Richard's Peace Treaty With Ex-Pat Brits in Tunisia

I see you all there, hiding in the corners,
You're like an army of well suntanned stalkers.
You keep coming to see if I’ve given more offence
To that fine African nation that gave the world the Fez.
Or is that Morocco? I really can't be certain.
I do know it's where Judy bought kitchen curtains.
Well, no more shall I insult good old Tunisia
I’ve got bigger nations to fry, like Bulgaria.
I insulted you with a little tale that was mostly fiction,
Some fact, but wrapped in my immaculate diction.
But now I'm happy that you kept on coming by.
The Guardian lot didn't, nor did Stephen Fry.

Richard’s Poem To The Googlebot Spider

Dear Googlebot, my friend, my one true reader,
How did you find your way, from whence did you wonder?
Where are you going now that you’ve seen my little jape,
About Bill Oddie’s onions and Stephen Fry’s cape?
And now you know all about little Judith Charmers,
That she’s psychic, four foot two, and recommends the Bahamas.
Googie, I think that there’s only you and I
And by writing this piece, I’m wasting my time.
You are but a robot, a piece of electronic kit
And have no idea of succulent English wit.
Yet you are quite welcome, I’m so glad you’re here
More than bloody exiled Brits from Tunisia.

© Richard Madeley, 2007

The Man With Two Rectums

Although I’m glad that you’re tolerant on these rare occasions when I fall silent for a day, I do expect a little more from you when I don’t make my usual Monday morning appearance and still haven’t been seen forty eight hours later.

Not a single email message asking me if I’m fine. Not one of you checking with UK embassies to make sure that we haven’t been kidnapped by ex-pat Brits from Tunisia. Sometimes I just don’t understand you people. Here are two of the nation’s best loved people – or at least one of them as I can’t speak for Judy – who could have been snatched by a gang of heavily-tanned retired pub landlords and whisked to Tunis for God only knows what kind of sick and depraved camel-based action they do over there. I wouldn’t mind but when Fry goes off on one of his American odysseys, he’s got all different kinds of desperate people asking if he’s well. They send him cheesecake, write him poems, and all this for a blog as moribund as a copy of Ezra Pound’s poems wedged between Jordan’s breasts. He’s already got thirty seven comments for one measly article he wrote for The Guardian, yet my encounter with that psychic wonder known as Judith Chalmers still only has four!

So, for those of you who have been wondering where I am, I can now reveal to you that I’ve been ill. Pretty damn rotten actually. I’ve been suffering from a debilitating case of sinusitis that hit me late on Sunday evening and by Monday morning had me slowly melting in the sauna in a desperate attempt to reopen nostrils more blocked than the North West Passage. Apparently, I’d caught something from the snails.

Do I hear you ask about snails? Well it’s about time somebody did. I’ve been working with damn things for the last two weeks and not one of you noticed or asked me how it’s going. Do you really think I’ll carry on blogging if you continue to ignore me like this?

To be fair, it has been a hush-hush project. I’ve been secretly filming a new game show called ‘Snail’s Pace With Richard Madeley’, which is due to go out on ITV in the new year. The producers had been fearing that Noel Edmonds would steal the idea before we got the first series in the can. The premise of the show is simple. So simple that even Edmonds could copy it. Contestants have to answer a series of questions before they get to compete on a one-to-one basis against snails in some fiendish competitions in which snails naturally excel. It’s a bit like Edmonds’ current show, ‘So You Think You’re Harder Than An Toddler’, but with more slime, a better class of presenter, and far fewer infants running around hitting each other with hammers.

I can already tell you that it’s making for great TV and that the first show will be an instant classic. You won’t ever have laughed so hard as when you watch a 64 year old pipe fitter from Norfolk trying to beat a snail to fill a bucket with mucus. It really is hilarious and not half as grotesque as it sounds. We’ve also got tests of strength that involve dropping bricks onto contestants and snails, agility contests when we see who can bend the most, and then the highlight of every episode when we pit the remaining contestant against a bag of snails in a trivia contest. You think we humans would come out on top every time but you’d be surprised.

It’s a great show and I think it will help revive my career, if only I can avoid catching any more colds from the snails. At first the doctor told me he thought it was a reaction to the medication I’d been taking to reduce the swelling in my earlobes. Only when the tests came back did we realise that I had caught a cold from the show’s top snail, Slick Sherry.

Sherry is a special North American snail who had been winning the races on the show all week. Now it turns out that Sherry has only been winning because of the copious amounts of slime she’s been producing. Apparently snails can catch the same colds as we humans. Biologically speaking, I’ve not been producing catarrh all week but slime. I don’t want to go into the grim details but when I woke up this morning, I’d actually slipped out of bed and down the stairs. To tell you the truth, Judy found me in the vegetable garden lying on the underside of a cabbage leaf.

The antibiotics are finally beginning to kick in and I’m feeling a little better. I hope to resume my blogging duties in the next few days but, in the meantime, I want to leave you with some of the snail facts that I’ve discovered making the show. Did you know that snails are all allergic to toothpaste? They also have two rectums, a characteristic they oddly share with a BBC newsreader that modesty forbids me from naming. Snails can live over forty years and can produce enough slime in a year to fill a bathtub. Some American clinics offer rich celebrities a chance to sit in a bathtub of snail slime, which has proven ability to get rid of wrinkles. The only downside to the treatment is that exposure to salt will make you wrinkle twice as bad as before and you might regurgitate your intestines. And on that pleasant note, I’m off to write a synopsis for my next show, ‘The Man With Two Rectums: The Huw Edwards Story’.

The Tunisian Weekend

You have to forgive me if I’m looking a little ragged around the edges this morning. We’re just back from a whistle stop holiday in Tunisia. And can I just say what a wonderful nation it is. Such colour, such weather, and a nation full of wonderful customs, cuisine, and culture. The only thing that let it down was those damn Tunisians and their inability to understand English. They want to speak nothing but French or Arabic, which you might think suits a man who works on Channel 4. But it doesn’t. There wasn’t a single shop selling subtitles. Judy suggested that we buy one of those remote controls to change audio track but we were sorely let down by the absence of a Dixons on the Tunisian high street. There wasn’t even a Boots.

After struggling to get to our hotel, we decided to do things the old fashioned way, by paying a local to translate everything for us. Only not being used to having a translator, I soon got into some difficulty because I didn’t know who was speaking or what was being translated. Our translator would start chatting to us and I’d think he’s talking to me when, in fact, he was merely translating something somebody else had said to him. I didn’t know who to look at, whose hand to shake, or, at one point, which end of the donkey to give the carrot. I soon realised that the problem lay in our translator looking too much like the locals and I solved this problem by putting a paper bag on his head. We spent the whole weekend in Tunisia being trailed around by a man wearing a brown paper bag, translating everything we heard.

In the end it was a good bit of business. We managed to do our piece for the Holiday Programme before we jetted home again late last night, and landed in Heathrow around midnight. To say things have been a bit hectic is an understatement. The last thing we needed was more trouble.

This morning we were back to our usual routine with a shopping trip to the supermarket. We were walking around our local Tesco, when Judy suddenly nudged me.

‘Richard,’ she said. ‘Did you notice something odd?’

‘Odd? What kind of odd?’ I asked, dumping a leg of lamb into the trolley.

‘Back at the cheese counter,’ she said. ‘When you were buying your weekly Edam. Everything you said sounded a bit foreign.’

‘Foreign?’

‘Well, a bit Arabic but mixed with a little French.’

As soon as she’d said it, I knew she was right. But I was also busy slapping my head, realising my oversight.

‘We forget to pay him off!’ I cried, dragging the figure in the paper bag from the shadows of the cracker section. ‘It was my fault. I was so used to having him with us, I must have paid for his seat on the plane back.’

‘I did wonder why British Airways sounded more like Air France,’ said Judy. ‘But what do we do now?’

‘We might take the bag off his head to begin with,’ I suggested.

Judy whistled and raised her eyes to the security cameras. ‘Immigration,’ she sang in warning.

She was right. You have no idea who is watching the feed from these supermarket cameras. The last thing the Richard&Judy show needs is a reputation for hiring illegal immigrant labour. In the end, we bundled him into the Range Rover and headed straight for Heathrow where we left him by the terminal building, with enough money to buy himself a ticket home. I think he was happy with the arrangement but, with the paper bag still on his head, I really couldn’t tell. But that’s another problem with Tunisians. They are people who very rarely show their emotions. And you can consider that your Richard Madeley Certified Fact of the Day.