Sick: Part One...

Flu has swept though FBTP (From Beer To Paternity) Towers and it laid the indefatigueable Missus up for three days and now it’s done the same to me.

And this is proper flu, not ‘man’s flu’. The sort of flu that makes every joint in your body ache like some sort of medieval torturer is twisting it on a rack after they’ve stuck pins through it then rubbed salt into the wound.

In short it’s pretty shit… but if ever there was an incentive to take as many drugs as possible and return to full health ASAP it is the thought of being stuck in bed for yet another day with daytime telly.

Yesterday I slept through most of the day but I did wake up in time to catch Ready, Steady, Cook – and when I fell back to a drug and illness induced sleep it gave me nightmares.

The bits of the show that struck me were the fact that Ainsley Harriott was larger-than-life and massively enthusiastic about everything that went on. He also made everything into a sexual reference of some sort or another.

‘I’ve brought monkfish today, Ainsley.’
‘Oooh! Monkfish. We love a bit of monkfish don’t we girls? Cos it rhymes with spu…’

The other thing that disturbed me were the studio audience. Whenever Ainsley made some crass joke the camera panned back to the audience and they were mainly old or infirm. And they cackled…

And these two factors turned into one of the worst nightmares I’ve had in years. In it I was tied to a chair in the Ready, Steady, Cook studio and Ainsley was screaming and shouting every double entendre he could think of – and as he did he’d point his big fat sausage-like fingers at me before my chair span around to face the cackling and slobbering studio audience. Then when I turned back Harriott’s fingers had grown even bigger and it continued like this for some time…

Still, it was less scary than the actual show itself.