Making a Rhod for his own back
I REMEMBER once interviewing Rhod Gilbert and the perma-grumpy (in a good way) stand-up telling me that his life wasn’t his own any more.
He sat there in the Cardiff cafe at which we’d arranged to meet, sullenly stirring his tea and bemoaning how even the odd night out with his mates had become untenable due to all the requests for selfies and autographs he’d get from drunken revellers at the bar.
For a moment I thought he was playing things up a bit to suit his curmudgeonly stage persona – after all, why would you go from qualitative researcher to stadium spanning comedian if a bit of unwelcome attention was going to bother you that much?
But as the interview ended and I walked out with him I quickly saw exactly what he meant.
We’d barely emerged blinking into the afternoon sun from our dimly lit diner when a shout of “Oi, Rhod Gilbert!” came at us from across the street.
Meanwhile, a big group of rugby lads, who’d just started spilling out of a nearby pub, began running over.
As they started dancing around him en masse as though he was some sort of human May Pole – all the while chanting his name to the tune of Bread of Heaven – I realised he hadn’t been exaggerating at all.
“Like having the red dot from a sniper’s rifle permanently affixed to your forehead,” was how he described it to me, and it was those words which immediately sprang to mind when the latest series of Rhod Gilbert’s Work Experience screened on BBC Two last week.
In it Gilbert tried his hand at yet another alternative profession, having had a go at being everything from binman to butler, wedding planner to RAF pilot over the course of the preceding six seasons.
Here he was having a crack at being a journalist – a subject that’s very close to my bank balance... sorry, I mean “heart”.
Dumped in the middle of a mocked-up refugee camp near Hereford, he was given a taste of what war correspondents have to deal with on an almost daily basis.
Flash bombs went off, smoke grenades were ignited and Rhod found himself staring right down the very real barrel of a pretend terrorist’s gun.
Thankfully there was also some light relief in the form of a stint at his hometown paper, The Carmarthen Journal – whose staff dropped him off in a deserted car park in Lampeter and told him not to come back without a front-page story.
Now, Lampeter being the kind of place that gives Bucharest on a Monday a run for its money in terms of things going-on being at a premium, Rhod certainly had his work cut out for him.
Luckily though, a couple of ladies were on hand to tip him off regarding a phantom bell ringer who’d been keeping the neighbours awake with some amateur camponology up at the local church during the wee small hours.
Cue Rhod’s front page lead and the rather winning headline suggestion: “What bloody chime do you call this?”
I swear that lad’s missed his true calling in life.
BRILLIANT to see Greg Davies’ sitcom Man Down back on Channel Four.
While still missing the late Rik Mayall’s memorable cameos as the comic’s unhinged dad, the show still manages to provide some stellar laughs.
The sight of Davies’ over-sized man-child being attacked by a fox in a skip, for example, still had me tittering on the train to work the next morning.