WHAT TO DO THIS WEEK
IF you’re weeding your borders, it’s best to put a plank of wood down to stand on so you’re doing less damage to the soil.
IF the weather gets cold don’t walk on frosty lawns as this will damage them. If ponds are icy and you have fish, break the surface with a stick to allow oxygen in but be careful as it’s easy to slip in this weather.
COVER your veg
(LAUGHS) I really, really loved it and I loved generally screwing up the tasks.
The strong camaraderie of the five comedians means you end up like a small family with me and Jo (Brand) as the older parents and the three others (Ed Gamble, Katy Wix and Rose Matafeo) as overexcited children.
How competitive were you?
TASKS are filmed over a long period of time and then we do five nights in the studio.
It was quite a surprise watching it all back and my lamentable lack of success. People were telling me ‘I thought you were really bright and you are a terrible dunce’.
But I told them ‘You don’t understand. I have always been massively impractical’. I have one skill – language and storytelling – and not a lot of practical skills.
I’ve always been hopeless at practical lateral thinking. I’m more an abstract lateral thinker. If I’m told to lasso Taskmaster’s Alex Horne my brain goes to a weird place.
Jo simply moved the starting line closer and just popped the lasso over Alex’s head.
How do you decide on TV appearances?
I DON’T really like doing panel shows. I’ve done lots of them in the past, but I find them a bit stressful. You go on a panel show and find yourself fighting against another comedian to get your joke in. It’s not conducive to the way that I think and I generally turn them down. I enjoy QI though and I don’t consider Taskmaster a panel show. Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned back in the day was completely unplanned and when we were doing it we could run with an idea for quite a long time. It’s the way I work best.
Are you looking forward to touring again with new show Trolls: Not The Dolls?
I’VE done lots of touring over the last years – My Family: Not The Sitcom and Fame: Not The Musical – and this is the third one.
(Laughs) I really enjoyed the last two tours and wanted to keep going while I was still young enough to get on stage without a walking stick.
The earlier tours were more personal, but this is more political and less about my private life. It’s about Twitter and social media. I’ve been on Twitter for nine years. It’s a bit of a look back on my life.
Would you class yourself as a social media addict?
(LAUGHS) I talk about my whole addiction to social media in the show and make fun of it.
It’s weird. My addiction is not an incredibly unhealthy addiction. I’m doing my job writing and when I think of a joke in my study I can put it out there and people respond.
It is a very immediate interaction with people. It can be really good and really bad. I’ve written a lot on Twitter over the last nine years – both comedy and more serious subjects – but I’ve been abroad to places that have no signal and have managed it. I can find myself reaching for the phone quite early in the day, but the few times I don’t, I don’t feel like it’s a lost weekend. I don’t turn into a gibbering wreck. I think I can keep it under control.
How do you deal with trolls?
EVERYONE says don’t feed the trolls. It’s the dark end of what you can get with social media and people say by replying and giving credence to them you give a platform to terrible people.
It’s a problem, but I don’t agree with don’t feed the trolls. It’s not like hecklers in a club. When they shout out something and you can put them down.
Hecklers on social media keep on
Centre, Leamington, on March 14, and Symphony Hall, Birmingham, on March 19.