picture from Chronicle Live

There may be no factual evidence of this, and it could well be an urban myth, it could even be something I came up with in my head, but isn’t a celebrity supposed to die on Christmas Day? It can’t just be me actually because my dad keeps mentioning it, (we both keep guessing Bruce Forsyth but the old bugger is taking us for fools every year). My ‘wild card’ for this Christmas is Cliff Richard, who will use his death in order to ‘do a Savile’ as I’m sure it is now called; your charity work, Royal connections, friendship with the Government, and gullible fans keep your misdemeanors under wraps until you die and the shit hits the fan.

This year has been a sad one for saying goodbye, especially sad because of who has been left to live. I’m sure we’d all do a deal with God (if he wasn’t a fictional conduit) to swap Rik Mayall for Paddy McGuiness or Robin Williams for Robbie. Just think of all the people who pollute our televisions on a daily basis in the name of celebrity, Andy Warhol gave us fifteen minutes, these people are taking liberties. We could sacrifice them and have Bob Hoskins, Richard Attenborough, Sid Caesar, Joan Rivers, Harold Ramis and countless other people back to entertain us.

An old tradition/superstition has returned with a vengeance this week, famous deaths happening in threes. Joe Cocker was the first to go, although I admired his work I wasn’t a particularly big fan of his – more of an ‘I like what I know’ contribution is what he has done to my music collection. His  famous version of ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’ is a beautiful cover, and as I am known for my enjoyment and appreciation of a well crafted cover version I posted a YouTube video of this song in tribute. Thanks to the wonders of the modern age I was also able to satisfy a niggle in my head that sounded like a made up fact but alas it was true; the song was used as the theme tune to The Wonder Years. Last of the three was sitcom writer Jeremy Lloyd, who I’m sure will have a decent tribute on television very soon.

A name that won’t mean a lot to the majority of people who read this, but whose death I was more upset about, is a man called Mike ‘the mouth’ Elliott. A former standup comedian from Gateshead, he made a name for himself in the North-East as one of the undisputed kings of the late night radio phone in show. I first came across him when I moved back to Redcar in 1995 and heard him on Century FM late one night, he was brilliant; one minute he was moving you to tears with advice to someone in serious trouble and the next minute he was calling someone all the names under the sun for being a waste of time, sometimes he simply hung up on them. I don’t know where he went after Century, although I did once catch him on a late night journey as I was flicking between radio stations. His like will never be seen again thanks to local radio becoming so homogenised, so I’ll raise a glass of ‘glug glug’ to him over Christmas and smile at the fact that nobody will understand that reference.

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I’m no longer a big drinker so the three bottles of Carlsberg I put away last night were enough to make me drowsy enough to not bother doing any late night work. I had wanted to record The Sunday Alternative but series four of Frasier has entered our house now so I couldn’t be arsed doing any work. The early night has done me some good though as I am snowed under at the moment, so when I woke up at ten o’clock this morning I was refreshed and ready for action. Rather than recording the podcast I just sorted the music ready with a view to recording it tomorrow (working on a Sunday – I am a trooper) as I wanted to go out for lunch and shopping.

We took Jack to town and bought him a t-shirt. I have gone from not wanting a dog to buying a t-shirt for my dog. He seemed to enjoy wearing his new shirt, topped off with a brand new collar, and received quite a lot of glances and comments of admiration. To paraphrase Mike Skinner, he’s cute but he knows it.

What a lot of people don’t get straight away is behind Jack’s cuteness there is a nervousness around strangers (we have that in common, I am hilarious). As he is a rescue dog (and we don’t know his history) he finds it hard to trust people. Mandi and I love him and look after him and he knows how lucky he is to have a second chance at the happy life he deserves. The worst thing anyone can do is reach down towards him to stroke him as he sees that as a threat. I spend a lot of time telling people to back off because he isn’t good with strangers, but this afternoon I wasn’t quick enough. We were having lunch at The Bell and had taken a table outside because of the dog. Mandi went in to order while I waited with Jack, and three men walked into the outdoor seating area and immediately started to compliment Jack on his t-shirt, only for one of them to try and stroke his head. With a loud bark he went to bite the man’s hand but luckily he pulled away and Jack didn’t achieve anything more serious than a warning nip. Knowing how some people can be I immediately apologised and explained his behaviour, going into my whole he’s a rescue dog and nervous around strangers routine, but they were all fine about it. The man with the bitten hand apologised for invading Jack’s personal space saying he should have known better as a dog owner himself. Our natural instinct is to want to stroke a cute dog but you shouldn’t if you are a stranger, you wouldn’t pat a woman on the boobs in the street after all because it is an intrusion.

So, we have series four of Frasier at last, a series that is proving very difficult to get hold of. Mandi found the box set on Amazon and it arrived on Friday. On Thursday I went into That’s Entertainment to find some Robin Williams films (all of my copies of the ‘obvious films – Mrs. Doubtfire, Good Morning Vietnam etc are on video) to watch tonight. At the time I only had a fiver on me so bought three DVDs as part of their offer, and came across series six of Frasier (that we can’t watch until we find series five) and asked them to put it under the counter until today. When I went in for it I told the assistant what I was there to collect and he asked my name. I told him and he responded with “What? The radio Steve Oliver?” I didn’t care for his familiarity so I bit him.

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Picture ©  http://www.dealwithdepression.info/ 

There’s been a lot of talk, in the wake of Robin Williams committing suicide, about depression this week, which is a positive after-effect. Unfortunately the ugly subject only seems to rear its head at such times, the last time it was talked about openly was last year when Stephen Fry admitted that he had attempted suicide by overdose while filming abroad. Surely this is a subject that needs a greater airing as it is still a disastrously misunderstood illness.

The biggest problem is the ill-informed idea that ‘depression’ and ‘being in a mardy’ are one and the same and that you can just cheer up and get over. People also seem to think that if you’re laughing and joking then you can’t possibly be wishing you had died in your sleep to save yourself the trouble. Personally, I don’t think that people who haven’t suffered (or know a sufferer) will ever fully understand; these are the same people who think that OCD is that cute little ‘likes to tidy up a bit’ affliction.

Telling people with depression to "just snap out of it" is about as useful as telling people with cancer to "just stop having cancer".
— Ricky Gervais (@rickygervais) August 13, 2014 

Allowing my mind to wander a little while I was walking the dog today, I pondered on awareness and what could be done. Perhaps I could do something positive to help others? When my article was published I received some lovely feedback from people with depression, and again when I re-posted it in the wake of the Robin Williams story. Could I use what little public profile I have for good and become a spokesman for this illness? It’s worth looking into I suppose.

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At some point in the early hours of this morning I shared this song online referring to it as beautiful. It is a wonderful tribute to Rik Mayall, a comedy great. An hour later I was still at my computer when the news came through that Robin Williams had been found dead. What a shit summer for comedy this is turning out to be.

The death of someone you don’t know personally is a strange thing because it is difficult to explain why we get so affected by it. Like Mayall, Robin Williams is someone we couldn’t have imagined life without.

In later years I had drifted away from the career of Mr. Williams, which is something I feel I should rectify. Having said that, as good as his films were, his finest moments were on stage. I spent a lot of last night/this morning watching An Evening with Robin Williams Live at the Met on YouTube. The show is a masterpiece of standup comedy that I haven’t seen for quite a few years and it is still the show that aspiring comedians should watch while taking notes. I found a more recent live appearance too, I suppose you could call it a comeback, and he had lost none of the magic. His improvisation ability was evident in Aladdin, where Disney took the unusual step of animating around his adlibbed liberties with the script. Another parallel with Rik Mayall was the capability to set aside the funny and carry off dramatic roles while at the same time remaining a comedian at heart, or our hearts.

Robin Williams had been suffering from/living with depression and it eventually became too much for him and he took the step of ending not only his life but also his pain. People often say that suicide is a cowardly act, but the truth is that making the decision to end your own life is the bravest decision of all. Living with the condition myself I know too well that the sweet release of death is the only thing that will stop my moods and put me at peace. I have even gone on record (in this article) as saying that suicide is how I will die.

Williams isn’t the first comedian to have been hurting underneath the laughs, and I doubt he’ll be the last. If it does something, even if it educates one person that depression is a serious illness, then the death of a much loved entertainer won’t have been for nothing.

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All donations received via the PayPal button above will be used to fund creative projects such as podcasts, short films, documentaries, comedy sketches and a whole lot more. You are under no obligation of course, but thanks in advance if you do drop something in the pot.

Today was never going to be the day of action that so many people claim the first day of the year to be. We didn’t wake up until around noon, although I could have quite happily stayed in bed all day. Last night was a family New Year’s Eve party at my cousin Pat’s house, where I finally lost my Jagerbomb virginity and found that it actually tastes like cough medicine that you’d give a child (although best not to get the two confused, they are probably equally as effective for a child’s cough). I was drinking John Smith’s too, and despite the mixtures I didn’t feel especially drunk. Obviously the Red Bull was helping to balance the alcohol intake, (a lot like an alco-pop I remember from the early 2000s called Red Square, basically a bottle of vodka and Red Bull that due to the combination of its sweetness and ease of drinking, and the fact that most places sold it for a pound, you didn’t get falling down drunk but did spend a lot of time once you’d got home wondering what the hell was happening to your body when half of it was pissed and the other half wanted to stay awake), so it wasn’t until we were walking home that I realised that I couldn’t walk in a straight line. According to Mandi I was slurring my words, but I do that after a wine gum to be honest so that isn’t a reliable indicator of my sobriety or lack of.

So that we didn’t spend the whole day eating the Christmas party food, Mandi cooked a shepherd’s pie while I took Jack for his belated morning walk. We ate watching Friends for the millionth time. This is a programme that we have the DVD box set of, so there is no excuse for getting so engrossed in it, but for some reason we do. I don’t know if the show has this hold over everybody, but we can’t leave it alone. It can’t possibly still have the viewing figures that it once enjoyed, but Comedy Central (and E4 before it in this country) surely wouldn’t persist with it if it wasn’t popular. Even now, I still do the handclap during the opening theme tune as we all did in the old days.

Friends finished at the right time, sometimes there will be an episode shown from about halfway through its life when the show took a real nosedive in terms of quality and relied on big name guest stars to prop it up. The best example of them getting it so horribly wrong was the pointless pre-title sequence with Robin Williams and Billy Crystal. Towards the end of the ten years they had pulled their socks up and thankfully ended the show with a respectable legacy. It’s weird now when you watch it because you just know that it is frozen in time, and as soon as they all leave the apartment for the final time to go their separate ways you just know that the next day they are all going to be ten years younger again and Rachael will be entering Central Perk in her rain soaked wedding dress. There was talk of a reunion episode/film, but the cast rather sensibly refuted this story. Everyone who watched the show can now have their own idea and opinion of what became of the six of them, (seven if you include Phoebe’s husband Mike), that doesn’t involve appearing in shit romantic comedy films.

The time freeze becomes even weirder when you consider the ages everyone would be now, with Ross and Phoebe being the oldest at roughly (depending on a rather shaky continuity) 47 years old. Monica and Chandler’s twins would be 10 this year, Emma 12, and Ben 19.

I remember learning from an interview with a cast member that even nowadays, the six principal actors receive ten thousand pounds every time an episode is repeated. From the UK alone that’s got to be around fifty grand a day, (assuming that +1 channels don’t count). They can certainly afford to be choosy, which doesn’t explain Jennifer Aniston’s film roles.

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