PANIC

On the 14th of August I’m going to the Seattle Hotel at the Marina in Brighton. There are going to be sixty odd people having lunch there. The are known as The Media Group. I’ve been asked to speak to them about my career.

Unfortunately they have only allocated me fifteen minutes to deliver it. Fifty years in the business in fifteen minutes! I know brevity is soul of wit but. hell’s bells, I’ll either have to rattle through it like a rocket or leave chunks out. What chunks, though?

My trouble has always been that I go off in tangents. Mention one thing and I shoot off talking about something different. I met up with Barry Cryer the other day for a chat. We sat down with a beer at four o’clock and I was still there at seven thirty. I say something and that triggers him off on another story. Crazy.

He’s doing a week at the Edinburgh Festival. His act has got to last forty minutes because someone else is booked at the same space straight after him. Barry just tells joke after joke, he’s not aware of time but he’s got an arrangement with his pianist, who plays a chord, to alert Barry, and he launches into his Zimmer Frame song which hits the button dead on the forty minutes.

I haven’t got a pianist and I don’t know the Zimmer song, so I’m up the creek. I’m scratching my head like a lunatic trying to work something out, which is not good for my ever increasingly depleting locks. The floor around me is littered with wispy hair.

There’s no doubt, I’ll be completely bald by the time I face The Media Group. Oh, gawd.

Later P.S. I think I’ve cracked it!