That’s That

And that is also that as well. Over and done with, completely over. Finished. Done with. Over and finished. Done over and finished with. Over. Finished over with. Done.

Scriptless Wonder, Benedict Nightingale’s #1 show for the week of 11-16 July 2006, has finished. In its place is a void, a shadow, a silence. I will mainly be filling this void by catching up with Deadwood, Battlestar Galactica and sitting on my arse.

After a rest on Friday, the last two shows were slightly different in that we didn’t have a judge. This meant I had to double up the tasks of compering with judging the games. The solution we came up with was to get the audience to yell a word for each team, based on what the preceding scenes had been about. Based on the volume of the yells, I would then award the teams their points, in the form of images of strange or extraordinary objects. Actually, the points were predetermined, and no winner was actually announced until the finale. And that winner was only chosen because Richard hadn’t been in a winning team yet.

Utterly corrupt of course, and as a result I have been relegated to the 2nd Division. The only difference being, the Italian foopballers were corrupt for money – I did it for a quiet life.

As a result of this predestination, the shows ran a lot smoother, although that might just have been my Soave-fuelled imagination. The audience loved it as well, although that was definitely Soave-and-lager-fuelled. They called for – and got – an encore, something the performers were only too pleased to give them. And then they wended their merry way into the Merton night, after telling us it was the, “biggest laugh they’d had in years”.

It was certainly a laugh, and a cry and a yell and a curse. But mostly a laugh.