Diary – 4 November 2006

I’ve been doing a stupid amount of travelling recently.

I’ve been doing a stupid amount of travelling recently. First to Dublin to appear on The Late Late Show, the world’s longest running chat show. It’s a televisual extravaganza; Ireland’s answer to Parkinson, Question Time and Trisha all rolled into one. I was the final guest, and when I arrived at the studio the previous ‘act’ was already being interviewed by the host. He was a convicted paedophile. Fortunately he had found a new purpose in life: giving advice to parents on how to keep their children safe from people like him. I felt the comedy gods were testing me: ‘Follow that, funny man!’ I did my best but the blue-rinsed audience was in an understandably sombre mood. In the course of my set I asked a rhetorical question about the Irish health minister. She’s a big-boned lady — a good 17 stone, I’d say — and I simply pointed this out while wondering how, in an age when tackling childhood obesity is such a big fat priority for the developed world, she got the job.