Tosser

I WANT A PRIME MINISTER WHO SAYS, I REALLY DON'T CARE THAT MICHAEL JACKSON HAS DIED; I HAVE QUITE A BIT OF WORK ON.
AND A LEADER OF THE OPPOSITION WHO DOESN'T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT IT EITHER WOULD BE GREAT.

I'b sorry, I have a cold

Wow! I feel normal again! For the first time in a week. This week we've been doing the radio recordings for Shappi's new Radio 4 show. I do a guest spot every week... except we ended up recording all of my spots on the same night, due to "Radio 4 Compliance Issues". I don't know exactly what this means, except they are draconian. The very phrase "Radio 4 Compliance" strikes fear into the heart of every producer.

One of my bits involved a song which I call The Racism Song except when I'm on public transport. Anyway, we'd already recorded it once and it was all fine. It references idealistic songs like John Lennon's Imagine, Nina Simone's Ain't Got No... I Got Life and (terrifyingly) 4 Non-Blondes What's Up? (it was my own tune, but there were musical jokes in the middle where you can hear the other songs in it - I mean come on, Jammin' does this all the time, right?). But three hours before the second recording I was on the phone to the producer who was going, "it does WHAT? Oh my God, I had no idea. Oh... oh God, we're fucked. Sorry, but the whole thing's fucked. It's... Radio 4 Compliance."

I said, "no, it's fine, I can just rewrite that bit, it'll only take me..." and he was just going "Oh God, oh God, no, we're completely fucked, you don't know what they're like, I mean, it's RADIO 4 COMPLIANCE". I started to get the seriousness of the situation. You do not fuck, apparently, with Radio 4 Compliance.

So I re-wrote the song, got myself to the Drill Hall and arrived to the producer going... "erm, you know the Unconventional Parents song? Well, we have to re-record it and change the ending because of..." at which point I whimpered, "Is it... R4 C?" We'd done a bit at the end for Shappi to sing "Oh, My Old Man's An Exiled Iranian Satirist"... and even though it's an old music hall song, apparently Lonnie fucking Donegan had recorded it and so there might be all sorts of compliance issues, so we rewrote the song into a generic Chaz n Dave style knees-up with about half an hour to go, whilst drinking more red wine than is feasibly good for me on the basis that "it might bring my voice back" (see aforementioned cold), I popped three Nurofen and applied a nasal spray and then wandered on stage thinking, "well, I can't see how this can go wrong."

It was ace though. Radio 4 audiences are the yin to their Compliance yang. And Shappi, John Gordillo, Felix Dexter, Paul Sinha and Aval Vidal totally rocked. Even my Religion bit, which I'd been very worried about under the circumstances, went fine, with the audience joining in like a proper congregation drunk at Midnight Mass. I would also like to thank Shappi for providing me with so many non-controversial topics to write songs on. I'm hoping next series we can do the Holocaust and abortions. Yeah!