You might say that being a best-selling author is all glitz and book signings but let me tell you about the significant chafing around my right buttock which is making it difficult to type tonight. Not only is it typical of the things they fail to mention when you sign your publishing deal but I’m also having flashbacks of the time when Judy and I rode a camel across Southport beach for Granada Reports. Judy thrashed our Bactrian one too many times and I slipped from the second hump. This went out live to the North West and I suffered a terrible wound caused by an impacted mollusk.
This time, the damage was inflicted over a long morning sitting on a PVC chair in a hot Radio One studio while Chris Moyle interviewed me over his breakfast of Sugar Puffs and scintillating wit. It was the latest part of the press junket for my book, ‘Fathers and Sons’ and I continued to rack up the mistakes.
Last week, I told a woman from 'The Guardian' that sherbet was poisonous to tadpoles (it isn’t, I was confusing it with tapioca), and only yesterday I told a crowd of shoppers at a W.H. Smiths book signing that earwigs are the only insect to have an odd number of elbows (they don’t, I was thinking of the Slovakian cockroach). This time, I went and let slip about my blog. Judy thinks it was a stroke of genius. I say it was something much more significant.
It came about because the early viewing figures from ‘Watch’ are only respectable. The pale somewhat beside the figures for the Appreciation Society which is clearly where all the Madeley action is to be found. With readership numbers peaking in the high hundred thousands, it’s here that the hard core Madeley fan comes to smell my musk. And a powerful agent it most certainly is. Moyles was soon under the spell of my aroma. With a large kernel of puffed wheat hanging from his second or third chin, he asked me if I hate Channel 4. It was an unscripted question and I made a glib comment about my blog. You can hear it here (thanks to David over at The Spine for bringing the recording to my attention) or here (about 1h 57m 20seconds) where the BBC have the full show.
‘Brilliant!’ said Moyles.
Well, it was like steaming custard poured on the large pudding of my satisfaction. And as soon as the skin thickened, I set this official recommendation in the middle of a line and pointed at it, thus:
‘Brilliant’ -- Chris Moyles
I came off the show happy but concerned by the damage done to my right buttock by the PVC chair. We Madeleys have always perspired heavily around the flanks but this flood had spread to outlying regions that normally favour dry conditions. The chafing was more toxic that a North American housing market. Yet even as I applied a soothing balm I’d fashioned from the coconut from a dark chocolate bounty mixed with a can of diet Tango (thank you Ray Mears!), I was already having doubts. ‘Well you’ve done it now, Dick!' I thought. 'Your postmodern game of hide and seek has gone too far. This time you’ve locked yourself in the coal cellar and the latch has fallen outside. This is a darkness from which you might not escape. People will never believe in your now...’
Which is why I have to post tonight without a care about the damage I’m doing to the right lower side of the left-hand of the ampersand. I just wanted to let you know that I’m as real as I sit here in my grey flannel trousers, smelling quite manly but vaguely like a taste of paradise. Sorry for what I said and I’ll try to be on my best behaviour tomorrow when I’m off to sign copies of my book for the people of Monken Hadley. Be sure to pop across to Chingford in the afternoon when, buttocks permitted, I’ll be joining other celebrities as we shin up palm trees in aid of the local West Indian community.
[UPDATE: Link now fixed]
