pearl Harbor fame.
We invited him, but we didn't think
he'd come and he just came by
himself
not with a publicist or anything.
And he was like the most beautiful
person I've ever seen in my life,
and he came in and I had my
clipboard, and I was like,
"Hm, what was it again?
"Josh? OK, I'll see
if I can find you."
Is that what you did?
Yeah.
Made him out as if he was a nobody?
Yeah, so Josh Hartnett's in the
party.
Yeah.
And the party's going very well.
Are you all right?
So Josh Harnett's there.
Got Josh in the building.
Josh is in the building, exactly!
And it's all going very well
and then I see he's about to leave,
and my friends are like, "Ellie,
you really fancy him, this
"is your only time. When are you
ever going to be in a building with
Josh?"
Don't let it go without giving him
your number.
Exactly, right.
So, I was like what I'm going to do.
Where you really up for it?
I was well up for it, Johnny.
Were you? Yeah.
Awesome!
Good for you, I say. Thanks.
That's exactly the right attitude.
Wait, wait.
I want to hear what happens next.
Well, Charlie, what happens.
You're giving him a husky voice.
Shut up, Johnny!
LAUGHTER
I just get excited.
Well, calm down.
All right, I don't get out much,
Chaz.
So he's going. I'm like, right this
is my moment, this is my moment.
I think, "Right, I'm going to
give him my business card."
So I get out my business card
to give him,
and he's just about to leave.
I take him by the hand
and I kiss him on the cheek...
Yeah? I give him my business card
and then I realise
I have not thought about what
I'm going to say.
So, I panic.
And end up saying, in quite,
sort of, a lascivious way
"In case you ever need
anything in London."
LAUGHTER
Then he just walks away thinking,
"Well, she's a massive prostitute!"
LAUGHTER
Shockingly, he never called!
I'm thinking he must have just lost
the card, that's the only
explanation.
AH!
So that's how I helped Obama.
If you had that moment again,
what would you say?
I'd just give him
a blowy in the loos.
LAUGHTER
Is the correct answer.
That should not get
a round of applause.
Are there correct answers on this
show? Can you win points?
I'm actually going to bring in
points tonight for the first time.
That sounds really good.
That sounds to be exactly
the right etiquette.
Oh, my mum's going to kill me
if she sees this.
Not at all.
A blowy! A blowy?
What's you favourite
terminology for it, then?
Oh, those were the days!
I don't know.
I don't even remember...
There was a time...
..what it feels like.
LAUGHTER
There was a time when the boys
where I'm from in Essex
called it the most disgusting thing
I've ever heard...
What?
A gobble.
A gobble?
Yes, I remember a girl who's...
LAUGHTER
When I... When I was talking to the
researcher before about...
I said, "Does it matter what
we talk about?" and he said no,
it's usually quite adult humour.
So, I thought OK, it'll be
jokes about James Joyce and ballet
and opera.
LAUGHTER
And I prepared my best ones!
Had I known it was all...
Give us one of your James Joyce
one-liners. Well...
He had syphilis, so he couldn't even
see his eyes hurt so much.
James Joyce was getting
a nosh one time...
LAUGHTER
..off a ballet dancer!
In the loo.
So, anyway... Please, the ballet
jokes that you have.
Back to ballet.
That's such a good title,
"Jokes about James Joyce and Ballet"
that I can't really think we'll use
anything else at the end.
We may as well just wrap.
Anyway, Charlie, I want you to tell
me about sprucing up
Stephen Fry's interiors.
I quite like saying that.
It's a...
Yes, you've made quite a dull
story sound intriguing.
LAUGHTER
He's a professional!
Yeah, no, it was in my days as
a painter and decorator.
When I left university
I was in a band for six years,
I was a singer for six years,
and...
The Higsons. I remember.
They were good.
Yeah, The Higsons - it was good fun.
But you never made any money,
so the bass player and myself
when we weren't touring,
we started doing a bit of decorating
because we had a bit of time.
And we started making good money,
you know,
there are a lot of houses in London.
And Paul Whitehouse, who I'd met at
university,
was working as a plasterer.
He did fancy plastering like running
cornices and mouldings and things.
So, we often worked together.
And Harry was also someone we'd met
and he was...
Harry Enfield. Harry Enfield.
Yes, sorry. Harry Enfield.
Did he have a trade?
He'd been working as a milkman.
We all ended up squatting in these
flats in Hackney, and, yeah,
he was working as a milkman,
Paul was a plasterer
and I was a decorator.
This seems absurd.
Well, it was a long time ago.
Paul was a good plasterer.
A very good plasterer.
He was on The Big Breakfast Show.
He came to do some plastering.
He could still do it. I was a very
decorator as well, I'll have you
know. Were you?
Well, you know,
we did posh decorating.
And, posh people, they don't
really like having working-class
people like Johnny in their houses.
Did you sort of front the crew?
"Hi. Good afternoon!"
We were all posh.
Paul's not posh.
He's posher than he sounds.
No, no, but...
No, he is not posh!
Well, you know, his mum...
No, he's not.
His mother's an opera singer.
Um...
She plays urchins.
No, no, he's...
He can do posh.
Yes.
But we'd get quite nice,
posh jobs.
And Harry was starting to do
the comedy stuff and he got to know
Stephen and Hugh and they said,
"We need someone to decorate our
house."
They were living together at the
time, just sharing a house,
and um...
Good save.
Stephen's fantasy life nearly
came true then.
Well, Stephen had made huge amounts
of money re-writing
Me And My Girl musical...
That's right.
A musical taking out all
the references, all the "N" words
and things like that that
were in it. Is that right?
I didn't know.
Is that how he did it?
So, they got us in.
Me and Paul went in and we decorated
their house top to bottom
and replastered it and spruced it
all up,
and, of course, we were
incredibly annoying because we were
starting to write a bit for Harry
and we were thinking,
"Oh, this looks like all right,
get in and do a bit of comedy."
So we would sort of do
comedy routines
and funny voices whilst...
Paul never stops.
Well, no, he is your archetypal
comedian.
You're the sort of more quietly
spoken, generally a bit more...
Yeah.
But Paul's just never...
He's nearly as bad as Johnny.
No, he's worse. I've worked
with him. I've worked with him.
He's miles worse.
He's miles worse. Seriously,
I don't even get a word in there.
No, he is. He's miles worse.
He is, you know,
he'll do voices and impressions.
He's incredibly entertaining.
Bloody funny, isn't he?
Brilliant!
You know, and I would try and keep
up and we'd do these funny...
"Oh, they're up!
Let's do another funny routine."
In the hope they might spot us
and say, "Oh, you two guys,
"you're terribly funny. You should
come on the television with us."
So, it worked!
We did get onto TV.
That is hilarious.
So, we did up the house,
we did a fantastic job
and then they were both rich enough
to move on, and Paul and I,
our career took off in TV
and we bought the house off them.
Was this the beginning of
Loadsamoney? The start of that?
Well, it kind of was,
because we started...
You know, "I can buy shoes!"
Things like that.
Do you know about Loadsamoney,
Ellie? You were a bit to young
maybe?
Yeah, no. Yeah, I've seen
it on the YouTube.
The YouTube facility.
The extraordinary thing about it...
So funny, wasn't it?
..was if you put all the TV
appearances of Loadsamoney together,
everything he did, it would
probably last about 20 minutes.
Yeah. That's all it was.
It was a brief thing, wasn't it?
You know, Paul and I doing those
jobs together,
that was one of the origins
of Loadsamoney
because we would often pretend to
be working class builders.
We would do these marvellous,
funny routines, talking about girls
and drinking.
No, we did.
So that was sort of one of the ways
that Loadsamoney came from.
It was extraordinary
because Margaret Thatcher in
the House of Commons actually said,
so we are in Hansard, she said,
"People have accused us of creating
"a Loadsamoney economy.
Well, what's wrong with that?"
Is that what she said?
Yeah.
I finished the link
and I just heard, clunk!
And funnily enough,
laughter rather like that.
Johnny, tell me about how you
nearly died on an oil rig.
Why didn't you die on an oil rig?
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
Very good point, very good point.
Very good point.
Well, I nearly did. I mean...
And there's, there's your...
Am I like, "Boo!"?
LAUGHTER
Do you know what I mean? I've become
the fucking bad guy!
You're not the bad guy.
You're lovely, we all love you,
but we want to know how you nearly
died. "Boo!"
HE HISSES
LAUGHTER
I'll kill you all!
Erm...
Well, I to... It's awful!
I never thought...
Anyone comes on this show and
becomes, like, a panto baddy!
I thought I was really... I thought
I was really opening things up!
LAUGHTER
And now it turns out I'm not
very popular!
LAUGHTER
Oh, my...
What happened to... So you're
on the oil rig.
Yeah, I went on this oil rig, cos I
was filming for this film show,
and it wasn't actually an oil rig,
it was an oil rig escape tower.
Now, these are things hundreds of
feet high, and when an oil rig
is burning, they stick you in, like,
a metal box about the size
of a minibus, and you have to get
strapped in,
they just literally drop it off the
side at great speed
in case the oil rig's about to burst
into flames.
And I got stitched up by this team,
I think probably felt the same
as you did about me.
LAUGHTER
It seems that they too wanted to
place me in a metal box
and eject me very fast. I...
Those are just the feelings
I engender.
And, erm... And... And...
it was terrible, because I was going
to do the opening.
There are times when you do telly,
you forget what you're actually
about to do.
You think, "I'm concentrating on
learning the lines."
There was a show called Moviewatch.
I was going, "Welcome to Moviewatch
"from Dundee. Today we're looking
at the city," and then the idea
was I finished, and they were going
to drop this thing off the tower.
I said, "Don't actually drop it.
We can film it from the outside,
"you don't need to see me in it.
You know we can just do that."
They go, "Yeah. That's
what we're going to do."
But again, you know the vibe
round me.
LAUGHTER
The vibe round me is... "Let's drop
the bastard!" "let's... Let's...
"Let's do him harm!
"Harm him! Harm him!"
And so I got in this thing and they
said, "Don't worry, we're not
"actually going to drop you in it,
cos we're not covered, anyway."
The director assured me.
And so I got in this metal box,
and they have to... And it's...
The impact is so fucking massive,
they have to strap you, you have a
special seatbelt for your head.
And you KNOW things are bad
when there's a seatbelt
going around your head.
And everything... It was like
when you see guys on a gurney,
about to be... The death sentence.
It was like that
but in a minibus seat.
And I was going, "Welcome
every... Er... And that's where
"we're coming from." And I was
meant to go, "Whoa!",
and then I was going to get out of
there and they were going to drop...
They had one
already on film from the exterior
shot, they were going to drop it in,
and then I just... I finished the
link and I just heard "clunk".
LAUGHTER
And funnily enough,
laughter rather like that.
LAUGHTER
From most of fucking Dundee,
and this thing just went, "Whoa!",
like this and I was like, "No! Jesus
Christ!", and you leave your...
Honestly, it's the most terrifying
thing, and it hits the..
The Scottish man says,
"You don't want to, Johnny,
"cos if you hit that water,
from that height,
"it's like fucking concrete.
You can just 'getdifuckya'."
And it did, and it hit so hard.
So, for the rest of the show,
I've got this sort of neck,
and my neck is just hurting so much
that I'm sort of looking round
like this. Anyway, I get fished
out the water.
I'm in this thing.
I'm the only one in there,
so I'm alone in this metal box
floating round in the North Sea.
They fired up the rig and just left.
Because I didn't think it was going
to go down,
I've loosened the safety belt.
I thought,
"I've got a bit of movement. I'm not
going to link like that.
"It's like Hannibal Lector
or something."
So, I've gone off this thing,
it's gone "Bang!"
really hard, and it's really hurt
and my head's really loose,
so I've got this stiff neck.
You know, one of those real,
"You all right there?"
"Not too bad. You all right?"
So, that's when I nearly died on
an oil rig.
There you go. It was fucking awful.
I had to go on a gurney thing...
No... I mean a be...
When I was in Jonathan Creek.
And the paramedic had to strap me
on this stretcher,
and they thought it'd be really
funny and they strapped my legs
incredibly tightly, pulled as hard
as they could
and then left me there, and then I
was out round the corner
and I had to wait for the camera
and the other actors to come,
and I was there for about ten
minutes, and it was...
After a while, I started going...
CHUCKLING: Saying, shouting...
"This strap is too tight! I can't
move my legs! Where are those men?!"
I know! "Someone release me!
"Help me! There must be a runner!
I can't move my legs!
"It's awful! Ow! Ow!"
But no-one would come. They were
like "Fuck it, leave him.
"What a wanker." It's actually
quite reasonable.
It's horrible! Yeah! I can't get
anyone's attention.
I know they can all hear me.
That was... You know, there's that
moment when you think everyone...
Well, I get that a lot.
"Everyone hates me."
It's, like, my factory setting.
LAUGHTER
That's not true at all.
I was just playing up to.
You were just playing up to it.
Just checking
the whole... Still being the bad
guy. Make way for the bad guy.
Uh... Well we've got...
We can finish. Erm...
LAUGHTER
Our work here is done.
Our work here is done.
Our work here is done.
You know how to end a show!
LAUGHTER
Whoa, you really do!
What a climax!
HE HUMS BOMBASTIC SONG
That's all, folks.
I don't know how I got the job!
It's the laziest show.
I have no understanding of a finale.
It's just,
"Well, that will be that, then."
LAUGHTER
I've done some of the laziest shows
on radio
and television over 22 years,
and I can tell you this -
this is bone fucking idle.
LAUGHTER
There's no preparation. You just
rely on people to turn up
with stuff and you do fuck all.
I watched you round the back, you
were sleeping in your dressing room,
eating Maltesers when you woke
up. Cos I opened them. I do!
You did? Oh, YOU opened the
Maltesers? I opened the Maltesers
cos I was having a piss, cos there's
not one in ours.
Charles has used my lavatory as
well.
Has he? Well, he had no choice.
That would be quite a good title.
Yeah.
Oh, titles!
Charles Has Used My Lavatory!
We have to have a title.
I quite like
She's Got "Minge" Written On
Her Foot.
LAUGHTER
"Minge" On My Foot - the new album.
My mum's going to be so cross
if she watches this.
Yeah. It's hard to get passed
I'd Give Him A Blowy In The Loo.
Don't!
"I'd Nosh Hartnett", I quite like.
Nosh Hartnett's good.
Yeah. I like "Jokes About James
Joyce And Ballet."
I thought that was one of my
favourite ones.
Is it a democracy or do you
have to choose it?
Well... Can we have a vote?
We could vote.
I mean, I'm open to suggestions.
I bet you are!
Cos you haven't written anything!
Unlike Josh.
LAUGHTER
Oh! Oh!
And the audience,
suddenly there was a new bad guy!
# Shot through the heart! #
SHE LAUGHS
If Josh is watching this,
he'll be kicking himself.
He really won't be.
Such an idiot.
LAUGHTER
Please, will you thank my guests,
Ellie Taylor....
Johnny Vaughan...
Sally Phillips...
and Charlie Higson.
APPLAUSE
I'm Alan Davies,
and you have been watching
Jokes About James Joyce And Ballet.
HE CHUCKLES
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Subtitles by Ericsson