I FINISHED what I had to do and adjusted my zip. It jammed. With a certain amount of trepidation, I pulled hard and heard a ping. Pings are always bad when it comes to zips. The fastener was broken, beyond repair.

“Aaargh,” I thought. “Why didn’t I bring my jacket with me to the toilet?” The answer was obvious. Because I was in work, and I work indoors.

“Calm down,” I told myself. “Nobody will see. You’ll just walk quietly and calmly to your desk, grab your coat, casually hold it in front of you like a waiter carrying a towel and leg it into Church Street to buy a replacement pair of grey trousers.

“You will get away with this as long as you don’t do something completely stupid or unlikely to foul it up.”

I laughed at myself for my panic. Shaking my head, I turned on the tap to wash my hands. Just a little too hard. The jet rebounded off the plug and described a parabola en route to the least appropriate area of my trousers. Which, as you know, were grey.

At that point, if you had offered me unembarrassingly dry trousers with a broken zip or grey trousers with a disturbingly dark wet patch and an intact zip, I’d have taken the former. As it was, I was in the worst of all possible trouser worlds.

I stood by the door, and steeled myself for my exit . . . 

Such preamble is to explain just how uncomfortable I felt seconds before my stand-up comedy debut last week in front of an audience of strangers and people from work who had found out I was doing it.

I am not, as regular readers will readily attest, a natural comic. Nor do I exhibit a quiet and easy authority when speaking to people I do not know. Or, indeed, people I do know.

So what made me think I could stand up in front of a group of fee-paying customers and hope to amuse them?

Well, I had performed in an online comedy show in aid of Amnesty International, alongside actual comedians off of the television. “Performed” is a misleadingly chosen word.

In reality, the organiser of the show curated some of my more amusing nuggets from the social networking site Twitter and re-presented them. It required more effort from the audience than from me.

But, after the show, a few people who did not know me asked when my next actual stand-up gig was taking place. And the fear the very idea struck in my bowels made me determined to conquer it. I called in a favour, and so I found myself as the first act in the gong section of the Rawhide comedy club’s Raw show.

The music played. I shuffled onto the stage like a feckless teenage pirate forced to walk the plank. I blinked under the lights. I gripped the microphone and tentatively offered a joke I’d thought of three hours before. It got a reasonable laugh.

But that laugh was like getting a big hug from Claire Rayner in her pomp.

I started to settle down, walked around on stage. I improvised. I did silly voices. I even looked at the audience instead of my shoes. And because I settled down, the audience did, too. Everything was getting better, as things often do before they go horribly wrong.

A bell rang to signal the fact that I was halfway through my eight minutes, just as I finished a sequence. I was distracted. I looked out at the audience.

And nothing. Absolutely nothing. Couldn’t remember a word. Couldn’t even remember my own name.

For 10 painful seconds – and I know this, as I counted them – my mouth flapped like a beta-male fish trying to be served at a Mathew Street bar on a Saturday night.

The gong was a kindness when it came.

Will I do it again? You never know. I’ll tell you this, though. There’s no way I’ll be wearing grey trousers.

WHEN I went to buy my last lap-top, proceedings were going fairly well. I had managed to snaffle a bag with FREE mouse for a paltry £25 as part of the deal, so I was feeling pretty good about myself.

I felt as if I’d been to a Moroccan souk and bought the beautiful daughter of the merchant for $8 and a bag of plums. If the merchant had been a pimple-faced boy who hadn’t even been born when the first Pentium processor came out.

That’s when it went downhill, of course.

“And would you like to buy our Superdupercover option?”

“What’s that?” I wondered.

“It’s total cover against breakdown of the equipment.”

“How much is that?”

“That’s £200.”

What? The laptop was only £500.

“Are you telling me you’re selling me a crock? Is that what you’re saying?”

“It does cover you if you break it yourself.” I noticed he hadn’t actually answered my question.

This is an outrageous way to run a business. Why should I take out insurance on an item with the store which is selling me the item? It’s tantamount to the store saying: “It’s Russian roulette buying stuff from us. I just don’t know how we get away with it.”

Can you imagine walking into Greggs and finding them behaving in the same manner?

“Can I have a sausage roll, please?”

“Jumbo or ordinary?”

“Erm, jumbo, please. As long as the noose is around my neck, I might as well jump off the horse. Ha, ha, ha! How much is that?”

“69p. But for an extra 30p you can have our special RollBack cover.”

“What?”

“Yes. If you bite into your sausage roll and find, for example, a slug in there – NOT THAT THAT HAS EVER HAPPENED, MR GREGGS’ SOLICITORS – then we issue a replacement sausage roll or other savoury bake to the same value.”

“And can you guarantee there won’t be a slug in that one?”

“We’re very confident there won’t be. But you can never be 100 per cent sure.”

I am reminded of the sign I saw in the window of a recruitment and temping agency in Liverpool city centre some time ago: “Due to shortage of staff at the office today, please post your CV through our Letterbox.”

That’s right. A company whose very purpose is to find people to fill temporary vacancies was forced to close because it has a temporary vacancy. Can you imagine the sense of failure there when this cropped up? A dirty great cloud of ennui. It’d be as if the whole of the remaining staff were forced to wear parkas in warm weather, but parkas made of gloom.

I told the man in the computer shop that I would take my chances, picked up my special-offer bag with mouse (who uses a mouse with a laptop anyway, by the way?) and completed my purchase.

Obviously I broke the laptop some months later, but I make no claims to be representative of humanity. If anything, I am a wake-up call to evolution.

 

I AM appalled by the efforts of the so-called “shepherd lobby” to indoctrinate our children in the ways of “woolly animal husbandry” as we must no doubt call it these days.

Now they want to make our children learn how to count in Shepherdese (ie,. Yan, tan, tethera, etc) and replace the classics with old Black Bob strips and episodes of Shaun The Sheep.

We must resist the “shepherd agenda”. What if all our children grow up to become shepherds? For a start, they’d have to change the name of shepherd’s pie. It would just be known as “pie”. It’s a slippery slope.

(NOTE TO ED: It’s all right. I have not gone mad. I’m hoping for a Jan Moir/ Melanie Phillips- style storm. Everybody on Twitter will link to the online version, just like they do to the Daily Mail. We’ll be quids in!)

HELLO, readers. Is there something that you once loved on television and would love to see back on free-to-air television? I do not mean revivals of shows – like the Upstairs Downstairs thing that was on over Christmas, the one which took a chance on little-known actress Keeley Hawes.

No, I mean actual shows which should be repeated for the benefit of the next generation, shows like Fawlty Towers and Father Ted. Or films, like the 2004 Michael Mann thriller, Collateral.

In that case, might I recommend that you give me a call and tell me to go out and spend actual money on the appropriate DVDs? 

I will happily go out and buy them, secure in the knowledge that within one week of the purchase, the programmes in question will be broadcast on television, probably along with a comprehensive documentary explaining how the series was made, and how Nicholas Lyndhurst was in the frame for the lead role until he gave David Jason a horsey ride and did his back in.

I have been stung in precisely that way more often in recent years than I would like to admit. And bearing in mind that I have admitted to placing my hand in a urine puddle on a bus seat in this column, you have to see I must mean it has happened a lot.

But, then, I have always had a poor sense of timing, comic or otherwise. As a young reporter, full of vim about the job and desperate to impress, I happened upon a court story about a drug baron’s wife and sister- in-law, who had been found guilty of living on her husband’s immoral earnings. Central to the story was a mansion in a leafy suburb.

(As an aside, why is it that criminals who run drug gangs are known as barons? Are the owners of illegal gambling dens known as earls? Are sex traffickers known as viceroys? Actually, that would be a good name for them).

I convinced my editor that we should get a photo of the property. He suggested that we might wait until the following Monday, but I said there was no time like the present, grabbed the reluctant photographer, and off we toddled in my little car, like an early 90s Noddy and Big Ears.

We arrived at the house, which was surrounded by a seven-feet tall wall, and briefly pondered the ethics of such a situation. But this was the early 90s – bandit country – and they were criminals. This was in the public interest, probably.

I left the engine running in my car and we walked over to the wall. We argued for a moment about who was going to give whom a bunk up to get the picture. In the end, Dave the photographer won, as he was the photographer. I bent over, fingers interlaced and up he went. I staggered a little . . . 

“Leg it!” shouted Dave. He leapt from my hands like a salmon showing off on Britain’s Got Talent. “What? What?” I cried as we raced to the car.

I flung the car into first, floored the accelerator, didn’t move, took the handbrake off, stalled, started the engine again and tore away. In my rear view mirror, I saw three men, of such burliness that light itself bent around them, rush into the street.

It was a full five minutes before I’d gathered myself enough to ask Dave what had happened. And I would ask you to put yourself in the place of the owners of the property.

“Gracious me,” you might think, “Close family members have just been found guilty in a court of law. The last thing I feel like doing right now is hosting this flipping outdoor children’s party.

“Hang on a moment, who is that man with the camera, whose head has appeared atop the security wall? Should I call the police? I’d better not, lest I be thrown out of the Desperate Criminals club. I’ll just send Bruiser, Fists of Death and Declan out to give him a good talking to. Honestly, what atrocious timing!”

I left reporting not long after that incident. I didn’t fancy a repeat.

“WEARING a green tie?” a colleague pointed out. “You’re brave.”

I should really have thought nothing of it, it was not the first time my sartorial decisions had been questioned, but I like green.

If I were called upon to fill in my favourite colour in a pop star interview – and I refuse to accept that that will never happen – I would unhesitatingly write “green.”

I decided I would make a stand on behalf of the maligned hue. “What’s wrong with green? Green is the colour of grass, of leaves, of . . . erm, of Kermit the Frog, of . . . ”

“Well, it’s unlucky, isn’t it? Green ties are unlucky.”

That was a new one on me. I’ve been asked to accept some pretty unlikely superstitions in my time, but I find the idea that green ties are unlucky to be particularly unbelievable.

For surely superstitions are meant to be ancient. Ties only arrived in the nineteenth century. At which point did the green tie become infra-dig? 

Is there an international convention of old wives which meets in some sort of coven to decide on which things people should be scared of? Apart from the Vatican College of Cardinals?

I imagine they take a look at how the world is developing and agree on contemporary superstitions to appear relevant to the modern age. And here I am, imagining it . . .

THE 23rd INTERNATIONAL CONVENTION OF OLD WIVES IS IN SESSION.

OLD MRS PREWITT:
. . . And I think we can finally decommission the “Your team only scores if you’re looking at a different page of Ceefax” ruling, after many years’ service.

OLD MRS BAGSHAWE:
All in favour? Motion carried. Ooh, sorry, Mrs Lewis. I know the word “motion” is a sore point. We will, of course, need a replacement in the Bumper Book of Old Saws And Folk Nonsense. Suggestions, anybody?

OLD MRS BEENY:
I have one. “Add two minutes at the start and the end at least one/ Lest the show you’re recording will overrun.”

OLD MRS BAGSHAWE:
Oh, that is very good, because it fulfils the criterion of making the believer feel as if a situation which is entirely out of their hands is, in fact, actually their own fault. We don’t even have to vote on that, do we, ladies? Instant classic. Next?

OLD MRS PREWITT:
Are we still happy with the unlucky green ties ruling?

OLD MRS BAGSHAWE:
I think so. Anything we can do to plant the idea in people’s minds that green is rubbish is fine in my book.

OLD MRS BEENY:
But is it rubbish? You know, there’s also the saying “Blue and green should never be seen.” But I went to a lovely valley in the Lakes, lush fields and trees against an azure sky and sparkling blue pool. I didn’t hear one person say, “Ugh! Right, tarmac over that grass and paint those DISGUSTING leaves orange, as that is the complementary colour for blue.” Although, in fairness, Jeremy Clarkson was filming elsewhere that day.

OLD MRS BAGSHAWE:
Now you say all those things, it sounds logical and reasonable. But the fact remains that my heart was once broken on St Patrick’s Day by radio football commentator Alan Green, who was dressed as The Incredible Hulk, so green remains anathema. Ladies! Throw Mrs Beeny out onto the pavement. But make sure she doesn’t touch any of the cracks, in case her innocent mother’s back is broken.

I imagine that is precisely how it happens. I speak from experience. I once wrote horoscopes for a now-defunct weekly newspaper. It wasn’t just made up. I spent time and great care working out the exact positions of the star signs on the page, before filling them in with any old rubbish and giving my own star sign the best luck of all.

Oh, yes, I’m not as green as I appear.

This is a thing which exists. Try to contain your excitement.

It is a book collecting my columns from the Liverpool Daily Post, with some bonus material. The bonus being it was stuff I’d already written.

You can buy it here for £5.95 plus P&P —> http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/GaryBainbridge All proceeds go to Tesco, following a very short stay in my account. It would make an ideal Christmas gift for somebody you do not like very much, a frenemy, perhaps.

REGULAR readers of my weekly column will be well aware of my unerring ability to alienate people in pretty much any situation.

I like regular readers – they are great. I also like irregular readers – they are nearly as great, but would be greater if they were regular readers.

My favourite readers, though, are the ones who read my column online and retweet it when I publicise it on Twitter. They are the best. When I am king of the universe, they will all get galaxies of their own.

Like the well brought-up chap I am not, I try to thank everybody who RTs my column on Twitter. I used to be able to do this by looking at my bit.ly results and working my way through them. I often get around 100 RTs, for which I am very grateful. Obviously it takes a bit of time to thank 100 people, but, like I say, I am very grateful.

Now bit.ly has stopped providing this service, at around the same time as Twitter brought in its Activity and @Gary_Bainbridge tabs. I presume you don’t have an @Gary_Bainbridge tab. That is probably specific to me.

So now, unless I spend every second monitoring Twitter – and, despite all evidence to the contrary, I do not – sometimes I do not find out that somebody has pimped my column. So I don’t know to thank him or her. And if this is somebody who I normally thank, i.e. anybody at all who pimps my column, then I am worried that he or she will think that I have become all lah-de-dah and up myself.

I am not all lah-de-dah. I admit to being up myself. Nevertheless, if you did pimp me this week, and did not receive my thanks, please accept my thanks. And my assurance that I am mortified.

Years ago, when I used to blog as Graham Bandage, I had an irregular feature: The Friday Interview. This was an interview and it was published on Fridays. This was my second favourite, about The Tube Man. I can’t remember what my favourite one was.

GRAHAM BANDAGE:
Roger Dulwich, you’re the last tube man in Great Britain. Why do you stick at it?

ROGER DULWICH:
It’s the only life I’ve ever known. And, you know, it’s a craft, my father was a tube man, so was his father. And if it dies with me, then so be it.

BANDAGE:
Tell me what the tube man did.

DULWICH:
Does, man, does! I’m not dead yet. They’ll have to crowbar my tube out of my cold dead hand.

BANDAGE:
I don’t think so. Not straight away. Rigor mortis only comes in a few hours later. You’d be floppy at first… Sorry, go on…

DULWICH:
We all worked out of a depot. And we’d just wait for the letters to arrive. Then we’d go through the letters and decide who was going where. Then we’d put the contents in the tubes and take them out in our floats to the houses.

BANDAGE:
So what would happen when you got to the house?

DULWICH:
Well, we’d knock on the door. And there’d be a proper old buzz. “Ooh, the tube man’s here. The tube man’s here. Quick, come and see the tube man.” So then they’d bring me into the lounge, sit on the sofa. And they’d make a fuss, bring me a cup of tea and that, and then it’d start.

BANDAGE:
You could use a lubricant, like WD40 or something.

DULWICH:
What?

BANDAGE:
To get the tube out of your dead hand. You wouldn’t necessarily need a crowbar.

DULWICH:
And then it’d start. I’d slip the content out of the tube. And I’d show them.

BANDAGE:
What was the content?

DULWICH:
Ooh, it could be anything. Nothing blue. We didn’t do blue. Old films, emo kids talking, pointless re-edits of Doctor Who title sequences. That was the beauty of it, you see. Just the tube man standing there, with a massive unrolled flicker book, simulating animation.

BANDAGE:
How long would it last?

DULWICH:
Ooh, anything from 30 seconds to five minutes. Or until my wrist gave out.

BANDAGE:
And what happened in the end?

DULWICH:
Well, the last frame had a big roll of paper attached. And they’d write their comments on it, like “OMFG! That was TEH L4M3ST. LOLZ” and … actually, I think that was the only thing they’d write.

BANDAGE:
Was the tube cardboard?

DULWICH:
Yes, why?

BANDAGE:
Well, if you were cremated, we wouldn’t need to take it at all.

DULWICH:
Now they do the whole thing on the internet. But it’s not the same.

BANDAGE:
No, because there’s sound and it’s quicker.

DULWICH:
You-bloody-tube? No. Let ME bloody tube for you, a professional.

I am not reproducing this as a pre-emptive strike, following the production of my first filmed sketch on YouTube. Not in the slightest. 

Well, I’m no Andrea Mann, but I have managed to get myself involved in this…

I am under no illusions that it is because of my ability to create the logo above, but I have contributed sketch material to the pilot series of Britain’s Got People, a daily topical comedy programme available exclusively on the internet, from Monday, November 14.

It is the brainchild of Dave Cohen, who writes for everything good on the telly, and features all sorts of famous and eminent people, including Mark Thomas. That’s the left-wing comedian Mark Thomas, rather than Mark Thomas, the editor of the Liverpool Daily Post. I also went to school with somebody called Mark Thomas. Sometimes I wonder if everybody is secretly called Mark Thomas, and only a small minority is unable to keep a lid on this.

Anyway, I would be grateful if you watched it.

You may go about your usual business now.

 

 

 

Stop reading. There’s nothing left to read.

I AM not adept at getting a big shop. Actually, I’m not bad at gathering the items. I’m quite tall, so I can retrieve blackcurrant jam from the top shelf without having to go on my tip-toes. I feel sorry for short people, actually, who have to eat strawberry or Value Mixed- Fruit Jam.

The difficulty comes when I reach the checkout. I’m fine at emptying the trolley onto the conveyor belt, and these days I know where to place the baguette so that it doesn’t get lodged against one of the spare dividers and knock the cylinder of barbecue flavour Pringles onto the floor.

It’s the other end of the process which troubles me – the filling of bags. And, even then, it’s not the filling itself, it’s the opening of the bags. For I have a Teflon thumb.

Normally it causes me no pain. I can hold a pen, make a cup of tea and perform all of my morning and late evening ablutions, but ask me to pick up a five pence piece from a tiled floor or open a fresh supermarket carrier bag and you might as well ask me to trap moonlight in a Thermos flask.

I tear the first bag from its holder and hope that it’s pulled the next one open enough for me to jam a finger in. Usually it hasn’t. Then I attempt to rub the little flappy thing to make it open. That doesn’t happen.

Then I look at the handle for the tiny millimetre-width seam and eventually prise the bag open. While this is happening the groceries are piling up, as if in a Tesco version of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. I feel like a contestant in The Generation Game: everybody around me is making pots with no fuss, while I’ve got clay all over my face and in my ears.

It is at this point that the assistant usually takes pity on me, and tears off eight wide-open bags with a single flick of the wrist. It is then the work of a moment to clear the backlog and look to all the world like a competent adult.

This is assuming, of course, that I am not being assisted by a charity bag packer. I would happily pay a charity bag packer not to pack my shopping. I have a system for filling bags, baked goods in one bag, fridge items in another, etc. The only system charity bag packers have is first come first served, eggs and yoghurt at the bottom, and tins on top of the soft baps.

This is what happens when children are given a job more suited to a grown-up. I have no objection to them doing jobs that adults are unable to do, for example, nipping up chimneys or repairing looms, but packing shopping bags is man’s work.

So it was with the intention of avoiding charity bag packers that I used the self-service check-out facility. And, to begin with, it all went swimmingly. The bag hung invitingly open on the rack. The items glided from trolley to carrier via the bar reader as if nature had intended it. And when the bag was full I tore it away.

But the next bag did not open. It just hung there, its white tongue lolling mockingly in my direction. I pulled it off. It was replaced on the rack by another obstinately closed bag. And as I struggled with my Teflon thumb to open the second bag, I became aware that there was a queue behind me. And I was flying without a co-pilot.

At this point, my body decided things were going far too well and directed a consignment of sweat to my index finger. I struggled some more. I even blew on the bag to try to part the tongue.

Then I heard it, an audible “tut” from the woman behind me. I had to cut the Gordian knot. I turned my back on the woman and surreptitiously pressed one knee on the pad. I have never been so glad to hear the words “Unexpected item in the bagging area.”

Within seconds, a supermarket employee was at my side. I expressed my bafflement, clearly there was nothing in the bagging area. He fiddled about with the machine as I whistled innocently.

Then, as an afterthought, he tore off half a dozen bags. If only I could use my Machiavellian powers for good.

HERE is my review of the year. (NOTE TO EDITOR: written on December 12 – should be all right).

January 
It’s hard to imagine the streets filled with snow now, but at the start of the year, Britain is absolutely battered by Arctic showers. Doubtless this year, the Government will have shipped a load of salt over in summer, and not at the last minute when snow, in a display of petulant irony, would make it impossible for the cargo to arrive.

February 
Britain gets a gold medal at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, when Amy Williams takes the first prize in the bob skeleton.

Opinion is split three ways: those who said “We are all very proud of Amy,” those who said “So basically, she is the best at lying down? I am amazed Great Britain doesn’t win more lying down prizes. I could get a bronze just now and I’m resting on my elbow,” and those who said “Ha! That reminds me of that lad I went to school with, Bob Skelton.”

March 
Chancellor Alistair Darling presents his 2010 Budget to the Commons. There is minor controversy when it is discovered the last few pages of the full budget document contain the text “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit,” over and over again. A contrite Mr Darling later says, “It just seemed pointless writing more.”

April 
Eyjafjallajökull erupts in Iceland, sending an ash cloud into the sky, severely disrupting flights to and from Europe. BBC News, ITN and Sky News convene and decide they’ll just call it “the volcano.”

May 
Nick Clegg wins the General Election by coming third, after Gordon Brown calls an elderly voter a bigoted woman, then goes around to her house and tries to make it better by saying he was referring to the size of her chest.

June 
BBC bosses announce they are cancelling Last Of The Summer Wine after 38 years, then feel bad about it so tell the cast and crew they were only joking and of course they can carry on, but secretly take all the film out of the cameras.

July 
A Sydney court rules Men at Work must give away 5% of royalties from their 1981 hit Down Under after claims they plagiarised Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree. The composer of the South African national anthem crosses fingers and hopes “Underneath The Spreading Chestnut Tree” is out of copyright.

August 
Big Brother finishes its final series. Bereft fans shift attention to miners who have become trapped underground in Chile, but lose interest when they realise there is no prospect of individual eviction.

September 
Tony Blair releases his autobiography, A Journey. Opponents of the Iraq war march down to Waterstone’s to move the book into the crime section. They are met by pedants who say that the book should be moved to the travel section, given the title. Blair laughs all the way to the bank.

October 
Boston Red Sox owner John W Henry agrees to buy Liverpool FC on the grounds that the team shifts to wearing red socks as a mark of respect. LFC chairman Martin Broughton tells Henry it’s a big ask, but he’ll see what he can do.

November 
Students protest at Coalition plans to raise tuition fees at the same time as cutting courses. It all gets very heated outside the Palace of Westminster. Nick Clegg puts a brave face on in the Commons as chants of “Clegg, you fat idiot” and “This is exactly what happened with Mars bars” echo around Parliament.

December 
(NOTE TO EDITOR: Can you put something in here? It’s too early for me to say, and I don’t want to look daft. GBx)