Fun is overrated. I am no good at having fun; I get excited when there’s a pattern on my toilet roll.
I am so glad it’s the New Year and the “fun” season is officially over. On New Year’s Eve I drove to Manchester to perform to 200 of the most outrageously drunk people I have ever seen. While I was on stage an inebriated/nearly unconscious man in the front row tried to pull my trousers down. I screamed and he said: “Sorry luv. I thought it was my pint.” He claimed to be having “fun”.
On the way out of the venue I found a screaming woman walking in diagonals in the middle of a dual carriageway and singing “I Will Survive”. She was obviously having “fun”. As I approached my car I saw a middle-aged woman rolling down a one-way street wearing stilettos, with black eyeliner smeared across her face and a hairpiece that had slid from her head down to her neck. “Are you Dave?” she asked me. The local CCTV operators must have thought they were watching Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video – though at least in that, the walking dead were choreographed.
People seem to measure how much of a good time they’ve had by how little they can remember. I have friends who say, “I had a brilliant time last night. I can’t remember what happened.” Well, actually you vomited down a drain and got groped by a bouncer, so it’s probably best you can’t remember. People seem so intent on showing the world they’re having fun that it just looks like desperation. How much fun can wearing an oversized mad hatter’s hat, pink fairy wings and getting obliterated on WKD be?
Being “forced” to have fun is even worse. Hen nights? You are meant to be celebrating your best friend’s impending marriage and what do you do? You dress her up like a slag and drag her round Blackpool in -plates and vomit.
I find fun in smaller things, like watching a Range Rover being clamped on the King’s Road or giving tourists the wrong directions. It’s even more fun if you can remember.
It’s January, so sales of ridiculous fitness videos starring gyrating Big Brother contestants are going through the roof. Everyone’s got a fitness video. Who next? John Prescott – with “How to exercise on a table without breaking it”? There is an industry built on post-Christmas guilt. Don’t buy in to it. Buy a half-price Christmas pudding and spend January watching UK Gold. Get fit and healthy in spring, when the weather is warmer and you discover that last year’s T-shirts and dresses cut off your circulation.
Even Saddam Hussein has a new DVD out. Available at all good Texan record shops from 29 December 2006. Priced $11.99. All proceeds to the Bush Foundation for International Relations. Last year I got the Bin Laden collection of bunker-made DVDs volumes 1, 2 and 3 – with subtitles if purchased in America. What is this obsession with filming everything? I blame Paris Hilton – she started it with that sex video.
My New Year’s resolutions are to grow my body hair and to stop shoplifting. That’ll do me till
1 February. I am making a film for the BBC about hairy women. As part of the show, I walked the red carpet at the British Comedy Awards with armpits full of fake hair à la Julia Roberts. The idea was to see how the paparazzi reacted. Behind me was Harry Hill, and all
I could hear was people shouting: “Harry, Harry!” In my confused state I thought they were shouting, “Hairy, hairy!” so I started shouting, “I know! I know!” It was the most degrading thing I have done. I cannot understand why people want to be famous for the sake of being famous, and trawl around any red carpet having their picture taken for no reason. I’d rather grow an allotment in my armpits any day.