This Week’s Highlight Was Hosting the Inaugural MY Comedy Chats While Sitting by Bins in a Neighbour’s Front Garden ‘Borrowing’ Their Internet. Welcome to My Life!

Do you every feel that some times fate has it in for you? This week, about an hour and a half before the launch of the inaugural of MY Comedy Chats which, needless to say, was an online venture, my internet provider Talk Talk (oh, the irony) stopped providing internet. Yes, that’s exactly what you want before you go online to host a chat show with over 70 people waiting to watch – no internet.

It was at this point in proceedings that a bird flew into my front room and for some reason seemed incapable of flying back out again. In an attempt to shoo him out, I even started meowing in a vain attempt to make him think I was a rather large cat while at the same time hoping he wouldn’t shit over my carpet. Sadly, I didn’t have time to fine tune my animal impressions as I had a chat show I was supposed to be hosting.

In desperation, I decided to ask my neighbour if I could borrow theirs. Sadly, they weren’t in. Alternatively, they had just heard a swearing-infused rant, followed by my cat impressions and were wisely hiding under their bed, refusing to answer their door.

I was thus forced to pop down the road and sit by the bins in another neighbour’s front garden while I ‘borrowed’ their Wi-Fi. Nothing encapsulates the glamour of show business, I find, than trying to balance your laptop on top of a bin while answering various calls from comics asking where the hell you are.

Needless to say, the start to the show wasn’t exactly how I had envisaged it. I had at least hoped I’d be at my desk nursing a rather strong drink. However, it did prove a lot of fun. This was no doubt helped by the fact that I know all of the comics very well – Jen Brister, Allyson June Smith and Lindsay Santoro. Although as one audience member pointed out: at times it seemed less a conversation and more like an intervention with me as the person needing help!

Even before binsgate, setting the damn thing up proved far more stressful than I could ever have imagined. Major thanks to my unofficial technical advisor, Darren Beaumont, for having the patience to talk me through it all. MY Comedy Chats is back this week with another show featuring Barbara Nice, Spring Day and Les Kershaw. Fingers crossed, I can sit this one out by my desk! If you’d like to be part of the audience, just click the following link http://eepurl.com/b2Z9V9 and you will receive details by email.

In other news, I’m still trying to eat more healthily. Admittedly, I did wash down the large punnet of strawberries that a friend sent me using three tins of evaporated milk. And as for the cauliflower  she sent me I turned that into cauliflower cheese – I’m sensing a theme here. However, friends still seem to be hinting that I might need to work on my fitness levels as witnessed by a DVD parcel from a mate in France.

Subtle hint?

Meanwhile, in a valiant attempt by Jen Brister to stop me talking about Ministry of Time, she bought me Babylon Berlin Series 1-3 which I am consciously working my way through, having watched all of Season 1 in two days. The series has really grown on me. The two leads Volker Bruch as Inspector Gereon Rath and Liv Lisa Fries as Charlotte Ritter are excellent and Peter Kurth as Detective Chief Inspector Bruno Wolter is convincingly loathsome. As for the production values, they are out of this world.

Another subtle hint?

It took me a while to get into it but it is a televisual feast. There’s an added dimension when we find our Rath is on a secret mission to retrieve lurid film of the then Mayor of Cologne, Konrad Adenauer. This may not mean much to the average Brit but German viewers would know that after the war Adenauer was the first leader of the conservative Christian Unionist Party and went on to become the first chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany. No idea if the real Adenauer was subject to such proclivities but, if he was, it would have made learning about post-war German history at university a hell of a lot more interesting. Mind you, irrelevant of your knowledge of post-war German politics, given that series 1 in set in 1929, you can’t help watch Babylon Berlin without bearing in mind that in a mere 4 years how everything would change which gives the show an extra frisson.

There is another layer to watching Babylon Berlin if you happen to be British and living in the UK.  Currently, us Brits are living in a country where it is now de rigueur for government ministers to blatantly lie, manipulate facts and figures, dish out contracts to mates without any form of scrutiny or accountability while media outlets, for the most part, singularly fail to speak truth to power. As of yesterday, government ministers are even willing to misrepresent the very laws they themselves have passed in an attempt to hoodwink the public. If anything, watch Babylon Berlin, because it’s a timely reminder how fragile democracy can prove to be.

Liked it? Take a second to support Maureen on Patreon!