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telly there including both Jimmy and Alan Carr. I remember that it was on Channel 4, that I appeared on two episodes and that I wore a brown shirt for one of them.

The choice of shirt was my key creative decision on that show as I had very few shirts fit for national consumption. My non-folding policy had rendered most of my shirts unpresentable even if you tried to iron them. They were beyond ironing now – they’d gone feral. But I remembered with relief that my mother had recently given me this brown one so it was still in acceptable condition. What I didn’t know, and have since learned, is that if you turn up to do a panel show looking like a dog’s breakfast they give you a shirt anyway.

I don’t remember Does Doug Know? being a huge humiliation, but it can’t have been a triumph because I wasn’t invited on another panel show for three and a half years. I hadn’t had a single invitation between then and the pavement outside the Crown and Sceptre (which a lot of people call the ‘Hat and Stick’ to convey familiarity; you may find that that makes you want to be sick – it does me). And this try-out wasn’t a proper invitation – it was just an audition for another new Channel 4 show with, if anything, an even less promising title than Does Doug Know? (which isn’t very good but would, as discussed in the previous chapter, have been fine if people had liked, or indeed noticed, the programme – and in support of that, let me introduce They Think It’s All Over and Never Mind the Buzzcocks, for fuck’s sake, into evidence).

Yes, my Does Doug Know? performance must have been terrible. Panel shows are hungry beasts and always looking for fresh meat, more panellists – I know that now. But whatever I did on that show led the entire industry to conclude that such programmes were not for me, a conclusion that thankfully it subsequently revoked. Not mentioning any names, but just think of the most annoying person who keeps popping up endlessly on panel shows (apart from me). Think of the one you find most grating and annoying (which, actually, is unlikely to be me in your case unless you have a masochistic taste in books). The most awful witless twat whose continued employment you cannot understand. Done it? (I wonder if we’re thinking of the same person?) Anyway, I must have been worse than him (and it is a him, let’s be honest. Hardly any women are allowed on panel shows so the ones that break through tend to be pretty good).

I’d had the occasional invitation from clip shows, usually with Rob – to appear on the I Love 1987 style of programme and affect nostalgia for Sodastreams – and I’d jumped at them until Rob said he hated doing them so we largely stopped. And he was quite right; they’re a shit form of television and contributors seldom come across well. The context is too unflattering: you simultaneously look like a cheap rentaquote and someone sufficiently arrogant to think their opinions are fascinating. Oddly, a panel show doesn’t carry the same implications, probably because there’s usually a nominal game being played to conceal the fact that it’s really some people behind a desk pontificating. Give Loose Women some sort of quiz structure and I reckon it would only be about half as annoying – although that is still very annoying.

So the FAQ U try-out sounded enough like it might be a reprieve for that foundering side of my career for me to forgo seven pints of beer. At 7 o’clock I stumped miserably away from the pub towards another pub, the Bricklayers Arms, in the upstairs room of which the audition was taking place. I got the job.

FAQ U was to be a nightly comedy discussion show, on at about 11 or 12, even later than Peep Show. I think Channel 4 was trying to recapture the success that they’d misremembered The 11 O’Clock Show as being – but with a simpler format. Some young comedians talk about vaguely topical stuff while sitting on sofas in front of an audience. The show had a three-week pilot run and they wanted to try out a new host for each of the weeks. I was given the job for week 2.

This show was not a success and did not get a series after this trial run.