Red Nose Day. As a youth, between weeping in butcher's shops, it was something I'd look forward to. It was a whole night of live telly which was anarchic and punky, where I honestly believed anything could happen, especially in the post 10 o'clock news section, when my parents would send me to bed to settle down and watch Ben Elton do his tried and tested tampax! I said tampax! And smear test! And I'm a bloody man and everything! material, and I would lurk at the top of the stairs, ears straining, not even daring to imagine the comedic wonders that would be unfolding.
Also, you could usually legitimately wear some kind of fancy dress at primary school, and the teachers would warily note the seas of hyped-up nine-year-olds high off the plastic fumes from poorly-made red noses washing around their shins, and declare the whole day a write-off; sponsored running around out of Miss's hearing range became the only lesson plan.
And then Dawn French snogged Hugh Grant, and the whooping went on for hours and hours and hours, and that was just me. If Dawn French could snog him, well...then, I could snog Dawn French! YEAH? Right on.
Anyway, now - now, it's just an unbearable procession of terror.
Well, it might be, anyway. Who can tell? I'm going to be typing gubbins throughout, starting...well, not now, because I'm not home yet. Let's say 8:30ish, yes? Lovely.
20:10 Hello, friends.
So, I've missed McIntyre and Claudia, but still, it was cheering to see that he'd got pregnant in sympathy with her. That's my level tonight; better get used to it now.
And good lord! Lucky first VT to stumble onto, as Harry Hill does some of his usual stuff and nonsense and manages to bring back Bernie Clifton and kill him with a boyband within the space of a minute, and tickle Ronnie Corbett under the chin. Harry Hill retains his 100% untarnished record; he could probably shill for Gadaffi and we'd all think it was a bit of wacky fun. "Well, I like the Israelis, but then I like the Palestinians..."
All in the best possible taste tonight!
20:24 Dear God! Thandie Newton is talking about doing a stinky fart? Or is he just describing the plot of Run Fatboy Run?
20:30 Here's a fun game during these MasterChef bits. Try to pinpoint the exact moment David Cameron realises he's in an unprecedented time of international chaos and war, so should probably not be eating chilli con carne served by a perma-blinking slinky spring, and preening in front of a fatheaded greengrocer. Clue: IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN.
20:34 Anyway, I haven't even opened my wine yet. I will attempt to open it with the same enthusiasm of a load of office workers walking into a photoshoot with Blue: shouting "WHO?!" at it until it cries, although it will never cry, because it, as an inanimate bottle, is 12 times more intelligent than the whole of Blue combined.
20:41 That EastEnders sex trafficking stuff is much more fun when it's silent and you can play a bit of jaunty Laurel and Hardy piano over it!
20:44 Well, I've never seen Downtown Abbey so let's assume it's just a standard Jennifer Saunders parody from the late 80s, produced by an automated programme written in BASIC on the very first BBC Micro by Stephen Fry. Meanwhile, look at my supplies for the evening:
You'll see I've covered the main food groups of carbs, some kind of bloody paste, fake fruit, Sticks Of Deliciousness, faintest waft of health, and GAH!
20:52 Well, there you go. Thanks to @rEddie_brek on that there Twitter for alerting me to concentrate on the Downtown catastrophe. Someone must have set the FryWriter to Sir Punalot mode. Here's some maids they didn't use. PomMAID (woman with slicked back hair). MAIDstone (woman carrying tiny pebble). Iron MAIDen (woman bleeding to death from multiple gory puncture wounds in the face and body).
21:05 OK, all everything else aside, Whitney is a bloody good little actress. She breaks my heart with those big Bambi eyes.
21:08 Graham Norton can't do the sincere gear changes. While Davina passionately emotes about the horror of child exploration, he looks like someone who's listening to the restaurant manager explaining why his carpaccio was undersalted.
21:15 Everyone! Bring the children! Gather round! Take That have turned into Kraftwork's younger brother's schoolfriend's cousins who once listened to Fischerspooner!
21:20 First genuine LOL of the night at "A terrifying glimpse into the future, Fake That still to come". God love him, I'm not going to stop loving Dermot any time soon. It's a whole forgotten Channel 4 reality programme about sleep deprivation thing, I don't want to talk about it.
21:26 You see? These barbershop lovelies are the best thing that's ever happened to music, and are they on telly apart from now and
that advert? More importantly, are they serenading me to sleep, serenading me awake, and serenading me to a shuddering climax 10 times a day? No, they are not. Where's my appeal VT, you bastards?
21:33 Finding this whole Ant and Dec thing quite charming. Drunk half a bottle of red wine in the last half hour. Scientists around the world are currently working on the logarithms to see if there is any correlation between these two events.
21:40 If there's anything that we can bring from tonight's events, it's that Peter Kay can't even be bothered to come up with any sort of new material or new ideas even if it'll save a million infant's lives. Let's face it: he's going to have to say "garlic bread" about three or four times to win back the inexplicable love of the British public after this. There's not even any jokes. It's just him, in a wig, duetting with Susan Boyle, in a wig, with a picture of Trevor Macdonald at the end as if that's some kind of punchline. That is a homoeopathic punchline.
21:48 Oh, gawd, this little downer bit has been going on for far too long now. I was just about to make comment, but @helencairns has just summed it up wonderfully on That There Twitter, better than I could: "Yes Adele, this is totally the time to tell us all about your ex-boyfriend and how you're all SADFASS about it."
Might have a little ten minute break now. Jack Dee doing his serious face is making me, through sensitive shot changes, accidentally laugh openly at starving infants, which is not the best look for a modern, forward-thinking girl about town like me.
21:56 LITERALLY? DAVINA AND DERMOT LITERALLY SMASHED IT OUT OF THE PARK, FEARNE? Goodness! Well, what did they smash? What park? I mean, this is probably a health and safety issue, now. If things are being smashed out of parks, the police should be involved. Things being smashed out of parks, that could damage passers-by. I'd hate for all your charity to be wiped out by a lawsuit from me, frankly, because I was hit over the head and badly injured from whatever was smashed out of the whatever park it was.
On a related point, Fearne, if you could attempt to smash yourself out of a park, just to empathise with the plight of the grammatically brutalised in the world, we'd be ever so, ever so, EVER SO GRATEFUL.
22:06 I don't have much to say about the Fake That thing. I said everything I wanted to say when Spice Girls and all those bloody people did exactly the same thing in 1997. But I have stumbled upon a horrifying truth. Please listen to this:
And then this:
Take That, you stole from Japanese geeks. I hope you Burn In Hell.
22:16 Well, of course Miranda's going to be unfunny if you take it out of context! It has to be in the context of, um... Well, it's funny because, you know, it's when she... It's traditional sitcom or, er...
OK, come on. Let's just admit it, all the ladies who watch Miranda and love it. It's because she looks like that and can pull that Giles Coren-refracted-through-handsome-glass geezer.
# Fearne Cotton
# You came and presented quite badly
# But we still had to watch
# Fearne Cotton
# One tip that we'd give you quite gladly
# Don't do that "special" voice... #
22:36 I feel I'm being slightly unfair to Lenny Henry here. At this juncture, for the record, it should be noted that he is being equally as awful as Fearne and her anti-disability bias.
22:44 The Smithy sketch will be remembered as the exact moment when the country was affected by the hallucinatory dirty bomb sent by Mars. This cannot possibly be happening.
22:48 Second LOL at sudden appearance of half-naked boy-champion. Also, Bieber. Also, as it seemed to be mandatory, I just appeared in this sketch. Where were you in it?
23:02 During the second Downtown, I'm having a wee lie down. I've been buried under a massive collapsing fourth wall. As soon as I build it up, they demolish it all over me again.
23:08 What the fuck? Seriously, that phone in the bottle thing was actually impossible. If you were a demon sorcerer, I'd like to think you'd actually pretend to be a rather shifty-looking ratty boy who popped up in an airport to do inexplicable things to you between your last Costa and the secretly pleasurable bit when you leave a couple of coins in your pocket in order to get felt up by someone surly of the same sex.
NOT JUST ME, SURELY!
23:18 Inbetweeners in real life. Lovely, lovely, lovely boys. They will fit perfectly into my lovely boy dungeon that I've just coincidentally constructed.
23:25 Pray silence for the new renaissance of Partridge.
23:28 George Michael's cover of True Faith. It's weird. You hear about these things, conceptually, but they have no real effect on you. It's like when you hear about the massive scale of space, the numbers just don't fit into your brain. Something is 20 billion light years away. It means nothing. George Michael has covered True Faith in the style of David Lynch having a slow-motion coughing fit into an accordion . It means nothing.
But it happened...
And the David Lynch, for reference. And because this is an accurate reflection of my mental status right now.
23:44 The updates, yes, they are coming a little slower. The quality is rising; there's been a bit of Elbow, there's been a bit of Partridge. Tim Key's lying on the floor. Partridge is sneezing blood on a nun. It's all got a little bit good.
23:55 24 hour Panel People! A world record to see how long one man can stretch out the joke of being straight, but talking as if he's gay. Do you see? He's straight, and married. But he says things as if he wants to have sex with men. No, but, I'm not sure you understand. He's got a model girlfriend. But...
FOR 24 HOURS.
IT'S MIDNIGHT!
Thank you if you have commented after my pathetic plea on Twitter. My lovely boy dungeon is feeling very snug.
00:10 I'm still going, incidentally.
OK, it's this bit. If it wasn't bad enough that we have had the dubious wonders of Karl Pilkington, who I've
ranted about before, let's be all bloody post-modern about it. Ha ha ha ha! You can say things that even Jon Gaunt would blanch at because Ricky Gervais is shrieking like a blown seal in the background! Ha ha ha ha! HA HA HA WE'RE SO CLEVER!
00:23 I can smoke, right? Right? I mean, I've written... I'm actually going to measure this now...
1934 words tonight.
And Annie Lennox is about to play a song.
It's almost a sign from God! Even God hates Annie Lennox and wishes she would wash that bloody tshirt!
00:28 It's a tribute to the awesome power of Annie Lennox that her song Universal Child makes me think of Elton John rubbing up against international plug adaptors.
00:35 ONE DAY LIKE THIS! Thank God! I was beginning to lose all hope.
00:40 Yep, I'll take that Armstrong and Miller sketch as a minor win. And further proof that all off-duty celebrities will grow credibility beards as soon as they are able.
00:50 And as hell's own Loose Women settle their six scarlet-clad buttocks onto Alan Carr's sofa, and Russell Brand narrates as kids falls over themselves in happiness to be reunited with their parents, I felt a small pang of guilt. Thankfully, this was immediately dissipated by Fearne Cotton accusing everyone who had logged on to see her bony, bescribbled body in a swimsuit - a swimsuit which she had donned to raise money for Comic Relief - as "pervs". Oh, darling. I had forgotten briefly that it's all about you.
01:03 Newport State Of Mind. Done by enthusiastic amateurs on YouTube, who were immediately slapped down by the might of Jay-Z's lawyers. But who cares, when you can get the Go Compare guy and famously Welsh Paul Whitehouse to mime stuff in black and white and say it's for charity. Next year: Charlie bit my finger, starring Brooker biting Chris Morris on the end of his fake satirical penis.
01:20 It's the sweepings from the bottom of the Benson factory floor now, as it seems to be a procession of Fearne bitching about people seeing her half-naked, David Walliams saying "penis" in all the various amazing connotations the Latin-based languages can offer, and then these bellends who have worked out that if you pitchshift everything correctly, it sounds similar. Because most music is written on the major scale, apart from the stuff that's written on the minor scale.
01:35 I'm a bit tired now.
01:38 Harry Hill seems so very, very long ago. Gosh, remember back then? When the night was young, and things seemed so fresh, and we hadn't seen James Corden and George Michael drive round and round and round and round White City?
Actually: remember 16 years ago, when Vic and Bob did this? I did. I didn't think anyone else did, until another Miracle Of Twitter, when @profanityswan came up trumps. I've just laughed until I cried. If you don't, something's gone wrong.
01:56 Throughout that whole 24 hour Panel People thing, there was not one mention of the amazing filler people who were constructed only from modern hair and Jedward comprehension skills. Poor, benighted, not even on Freshly Squeezed morons.
02:10 It should have ended. I feel like I have to stick it out. And lucky I did, to get that amazing end of office karaoke night vibe; when everyone tries to sing Never Forget, but can't quite do it because a) they're arseholed on cheap cocktails b) they've got their tongue exploring the inner caverns of that one a few desks down that wears tank tops even when it's raining outside c) they are slumped in the corner, the general ennui of their life weighing upon them so much that even the words "Never Forget" are mocking echoes smashing into their self-esteem like cannonballs into a brick wall. Never Forget that she doesn't want you. Never Forget your life is going nowhere. Never Forget that you're going home to YouPorn and a cry-wank.
03:00 Jack Whitehall and Kevin Bridges are still going, but that's it. I'm out. It's been seven hours of stuff I can't remember, which will make moulding this into a publishable article an interesting experiment for my weekend. If you've read even a few words of this, I am full of gratitude. If you're reading after the event and you've got this far, you deserve some kind of award which I am happy to provide - email me at justrestingmyeyes at hotmail dot co dot uk for details of how to claim it. And if you take away one thing from this, it's that I specifically love one of you, and you'll never know who. Night-night, everybody. Night-night.