And Now For An Entry That Actually Isn't About Pokémon.
Yesterday, sos_your_face and I went to a recording of Would I Lie to You?. On the journey to the studios, I mentioned that Victoria Coren hadn't appeared on the game before and I'd love to see her there.
'You've said it, so now it's going to happen,' sos_your_face said, referring back to an earlier discussion of my weird power to alter reality: the way Charlie Brooker began flirting with David Mitchell only after I began theoretically 'shipping them, the way I came away from an earlier Would I Lie to You? filming thinking Keeley Hawes/David Mitchell would be adorable and subsequently along came this sketch. 'I'm going to be really disappointed if she's not there tonight. I'm just going to leave and go home.'
'Right,' I said. 'Well, I apologise in advance if on this occasion my reality-warping powers let you down.'
Fast-forward a couple of hours and you'd find us sitting in the studio.
'Next,' Rob Brydon said, 'please welcome to the stage one of my favourite writers, presenters and poker players...'
I actually exclaimed 'Yes!' aloud.
So, yes! On David Mitchell's team were Chris Packham and Mackenzie Crook; on Lee Mack's were Rhod Gilbert and ♥ Victoria Coren ♥. I was convinced for several minutes after Coren's appearance that I was dreaming.
(Victoria Coren is, incidentally, the best player of Would I Lie to You? as a game ever. She got every single claim right.)
Here are some things that I remember from the recording! For anyone unfamiliar with the concept of Would I Lie to You?: a panellist on one team reads out a fact about themselves from a card, and the other team cross-examine them in order to determine whether the fact is true or false.
After coming onto the set, Brydon greeted some people in the front row with a 'Hello, regulars'. I highly suspect he was addressing amandapear and sawnoffcourtney.
Coren felt the need to inform us immediately after sitting down that she was aware that she was the only one who'd walked in holding a duffel coat. 'I didn't realise until just now that nobody else had one, and it was a matter of either literally throwing it to the ground or carrying it in with me.'
Mitchell, shortly after sitting down, discovered a notebook containing instructions for assembling the set and began to regale us with its contents.
Mitchell: Apparently, I'm in position A2. Lee's in A5.
Mack: (takes offence at the fact that Mitchell's seat number implies greater importance)
Mitchell: (gesturing around the panel's seats from the one on his left (from our perspective) to the one on Mack's right (from our perspective)) There's A1, A2, A3, A4, A5 and A6. (puzzled tone) Then there's 'Spare'...
Mack: For when the seventh guest comes on.
Mitchell: (even more puzzled) And then 'Stick 1' and 'Stick 2'.
Mack: Where's Rob sitting?
Mitchell: It just says 'Rob'.
Coren has an issue with things going near eyes, it appears; she was cringing and going 'No, no, no' when the others were discussing Brydon's contact lenses.
Coren: Nonononono, can we please talk about something else?
Mitchell: Would you like me to start reading from the notebook again?
Gilbert: (reading from the card) 'I was fired from my job at the zoo...'
(Coren begins to titter)
Mack: Oh, I like this one already.
Gilbert: '...for photographing animals wearing hats.'
Packham: How did you get the hats onto the animals?
Gilbert: It was a matter of elevating my arms whilst holding the hat and then letting go when the hat was on top of the animal's head.
Crook: You put a fez on a snake?
Gilbert: I said it wasn't a snake. It was in the reptile house, but it wasn't a snake. I don't know what it was. It had a long body, but what let it down snake-wise were the four legs.
Mitchell: You're thinking of a dachshund.
(someone asks how he came to be fired)
Gilbert: I got caught. I can't remember exactly what I was doing at the time, but-
Mitchell: Well, putting a hat on an animal. Because, I can tell you, if you were having sex with an animal, it wasn't to do with the hats.
Mitchell: Is Keith Richards here? Because I'm not very well-informed about music; I might not realise.
Brydon: You went to see a Shirley Bassey concert once, didn't you?
Mitchell: That was a few series ago, yes. Back when there were still interesting truths about me to tell. In a couple of rounds it's going to be (pretending to read from a card) 'My National Insurance number...'
Coren's claim in the first round was that for four years she ate her tea out of a dog bowl whenever she was at her friend's house.
Crook: Did your friend have a dog?
Coren: No.
All: ...
Coren explained that she and some friends had been pretending to be the Famous Five, and she had the role of Timmy the dog.
Coren: Better Timmy than Anne. 'Oh, yes, you go off and have adventures and I'll stay here and cook.'
Brydon: Did you ever try to get your hands on Dick?
Coren: ...I was eight.
Brydon: The Famous Five! Who was there... Julian, Dick, George...
Mitchell: (helpfully) I think the point you're missing here, Rob, is that 'dick' can also be a synonym for 'penis'.
Brydon: (claps a hand over his mouth in mock-horror)
Mitchell: You said you had your tea from a dog bowl. Do you mean tea the drink?
Coren: Tea the meal. Jam sandwiches and things. You don't drink tea when you're a child.
Mitchell: ...I drank tea as a child.
Of course David Mitchell drank tea as a child. Oh, Mitchell.
Packham was wearing a bizarre shirt with many patches of colour. Mack decided it was camouflage clothing and kept insisting that all he could see was a floating head.
Packham: (begins to read out his first claim)
Mack: Who said that?
Packham's claim was that he had tried to get closer to badgers whilst studying them by dyeing his hair black and white and putting on badger scent, collected from the anal glands of badgers killed in road accidents.
Coren: So you thought 'I know: nothing reassures a badger more than a man with multicoloured hair who smells like a dead badger'?
Coren: (trying to establish the truth of the statement) It's not a question of whether the badgers were fooled or not; it's a question of whether Chris is mad enough to dye his hair like a badger and rub a badger corpse over himself, and I for one absolutely believe he is.
Brydon fumbled a line several times.
Mack: You realise this is live?
Mitchell claimed, falsely, that the 'This Is My...' guest Simon had a tattoo of him on one knee and of Robert Webb on the other. When the round was over, Coren asked him whether his claim had been based on a real person.
Mitchell: Not as far as I know.
(Chris begins to roll his trouser leg up)
Brydon: (holding a transcript of a letter Mackenzie Crook wrote) I hope you don't mind if I do it in an accent. (begins to read in a not-terribly-convincing stab at Crook's voice)
Mitchell: (smirking) I thought you were going to do an accent.
Brydon: >:( Well, we can't all be blessed with your acting range. (Mitchell-voice) 'Shall I do repressed and posh or posh and repressed?'
Mitchell claimed that he'd forced his mother to take him to the doctor multiple times as a child because he'd been concerned about the rate at which his toes were growing.
Coren: It's just difficult to imagine him-
Mack: Without socks on? I know.
Coren: She was willing to take you four times, wasting the doctor's time?
Mitchell: Well, what you need to understand is that my mother hates the NHS. Really, really hates the NHS.
(a little further along)
Mitchell: I should point out that my mother doesn't really hate the NHS. I was saying that for humorous effect.
Mack: Really? Because I was talking to your mum a couple of weeks ago and she was telling me how much she hated the NHS.
Mitchell: I didn't know that. I'd previously thought she was a lovely woman; now I see that I shall have to cut her dead.
Mack's parents once used a Ouija board in an attempt to find a very, very, very important document. (Mitchell's attempts to find out exactly what the document was were fruitless. 'Can you be even more specific?' 'A very, very, very, very, very important document.')
Mack: I want to make it clear that my parents were lovely people; they were just sort of mental. (a man comes in to adjust Coren's microphone, which involves a lot of fiddling with her neckline) But not as mental as him. He doesn't even work here.
Mitchell spoke out in sort-of defence of Tim Henman, pointing out that he himself would probably put in a considerably worse performance at Wimbledon.
Mitchell: Tim Henman is a relatively good tennis player.
Brydon: I'm not a gay man, but if I were I would want Tim Henman to take me in his arms and lovingly kiss me.
Crook had a 'possession' claim: an orchidometer that his sister allegedly bought for him as a gift. An orchidometer is a piece of medical equipment for determining the size of human testicles; it consists of a series of strung-together balls of varying sizes with numbers written on them. Presumably one compares one's own balls to the balls on the orchidometer.
Crook: She gave it to me for nostalgic reasons.
Mack, intrigued, immediately went over to Crook's desk and claimed the orchidometer.
Mack: (dangles two of the balls on Brydon's chin) Bring back memories, Rob?
Mack: (returning to his team) I believe your sister would get this for you. What I don't believe is that you wouldn't run straight to the bathroom to try it out. I'm going to measure mine right now. (sits) I'll do it under the desk.
Coren: (almost getting out of her seat) You're not going to-
Mack: Why not? All right, I'll only get one out.
Coren: (beginning to grin) ...go on, then.
Mack: (cracks up)
Mack: Look at that! (holds up the smallest ball on the orchidometer) I feel like I'm trying to get off with a Borrower.
Mitchell: I think what we can establish from this is that, if men had fifteen balls, Lee would be gay. He's fascinated!
Mack: What d'you think?
Coren: It is one million per cent true.
Gilbert: How much is that statistically?
Coren: If we played this game a hundred times, a million of those times Mackenzie would be telling the truth.
Coren: He's telling the truth! Just look at him through these. (hands Gilbert her glasses)
Mitchell: Do you have truth glasses? Because those aren't allowed on this show!
At the end, Coren put on her duffel coat and she and Mitchell walked away together and Mitchell stepped down from the set and held out his hand to assist her and she took it and stepped down and it was the most adorable thing ever. It's fine if you don't want to get married and produce the world's most intelligent and sarcastic children, guys, but I think it would be a great loss to humanity.
'You've said it, so now it's going to happen,' sos_your_face said, referring back to an earlier discussion of my weird power to alter reality: the way Charlie Brooker began flirting with David Mitchell only after I began theoretically 'shipping them, the way I came away from an earlier Would I Lie to You? filming thinking Keeley Hawes/David Mitchell would be adorable and subsequently along came this sketch. 'I'm going to be really disappointed if she's not there tonight. I'm just going to leave and go home.'
'Right,' I said. 'Well, I apologise in advance if on this occasion my reality-warping powers let you down.'
Fast-forward a couple of hours and you'd find us sitting in the studio.
'Next,' Rob Brydon said, 'please welcome to the stage one of my favourite writers, presenters and poker players...'
I actually exclaimed 'Yes!' aloud.
So, yes! On David Mitchell's team were Chris Packham and Mackenzie Crook; on Lee Mack's were Rhod Gilbert and ♥ Victoria Coren ♥. I was convinced for several minutes after Coren's appearance that I was dreaming.
(Victoria Coren is, incidentally, the best player of Would I Lie to You? as a game ever. She got every single claim right.)
Here are some things that I remember from the recording! For anyone unfamiliar with the concept of Would I Lie to You?: a panellist on one team reads out a fact about themselves from a card, and the other team cross-examine them in order to determine whether the fact is true or false.
After coming onto the set, Brydon greeted some people in the front row with a 'Hello, regulars'. I highly suspect he was addressing amandapear and sawnoffcourtney.
Coren felt the need to inform us immediately after sitting down that she was aware that she was the only one who'd walked in holding a duffel coat. 'I didn't realise until just now that nobody else had one, and it was a matter of either literally throwing it to the ground or carrying it in with me.'
Mitchell, shortly after sitting down, discovered a notebook containing instructions for assembling the set and began to regale us with its contents.
Mitchell: Apparently, I'm in position A2. Lee's in A5.
Mack: (takes offence at the fact that Mitchell's seat number implies greater importance)
Mitchell: (gesturing around the panel's seats from the one on his left (from our perspective) to the one on Mack's right (from our perspective)) There's A1, A2, A3, A4, A5 and A6. (puzzled tone) Then there's 'Spare'...
Mack: For when the seventh guest comes on.
Mitchell: (even more puzzled) And then 'Stick 1' and 'Stick 2'.
Mack: Where's Rob sitting?
Mitchell: It just says 'Rob'.
Coren has an issue with things going near eyes, it appears; she was cringing and going 'No, no, no' when the others were discussing Brydon's contact lenses.
Coren: Nonononono, can we please talk about something else?
Mitchell: Would you like me to start reading from the notebook again?
Gilbert: (reading from the card) 'I was fired from my job at the zoo...'
(Coren begins to titter)
Mack: Oh, I like this one already.
Gilbert: '...for photographing animals wearing hats.'
Packham: How did you get the hats onto the animals?
Gilbert: It was a matter of elevating my arms whilst holding the hat and then letting go when the hat was on top of the animal's head.
Crook: You put a fez on a snake?
Gilbert: I said it wasn't a snake. It was in the reptile house, but it wasn't a snake. I don't know what it was. It had a long body, but what let it down snake-wise were the four legs.
Mitchell: You're thinking of a dachshund.
(someone asks how he came to be fired)
Gilbert: I got caught. I can't remember exactly what I was doing at the time, but-
Mitchell: Well, putting a hat on an animal. Because, I can tell you, if you were having sex with an animal, it wasn't to do with the hats.
Mitchell: Is Keith Richards here? Because I'm not very well-informed about music; I might not realise.
Brydon: You went to see a Shirley Bassey concert once, didn't you?
Mitchell: That was a few series ago, yes. Back when there were still interesting truths about me to tell. In a couple of rounds it's going to be (pretending to read from a card) 'My National Insurance number...'
Coren's claim in the first round was that for four years she ate her tea out of a dog bowl whenever she was at her friend's house.
Crook: Did your friend have a dog?
Coren: No.
All: ...
Coren explained that she and some friends had been pretending to be the Famous Five, and she had the role of Timmy the dog.
Coren: Better Timmy than Anne. 'Oh, yes, you go off and have adventures and I'll stay here and cook.'
Brydon: Did you ever try to get your hands on Dick?
Coren: ...I was eight.
Brydon: The Famous Five! Who was there... Julian, Dick, George...
Mitchell: (helpfully) I think the point you're missing here, Rob, is that 'dick' can also be a synonym for 'penis'.
Brydon: (claps a hand over his mouth in mock-horror)
Mitchell: You said you had your tea from a dog bowl. Do you mean tea the drink?
Coren: Tea the meal. Jam sandwiches and things. You don't drink tea when you're a child.
Mitchell: ...I drank tea as a child.
Of course David Mitchell drank tea as a child. Oh, Mitchell.
Packham was wearing a bizarre shirt with many patches of colour. Mack decided it was camouflage clothing and kept insisting that all he could see was a floating head.
Packham: (begins to read out his first claim)
Mack: Who said that?
Packham's claim was that he had tried to get closer to badgers whilst studying them by dyeing his hair black and white and putting on badger scent, collected from the anal glands of badgers killed in road accidents.
Coren: So you thought 'I know: nothing reassures a badger more than a man with multicoloured hair who smells like a dead badger'?
Coren: (trying to establish the truth of the statement) It's not a question of whether the badgers were fooled or not; it's a question of whether Chris is mad enough to dye his hair like a badger and rub a badger corpse over himself, and I for one absolutely believe he is.
Brydon fumbled a line several times.
Mack: You realise this is live?
Mitchell claimed, falsely, that the 'This Is My...' guest Simon had a tattoo of him on one knee and of Robert Webb on the other. When the round was over, Coren asked him whether his claim had been based on a real person.
Mitchell: Not as far as I know.
(Chris begins to roll his trouser leg up)
Brydon: (holding a transcript of a letter Mackenzie Crook wrote) I hope you don't mind if I do it in an accent. (begins to read in a not-terribly-convincing stab at Crook's voice)
Mitchell: (smirking) I thought you were going to do an accent.
Brydon: >:( Well, we can't all be blessed with your acting range. (Mitchell-voice) 'Shall I do repressed and posh or posh and repressed?'
Mitchell claimed that he'd forced his mother to take him to the doctor multiple times as a child because he'd been concerned about the rate at which his toes were growing.
Coren: It's just difficult to imagine him-
Mack: Without socks on? I know.
Coren: She was willing to take you four times, wasting the doctor's time?
Mitchell: Well, what you need to understand is that my mother hates the NHS. Really, really hates the NHS.
(a little further along)
Mitchell: I should point out that my mother doesn't really hate the NHS. I was saying that for humorous effect.
Mack: Really? Because I was talking to your mum a couple of weeks ago and she was telling me how much she hated the NHS.
Mitchell: I didn't know that. I'd previously thought she was a lovely woman; now I see that I shall have to cut her dead.
Mack's parents once used a Ouija board in an attempt to find a very, very, very important document. (Mitchell's attempts to find out exactly what the document was were fruitless. 'Can you be even more specific?' 'A very, very, very, very, very important document.')
Mack: I want to make it clear that my parents were lovely people; they were just sort of mental. (a man comes in to adjust Coren's microphone, which involves a lot of fiddling with her neckline) But not as mental as him. He doesn't even work here.
Mitchell spoke out in sort-of defence of Tim Henman, pointing out that he himself would probably put in a considerably worse performance at Wimbledon.
Mitchell: Tim Henman is a relatively good tennis player.
Brydon: I'm not a gay man, but if I were I would want Tim Henman to take me in his arms and lovingly kiss me.
Crook had a 'possession' claim: an orchidometer that his sister allegedly bought for him as a gift. An orchidometer is a piece of medical equipment for determining the size of human testicles; it consists of a series of strung-together balls of varying sizes with numbers written on them. Presumably one compares one's own balls to the balls on the orchidometer.
Crook: She gave it to me for nostalgic reasons.
Mack, intrigued, immediately went over to Crook's desk and claimed the orchidometer.
Mack: (dangles two of the balls on Brydon's chin) Bring back memories, Rob?
Mack: (returning to his team) I believe your sister would get this for you. What I don't believe is that you wouldn't run straight to the bathroom to try it out. I'm going to measure mine right now. (sits) I'll do it under the desk.
Coren: (almost getting out of her seat) You're not going to-
Mack: Why not? All right, I'll only get one out.
Coren: (beginning to grin) ...go on, then.
Mack: (cracks up)
Mack: Look at that! (holds up the smallest ball on the orchidometer) I feel like I'm trying to get off with a Borrower.
Mitchell: I think what we can establish from this is that, if men had fifteen balls, Lee would be gay. He's fascinated!
Mack: What d'you think?
Coren: It is one million per cent true.
Gilbert: How much is that statistically?
Coren: If we played this game a hundred times, a million of those times Mackenzie would be telling the truth.
Coren: He's telling the truth! Just look at him through these. (hands Gilbert her glasses)
Mitchell: Do you have truth glasses? Because those aren't allowed on this show!
At the end, Coren put on her duffel coat and she and Mitchell walked away together and Mitchell stepped down from the set and held out his hand to assist her and she took it and stepped down and it was the most adorable thing ever. It's fine if you don't want to get married and produce the world's most intelligent and sarcastic children, guys, but I think it would be a great loss to humanity.