The joy of X

Actor David Duchovny has been hard to avoid in London this week. Although I haven’t actually bumped into him anywhere, he’s been so busy doing the rounds for his latest big screen excursion, Evolution, that I’m beginning to feel like he’s the brother I never had. At the time of writing, I reckon I’ve seen or read no fewer than a dozen interviews with the man who will forever be best known as Fox Mulder from The X Files in the past six days. Unlike many in his profession, Duchovny gives good answer and seems like the kind of fella you’d love to go for a few pints with, if only to embark on the one line of questioning that was not broached in any of the twelve David Duchovny interviews I have seen or read in the week gone by.

The sexual chemistry between Fox Mulder and his screen partner Dana Scully, played by the ravishing Gillian Anderson was, for many, the highlight of The X Files. “Will they or won’t they?” viewers wondered season after season for several years, until finally we went to see The X Files movie and were so appalled by its sheer bloody awfulness that we immediately stopped watching the TV show and quickly ceased to care whether they would or wouldn’t. However, watching one interviewer after another lob interrogatory softballs at Duchovny in the past week, I once again found myself biting my nails to the quick while wondering: “Will they or won’t they?”

Plummeting standards in journalism decreed that not one of them did. Now, I’m no Paxman or Bowman, but I’m fairly certain that if I was ever interviewing David Duchovny, the first thing I’d do once I’d got the tape rolling is ask him if he’d ever heard of a man named Dan Petrescu. If he bristled and began balling his fists, I’d quickly move on to a less sensitive issue and maybe enquire if he’d ever given Gillian Anderson a seeing to, and if so, was it as much fun as I imagine it would be.

If, however, he looked puzzled and answered “Dan who?”, I’d immediately show him a photo of the Romanian footballer just to see what would happen next. A world famous American movie star that looks so like a top class eastern European footballer they could be identical twins, and yet not one out of a dozen interviewers thought to ask David Duchovny if he’d ever seen or heard of Dan Petrescu. What were they thinking? It reminded me of Ardal O’Hanlon’s spiel about getting his own chat show, just so he could have Neil Armstrong on as a guest, talk to him for 20 minutes and not mention the moon once. A case for The X Files if ever there was one.

Then again, these are strange times in London. Last weekend I played my first ever late show in Jongleurs Battersea, one of about a dozen Jongleurs comedy clubs scattered around England. I was due on stage at approximately 1am on a Sunday morning, and had been warned by my fellow comedians during the previous evening’s show that the Saturday night late show could be something of a bear pit.

Since I remain traumatised by memories of my first ever Jongleurs experience, when I walked off at 9pm on Friday 13th of August 1999 with the sound of my own feet drowned out by the slow hand-clapping and booing of 350 complete strangers, I was absolutely terrified at the prospect of enduring a similar hell almost two years down the line.

It never came to pass. An audience that I was led to believe would be comprised of aggressive London wide-boys proved welcoming in the extreme and the show was one of the more enjoyable I’ve ever had the pleasure of performing. If there’s a woman alive who can provide the kind of relief I felt walking off that stage in the early hours of Sunday morning, I’ll happily marry her.

Looking over a recent installment of London Calling to see what errors the sub-editor had inserted in an effort to make me look stupid, I was horrified to find that I had wandered aimlessly across the journalistic minefield that is “man from Birr, County Offaly writes about women’s pubic hairstyles.” It was a mistake, I apologise and I can only conclude that I was either drunk or temporarily insane when I wrote it. It is a topic I should never have attempted to address and will never mention again.

Lately, however, I have noticed another alarming trend in ladies’ fashions that simply cannot go without comment. The comment

is this: girls, wearing short t-shirts and what you perceive to be slinky low cut denim jeans with no waistband that result in half your arses and your underwear being put on involuntary public display every time you bend, hunker or sit down is a mistake. The sight of a centimetre wide thong riding up the crack of your backside, then going Y-shaped and disappearing into the flabby rolls of flesh that pass for your hips is in no way sexy or erotic.

There, I’ve said it. Ignorant, misogynistic and ill-informed comment it may be, but it’s for your own good girls. Indeed, if you’d seen the two beached whales I saw sunbathing on their stomachs on Clapham Common this afternoon while being unwittingly hoisted by their own petards you’d understand where I was coming from. Face it ladies, if several generations of builders and from-the-chest-down stick insects like Jordan, Billie and Geri Halliwell can’t pull it off without evoking howls of revulsion and derision, then neither can you.

As obvious an example of two thongs not making a right as I ever did see.