Graham

In 2013, I ran a season of variety shows at the Bethnal Green Working men's club in London. Every show had performances from some of my favourite cabaret monkeys, me hosting it and doing new material, and an interview with someone interesting. It was a bit of a passion project, and people seemed to share my passion, because it went really well - some nice big audiences came to see genuine one night only lineups. We had stars from the golden age of variety telling scandalous stories, kick lines of showgirls, lots of surprises, and I got to introduce people I admired, and chat to them on stage.

One of those people was Graham Linehan.

In 2013 I was a fan of Graham's work. Father Ted, obviously. But my own personal favourite was the sketch show Big Train, which I still think contains one of the funniest sketches ever aired on TV. I didn't know Graham, but managed to get a message to him through other people, and I pitched him the show. The fee was miniscule, but he must have thought it would be a fun thing to do, because he said yes, and we locked in a date.

On the night, when he and his wife arrived, I introduced myself to him and ran through how things were going to go. He was delightful. He could see I was stressing slightly, and he reassured me. "I love doing these things, and I'm good at them. It'll be great. It'll be easy", he told me.

And it was easy, and he was great. He was funny, we shared our favourite sketches, he got laughs, and generally came across as a realy nice friendly dude, who wanted to be there.

And here we are, quite a few years later, and it feels like the present has made a fool out of the past. Every so often, I'd think about how friendly he'd been that night, and how that makes my opinion of him these days so complicated. Because Graham changed.

For a long time I've felt like there was a loose end here.

So, I'm going to tie it off.