Diary – 16 February 2017

I’m boning up on conversational Spanish for a trip to the Primera Persona festival in Barcelona with Alexei Sayle. We’re due to talk about The Young Ones — the comedy series we made together 35 years ago. For some reason the show is huge in Catalonia — perhaps it’s scatological: one of their regional symbols is a pooping peasant. The Catalan-dubbed version is still playing on TV, so, as well as Spanish, I am refreshing my catchphrases in Catalan. When I visited Barcelona last year to make a travel programme called Catalunya Experience for Catalan TV3, people asked for selfies and threw peace signs at me in the street, because I played the hippie character, Neil, in The Young Ones. I found I could make the Catalans collapse with laughter by saying, ‘Hey, tius, mol a,’ which, roughly translated, means, ‘Hey guys, this rocks.’ I put on my glum Neil face and whined ‘Mal karma’ to their phone cameras.