Back Story Page 0,129
of this slippery slope for years now, so I reckon I’m a sort of Spiderman figure in the world of this metaphor.
But in December 2004, I must have been outside the pub for reasons of space; this was two and a half years before indoor smoke was banned without an associated chimney.
‘I’ve got to go in about half an hour,’ I was saying to whoever would listen. ‘I’ve agreed to do a try-out for a stupid pointless thing.’
This had been my sole topic of conversation all day. It was the afternoon of the BBC Radio Comedy Christmas party which I’d been massively looking forward to. The comparatively brief business of the lunchtime party having finished, everyone had now gone to the pub. In general things were going well for me. Both Peep Show and That Mitchell and Webb Sound had been given second series and so I reckoned I had a pretty viable career. I felt I was owed a nice relaxing Christmas, kicked off by an afternoon of heavy drinking at this most fun and least wanky of all media events.
It feels very much like the office party for a lot of people who don’t have offices. Even those not invited to the do itself would wander along to one of the post-party pubs round the corner from Broadcasting House: the Yorkshire Grey or the Crown and Sceptre. I was outside the latter explaining to the umpteenth person that my ‘end of term’ piss-up was basically ruined.
‘I’ve been nursing two beers for five hours,’ I repeated sadly.
The ‘try-out’ that I’d said I’d go to was for a new Channel 4 panel show unappetisingly called ‘FAQ U’. So, a bit like ‘Fuck You’. Splendid. FAQ obviously stands for ‘Frequently Asked Questions’, and the ‘U’ for ‘You’ but, as the phrase ‘Frequently Asked Questions You’ makes no sense, it was impossible not to conclude that they’d wanted the show to be called ‘Fuck You’ – that they thought that would be good or funny. So I wasn’t very hopeful about the project, but I also felt that refusing to go to a job audition because I’d earmarked that day for a nine-hour drinking session would be crossing some sort of Rubicon in a march away from professionalism.
Also, I wanted to do panel shows. Despite being in a genuinely award-winning sitcom and a well-reviewed Radio 4 show, Rob and I didn’t feel like we’d quite broken through. Maybe it was the fact that fewer people had seen Peep Show than read some of its complimentary reviews.
I really liked the thought of trying to be funny off-the-cuff as part of my job. I enjoyed the warm-up chats we always had with the audience at the beginning of radio recordings. I didn’t want to do stand-up, but I wanted an arena in which I could try and just ‘be funny’ in public.
I’d had the occasional opportunity. I’d been a team captain in a show called Fanorama which had been broadcast on E4 in 2001 and 2002, long before E4 was a channel with an audience. The two series were hosted by Claudia Winkleman and Lauren Laverne respectively and the other team captain was Rhys Thomas. It was a show in which obsessive fans of bands, actors, celebrities or TV programmes competed to prove theirs was the deepest fanaticism. Rhys and I were supposed to keep it all light. We’d shoot three or four shows a day and get a series of twenty in the can in under a week.
It wasn’t brilliant but I really enjoyed it and, as I’d hoped, it led to an invitation to appear on a proper panel show on a terrestrial channel. I’m afraid it might not be one of the ones you’ve heard of – in fact I’ve just checked and it doesn’t even have its own Wikipedia page. Even Bruiser has its own Wikipedia page. It was called Does Doug Know?
You get asked a wide range of questions if you’re on TV – particularly since the advent of Twitter – but no one has ever asked me if and when Does Doug Know? is coming back. Neither, to be fair, have they slagged it off. Or mentioned it at all. Most spookily of all, there’s no trace of it on Dave.
I’m beginning to suspect that I dreamt Does Doug Know? It feels like a dream. I can’t remember a lot of the details – the premise, for example – and there were odd and incongruous people from the