Thanks to Twitterer Patrick Barry for spotting me in this YouTube clip of the Perrier Award announcement at Edinburgh in 2001, the year I was up with Lloyd Cole Knew My Father, and, it seems, favouring a red tracksuit top. We just happened to be huddling by the gantry from which Iain Lee was presenting live coverage of the event for Channel 4, which was somewhere in the Pleasance Dome, as I recall, and picketed by a polite smattering of anti-Nestle campaigners, who as far as I know failed to guilt anybody into not entering the bash, but certainly got their cause out there that year.
If you watch the clip, in which a hoarse and impossibly young-looking Tommy Tiernan, the previous year’s winner, croaks out that Matt Holness, Richard Ayoade and co’s horror spoof Garth Merenghi’s Netherhead had won, you’ll witness Steve Coogan helping Iain Lee fill for time when the cameras fail to cut to Jenny Eclair “with the winner.” And yes, just there, between the pair of jokers, you’ll see my self-conscious face, trying not to look like I am trying to get on camera. Coogan had come to see our show that year, which we were all flattered by.
In a future that none of us could predict nine years ago, I would end up script-editing the BBC2 sitcom The Persuasionists, in which Iain Lee co-starred, and interviewing Richard Ayoade onstage at Bafta about the third series of The IT Crowd. We live in an age where we kind of expect everything that’s ever happened to be on YouTube, and it’s fun when something you didn’t know was there crops up.
Never Knowingly Underwhelmed 