I can’t possibly tell you what happened in Derren’s show last night as firstly it would ruin it, secondly he would probably hunt me down and steal my memories or something if I did, and thirdly it would mean I would start thinking about how he did it all again. The last one is the worst as I woke up this morning and the first thing I did was think ‘but if that was controlled in that way, then how on Earth did…..argh’ at which point I had to distract my brain with some Jeremy Kyle just to relax. Don’t think of clever mind tricks, just watch two people of a lower social demographic shout because they both cheated on each with people who are equally as repulsive. Its almost like Elephant Man cage fighting championships, with a self righteous, arrogant little twerp as a referee. I suggest they do install a cage into the show and just let them have at it. I dare say more disputes would be settled and we’d be rid of some of the horrible people that feel it necessary to deal with personal situations in a public domain. I have never once got annoyed with Layla and thought, ‘do you know what, much rather than talk about this here, lets go to an overly bright 90’s style studio to show everyone our dysfunctional situation. To be fair, I never get annoyed with Layla, she just gets annoyed with me.
Up until Derren it was a rather stressful day starting with attempting to write sketches for kids. This begun with sitting around and discussing how awful it must be fore Miley Cyrus to have Billy Ray Cyrus as her dad, and then playing on Stan’s phone’s Labyrinth app. After that we took a very long lunch where I managed to confuse the waiter by actually ordering food. I have some suspicions now as to whether he worked there or not, or suffered from some sort of displacement disorder whereby he constantly thought he worked in a garage or zoo or something and wondered why, on a daily basis, people kept asking him for food. ‘Why does no one care about the penguins?’ he probably wonders, or ‘surely you need a new crankshaft?’ but nonetheless goes and gives the order to the zookeeper. He really seemed to mentally stop as I gave him each item I wanted to get, and I had to slow down my delivery till I was almost speaking like a cassette that was being played in a walkman with low batteries. For all those younger readers, just read that last sentence as ‘imagine if your i-pod magically slowed down’, and just know for later that cassettes were something they used in Medieval times to ward off evil spirits.
The non-sketch writing was followed by some general Edinburgh accommodation panic. Every year there appears to be some sort of secret start date to look for accommodation that certain people just know, in the same way birds know exactly when to migrate or exactly when you’ve parked your car under a tree and it needs shitting on. I never know what this start date is, but I always seem to miss it by about a week, at which point I am only left with everywhere that Foxtons would tell you was in a ‘plush and near to town location’, meaning you have to hike across three fields and get a private flight just to go to the high street. I’m now not going to be living with the people I thought I was going to be living with, and instead should be living with Ginger and Black and Lauren. They have kindly accepted me into their house hunting group which means they are now four panicking people instead of three. We will all panic together and if needs be our time tables should differ so much that at least one of us can guard our makeshift tent/cardboard box creation if needs be.
Then I met up with Corrie and we drove to Oxford so she could she Derren’s new show before it went to the West End. Corrie was so excited by various elements of the journey that we needn’t have gone to the show. There was a funny circular hill, an inflatable Buckingham Palace Guard, a 50’s diner and a road called Toots Hill Butts, all of which incited some wonder. Less so with me as I have driven past them many a time. Although to be fair Toots Hill Butts was pretty good. She had also made a road trip mix which had lots of tunes with beeps and odd noises you could make beep noises along with. I like songs like that. It makes me able to pretend that I am R2D2 doing karaoke.
The show, well, I cant say much, but it didn’t disappoint. All the tricks have cemented my feeling that Derren is indeed a sorcerer of sorts. He did things that are still upsetting my mind right now and carried them off with such charm and performance that I couldn’t hate him for baffling me. You should go see it. Go on. Hurry up. Then we can talk about the ending which is really distressing me. The man is a proper showman and a master of the dark arts. One day Harry Potter will destroy him, but until then I look forward to his next show. Sort of. It may be that he’s made me think that of course, and in fact I could have hated every iota of last night. But it’s unlikely as. everything. Derren. does. is. brilliant. he. should. rule. the. earth. must. be. assimilated.
