I love the Krater club in Brighton.

Without meaning to indulge in cross-blog sycophancy I'd have to put a great deal of this down to Stephen Grant - the place is treated like a favourite child by him, and the fact that it rarely has a seat unfilled tells you quite how much effort has been put in over the years.

The problem I had with it this weekend is a rather unfair one in my eyes.

I compered Friday night, and then both the early and late Saturday shows.

Friday night was, I feel, perhaps the best time I have ever had on a stage as a compere. Sometimes it can get a while to settle the room, particularly as substitute compere (Stephen is the resident compere and it is not unusual for the audience to let out an audible sigh of disappointment when a different name to his is announced). Friday night however I hit the ground running and had them in the proverbial palm of my hand. Ditto the early show on Saturday - in fact, at one stage I was running around backstage looking for presents to give to a gentleman in the front row who, despite looking like old Steptoe, was really looking forward to Christmas. He even asked "how many more sleeps is it?" which was as beautiful a moment as any. I wrapped up the early Saturday gig to deafening cheers from the sold out audience and then went off to the pub for an hour with James Dowdeswell before the next show.

That's all it took. One hour.

You expect a late night Saturday show audience to be a bit more of a handfull. Then again, naieve as I sometimes am, I also always expect a comedy audience - particularly one normally as savvy as the Krater crowd - to at least offer a fair fight.

Not a fucking bit of it. I found it an impossible task. And I must stress yet again that this was a freak occurence. I have done the late Saturday show many times before and never experienced anything like that. They were just too drunk. Too many pockets of dissent in that crowd, not one of them with an ounce of humour or the basic understanding that if they all spoke at the same time it would just become 'noise'. They fucking hated me.

The plus side of this was that the acts weren't subjected to nearly as vicious a barracking as I was, the relief of many sections of the audience was palpable at me merely leaving the stage. Not to say it wasn't hard for the acts, but they certainly came out of it a lot better than I did.

So horrible was my first fifteen minutes on the stage, I actually resorted to going on in the second half in disguise. A fucking disguise! I tied my hair back, wore Dowdeswell's glasses (tell you what, his fucking eye isn't half wonky - never realised quite how much till I put his glasses on - it's not a lazy eye, it's in a fucking coma) and changed my t-shirt. Despite me adopting a posh accent, the audience saw right through my disguise and I was back to square one. I tried a bit of traditional compering, asking a pretty girl in the front row what she did. If I'm having a difficult time, chances are I will talk to a pretty girl in the front row...might as well get some pleasure out of it. She told me she was a translator and a waitress. I asked if that meant she worked at Cafe Rouge. Yep - I was pretty flustered and that was the very best I could come up with. It got the minimal laugh it deserved but at that stage I was taking any laugh as a moral victory.

By the third and final section of my compering I'd had more than enough of the shit. I walked onto the stage, waited an eternity for the murmuring and pre-emptive pockets of boos to die down, turned my back on them and started to sing.

We are the champions.

All the way through...

The lights changed beautifully (hats off to Dave on the desk) and the mood was set.

It was rather cathartic to be honest, and at the very least showed me that nowhere near all the audience were against me. When I hit the high notes there were groups of people standing up to applaud, I'd completely misjudged them. I thought they were all cunts, but noooooo, the few cunts in there had just surrounded the room and ruined it for the people that really wanted it to be fun in a nice way, without the bullying and abuse. All it took to bring it home was a short, fat lad singing his heart out in defiance.

After the show I had lots of people come up to me and confirm this, and thankyou those people. I was a bit upset and they made me feel better. It's a shame that the last person to talk to me before I left the club whispered in my ear that I "needed my head kicking in", as that may have took some of the pleasure out of it. It sort of gave the cunts the last word...

I had arranged to meet Stephen Grant for coffee on Sunday, before getting my train over here to Cardiff for filming (which I did today and am now in a posh hotel trying to work out how to get dirty films on the telly - they keep coming up all red with no sound and I like to follow the stories too...I don't really). I arrived at the Cafe Rouge early to meet Stephen and ordered a coffee. The waitress nudged me and said she had enjoyed the show last night. I looked up and saw the pretty girl from the front row smiling at me.

See, I may not always be funny - but when I'm not I'm at least usually accurate.

For someone with a 'fuck it' attitude I can act mental sometimes...

I have spent the entire day switching around my office (Well, I say "day" - I only got up at 6pm, and I say "office" - but it's just the spare room with a desk in it essentially).

As I was determined to sort it out all in one go, I naturally have managed to do all manner of things in no way connected to the job in hand in order to drag out the chore for as long as humanly possible.

Conditional deferrence is the natural enemy of the weakly motivated artist.

Ironically, the only reason I was shifting the office around in the first place was because I convinced myself that I would work better in here if it was tidy and organised. I don't know what justification I can give to downloading naked girls that walk onto my computer screen and dance saucily for me every couple of minutes but it was important enough to temporarily suspend the tidying whilst I did it earlier.

There is one dancing even as I write this...she has just licked her own nipple...if I'm honest it has already lost it's novelty...

I really pissed myself off last night. I'd settled down to do some writing on the sitcom and then got distracted by MySpace. I figured that taking an interest in the lives of some real people may be inspirational in my quest to write some great and original characters. Yes, you read that right - that really is how I justified it.

I came to the conclusion by the early hours of this morning that MySpace is bad for you. Thing is, I'm not interested in looking at the sites of people I know - I'm far more interested in looking at the sites of people I have known and piecing together their lives from the snippets of information they have deemed worthy of public consumption. And after digesting that information I end up following a paper trail - seeing what comments they have left for people listed as their friends and stuff like that - reading deeply into it and constructing theories. It reeks of unhinged obsessive behaviour and that's out of character for me - I started to feel like some sort of clandestine and voyeuristic stalker. No good came of it.

But it didn't stop there.

Oh no sir...

In turn, the MySpace lurking led to me looking up some of my ex-girlfriend's names on google.

Seriously - for fuck's sake...

I'm meant to be working don't forget, but instead my curiosity of what journeys had been had by romantic involvements of times past had been awoken. I wanted to know what they were doing NOW. I know, I know - how fucked up was I last night? On the good side, I did find a photo of one who broke my heart many years ago and decided that with hindsight I have had a lucky escape.

That sounds terrible I know, but she has ended up looking like her mum, and her mum was a fucking witch.

I flopped into bed at 9.30am this morning - irritated with my wasted evening and cursing myself beyond belief - deciding as I drifed off to sleep that if I made my office a cleaner and more professional environment then I would be far better set to crack on with the work on this sitcom that I need to do. I practically vaulted out of bed this evening, with a sense of determination that I was going to get on top of things - a feeling that was compounded when I checked my emails and found that my writing partner Steve Morrison had sent over fucking loads of stuff that he had done. If my own self-motivation hadn't been sufficient, the guilt would have been.

It took fucking ages, as you can tell by the time of this post, but my office is all tidy now. I forgot how big this desk actually was when it wasn't covered in bank statements, invoices and cds. I've binned loads of stuff, I've updated all my framed posters, and removed as many distractions as I possibly can.

I've got the lights down low and moody, I've got nice, non-intrusive music playing and the fan heater is blowing on my feet.

I am now ready to start doing some work.

After looking at YouTube for a bit...

Hello

First off - I found out today that I did in fact get one of those castings that I went for. I'm filming it next week. I'm not allowed to tell you what it is. I really want to though. It's a really small part but that doesn't matter in this case. Oh, let's just not talk about it...

So, Saturday night was the Oxford Gong Show and I was the 'professional compere' according to the poster.

Have to say, I'm not a fan of gong shows - the concept is sound as long as the people involved are made of strong stuff and don't take it too seriously, but there's always the risk that there will be a potentially brilliant act destroyed forever because their vulnerability could not stand up to the pantomime. With that in mind, whenever I have compered them I have always taken a fatherly approach.

Not, you understand, to the point of being condescending or patronising to the acts off stage, but more to being overly vociferous and confrontational with any members of the audience who smell the fear and bully. I am good with hecklers - not bragging, just from experience I am - and the fact that the pressure is really off for a compere at a gong show given that they have untouchability only adds to my surly confidence.

I like to think that no matter what abuse some of Saturday's contestants took during the show, it was nothing compered to what certain sections of the audience got back from me.

Technically though, the audience were pretty well behaved (or scared into behaving) and only two of the ten contestants actually got gonged, which I found quite a relief as the process of removing somebody from the stage does not sit well with me.

My conscience is so fragile on the matter that I even instilled a rule of a post-set 30 second amnesty for anybody who was gonged off to redress the balance. If anyone in the audience heckled in this time then the contestant would be reinstated and their gonging off over-ruled. The judges also had the opportunity to reverse their decision based on what was said during the amnesty, but as said-amnesty tended to consist of spewed vitriol...well...there was no reversal. It did restore the power balance though which I thought was fair enough.

I've been to (mercilessly few) gong shows where the compere has been become an extension of the audience but I don't think that is the right approach at all. Perhaps because that is a good rule of thumb for conventional compering (to convince the audience you are one of them) it is all to easy to slip into that role, but that is not my personal conviction with gong shows - not least because there is a decent chance that many of the contestants will pretty soon be your contemporaries and you don't want them thinking you are an arrogant cunt. Even if, like me, you actually are. Sometimes.

In all it was a good evening - not overly laced with badness and taken pretty much by acts and audience alike as the theatre that it should be. The audiences at the Free Beer Show in Oxford (who ran it) tend to know how it is. It's an amazing and diverse club, free of clique and all about the comedy. There aren't many clubs where you wouldn't at any point use the dressing room to escape attention (which is lucky - as there isn't one), you just hang out with the audience, get up and do your thing, then hang out with them again. There's no airs and graces.

And also, I would like to point out that the lad who won the show had also been a contestant during the last Oxford Gong Show and faired much worse on that occasion. I believe he lasted about thirty seconds on that night. On Saturday he was triumphant (if fifty quid and a case of beer is any measure of triumph). Which is my clumsy way of telling any acts that have been booed off at gong shows to not take it as a definitive assessment of your ability.

That's not to say it isn't...I mean, you really might be shit - they might be right...just bear in mind that it's not neccessarily so.

So, there seems to be a little catching up to do after my brief stint using this platform to write my fucking memoirs...

Here is the catching up from the last few weeks, done as briefly as possible (I'll be leaving out gigs that were run of the mill):

1. Performed at the "Railway" in Winchester to the nicest audience I have stood in front of for as long as I can remember. It is a brilliant night, full of intelligent people, and I couldn't recommend it more strongly to acts. It will remind you why you do comedy and make you drive home happy. Details at www.myspace.com/touchus.

2. I have fainted once and nearly fainted another two times (both last night actually). I must remind you that I am not a girl so this is particularly appalling. You know you are in trouble when you ask a complete stranger for help as I did when I properly went - I don't think I have ever felt so pathetic without caring.

3. Performed at the Guildhall in Gloucester. Weird but very enjoyable gig. Spent a great deal of the evening trying to find out from the audience just what it was about me that encouraged them to heckle (very good-naturedly I should stress). The best anyone could come up with was "that I was short".

4. Did three castings - none of which I have heard back from so can probably safely assume by now that they were unsuccessful. The feedback to my manager from the BBC about one of them said there may be a problem because I was "too tall". That comment is worth me not getting the job and a perfectly adequate, if overly delayed, response to the bloke in the audience at Gloucester.

5. Been very random with my fluoxetine tablet taking which is stupid but I keep forgetting. I had my lowest night in a long time when I got back from my gig last night which may have jolted me into attention and put me back on track. Well I say that, but I've just realised that I didn't take it today again...

6. Started to break the back of the writing project I am working on with Steve Morrison, and it's really beginning to take shape and become almost exciting. I feel like a tease by not giving any details about this but it is confidential and would be an easily nickable idea. Plus you probably don't care enough for me to explain any deeper anyway, now that you have the useless information of the history of Big And Daft fresh in your minds.

7. I have played my PSP a LOT, got up to date with my dvd watching (last night watched "An evening with Kevin Smith 2" which I think is only available on region one at the minute but well worth the punt if you have the capability), I have more than doubled my Star Wars Kotobukiya figure collection (they are about fifteen inches high and expensive but beautiful mini statues - particularly the C-3PO and R2-D2 one that I cannot take my eyes off) and got a bluetooth headset which - like all people when they first get bluetooth - I am wearing ALL the time (even in bed).

And that's about everything of any note. I was going to tell you about the Oxford Gong Show (run by the Free Beer Show) that I compered last night, but have now decided to award it a post to itself tomorrow rather than clumping it in here with this one.

Apologies for the sporadic and disparate nature of this post but it was just me clearing out my intray so I can start afresh next time.

Hope all that personal info keeps the stalkers happy.

Right, this is the last bit so don't panic.

I'm fairly certain that neither myself Rob or Jon have ever spoken about the end of B.A.D in a public way. I might be wrong, but that was the reason I started writing these five (technically six) parts. I wanted to put it on the record somewhere. We did just slip away as a three.

So after our Christmas Show in Edinburgh 2001 we went on tour, which sounds far more grandiose than it actually was, but it was a tour nevertheless. The tension between the three of us had reached a fever pitch though, and I found myself increasingly unhappy with being a part of it.

The management situation remained unresolved, and all our conversations appeared to be going around in circles. There was a brief moment of clarity and happiness as we began to rehearse our tour show, as it consisted of our favourite sketches and it was back to just the three of us again without any interference. It became a laugh again, but for the shortest time - as soon as we were actually out on the road and cabin fever set in there was only one direction this would ever go.

I'd gotten it into my head, almost obsessively, that Big And Daft would end on my terms. I started it, I was going to finish it when the time came. This thought had been preying on my mind for a long time, and I sort of decided that after the tour that would be me. I had given up on our little project ever coming to true fruition - I felt we had missed the optimum time to make our mark.

The other thing that was beginning to eat away at me was our ages. I felt we were simply getting too old to be acting so childishly onstage. That sounds weird but I know what I mean - I perhaps haven't explained it too well. I just reckon that once you hit thirty, there's something a little sad about acting silly for laughs - there comes a point when you need to move on and develop yourself creatively rather than rely on the same old fannying about. The knock on effect of these thoughts I was having was that 'fannying about' started to become incredibly irritating to me, and my displeasure at it was not without pomposity. Problem was, I was actually in a show that was based on 'fannying about' so was confronted with it on a nightly basis.

Big And Daft became a victim of itself. I always thought it could have been exceptional if it was just tightened up some, if we instilled a bit of discipline in it. Yet the looseness and lack of discipline was what attracted much of the audience. It was a no-win situation. We couldn't reach our potential without destroying the 'magic'.

I walked off stage at the Komedia in Brighton on 11th October 2001 and told Rob and Jon that I was done with it. I'd gotten myself proper angry and pissed off during the show, and decided enough was enough. On that evening I wasn't even sure that I would do the rest of the tour - there were still seven dates or so left - I'd really had enough. We had a blinder of a row in the dressing room when I dropped my bombshell.

Jon was pissed at me in a major way, saying that my actions were leaving him in the shit, but there had been opportunities for our collective problems to be resolved that I had been more than willing to take. I felt for Jon mind, and tried to take his anger on the chin despite feeling it was misdirected. Rob was holding it together pretty well but he was clearly upset, much of my frustrations had been aimed his way - I laid a lot of it at his door. He took my anger on the chin despite no-doubt feeling it was misdirected. It was a bizarre and destructive three-way in the dressing room that night. I wasn't budging on my decision though - the end of that tour was going to be the last time I performed on stage with Big And Daft.

From that night on the rest of the gigs were a joy. All the pressure was off, there was simply nothing to argue about any more and we could just get back to having a laugh like we had done all those years ago. Added to that the fact that we now knew it was almost over, and we started to make the best of the limited time we had left with each other. On the good days, being onstage with those two was about as blissfull a performance experience that one could ever wish for - and this was no more apparent than when the tour arrived in Edinburgh for a one night performance at the Gilded Balloon studio.

It was completely sold out, full of 'fans' from our fringe shows, Gilded Balloon staff and friends. There had been stuff in The List and the local papers praising us and speculating that the end of Big And Daft was imminent. We'd hinted at this in interviews but never confirmed it. Actually, we never confirmed that Big And Daft was ever over. It would have been an ideal show to end on, but we had a couple more to do in far more vague Scottish towns. In my mind, returning to the site of our best show ( Big And Daft In Space at the Studio), and doing our best work to people that cheered and laughed despite the fact that they had already seen it before, was as fitting an end as any.

The last show we did was at Carnegie Hall in Dunfermline. We arrived at the theatre and walked into the vast auditorium. I think it holds about six hundred or something, it would have been a great stage to say goodbye on. But the person that was running the gig just carried on walking - right through the proper theatre and into the cafe at the side of it, informing us that this was where we would be performing. No stage, no lights, no mic. Perhaps that was the fitting end. Five years on and we were back where we started.

Before we did our final show, Rob and I sneaked into the main theatre and onto the stage. We stood in front of hundreds of empty seats, he played his guitar brilliantly and I sang Pinball Wizard better than it had ever been sung. You'll have to take my word for that, I can't prove it - problem was there was nobody there to see it.

Read into that what you will.

We went home from Scotland and got on with our own stuff. We were offered the radio show on BBC London and did it for seven months or so, but despite managing to fake it for a while, the all important relationship between the three of us was gone. The early radio shows are great but they diminished rapidly as time went on, and you could hear that we perhaps didn't love each other as much as we had.

Rob went on holiday, Jon and I were to be presenting the show together in his absence. Saying goodbye to each other in the BBC car park after Rob's last show was the last time to this day that the three of us were together. We got a call on the Monday before the show to tell us that it was canned. It was only annoying because I had already worked out the date of my own last show and was working my way up to telling them.

Rob's management asked me not to speak to him until they had because he would be 'upset'. This fucked me off no end, because he was my friend and I should be able to speak to him whenever the fuck I wanted to. I did as I was asked though. Rob and I have never discussed what happened at the BBC. I've only seen him three times since - all at gigs where we have been on together.

Which is three times more than I have seen Jon. Jon and I had been to college together - known him for years and years - the overriding sadness of the death of Big And Daft has been the death of the friendship. It's hard to work so closely with people for so long and to go back to being friends again. It really is like a marriage - virtually impossible for the three of us to be mates as we were before we fell in love - not least because there would always be the chance that we would have been tempted to go back to bed with each other.

Can I just point out that this is a metaphor by the way - don't want you thinking we ever did stuff like that. Although, interestingly, Rob and Jon did once discover they'd had a wank at the same time and finsished at the exact same moment. It was when Anna Friel was getting her bosoms out on telly. I've never been interested in Anna Friel so was not a part of that.

But, contrary to whispers I occasionally hear from others, my personal feelings towards both Rob Rouse and Jon Williams are nothing but positive - it was just something I needed to exclude from my life in order to move on professionally. I never wished them anything but love and success, and that is true to this very day. I do miss both of them an awful lot, but I don't regret ending it in the slightest.

My career choices since then have been the antithesis of what B.A.D was in theme, but effortlessly true to what it was in spirit. We always wanted to do only good stuff, only stuff we would have enjoyed ourselves if we watched it. That's no guarantee that the stuff you do would be any good (see Terrorville), but the intent was pure. It was never about cash, never about fame or wanting to be celebrities - we hated the idea of celebrity and were far more interested in kicking against it. There was little danger of us selling out, and the self-destruction was perhaps a neccesary evil to stop that ever being a risk.

I know that sounds dreadfully arty and wanky, but the simple truth is, it's not that difficult to remain true to the reasons you began something in the first place - not that hard to remember.

It was always merely about being funny and doing what genuinely made us creatively happy.

It was about being big and daft.

Dragging on a bit this now isn't it? I wish I'd never started it. I was quite happy just telling you what I was up to on a day to day basis rather than writing a fucking autobiography. Still, all you people texting and emailing to tell me to hurry up and get to the bit where Big And Daft implodes won't have too much longer to wait.

So, we were about to go up to the fringe for the third consecutive year doing the Christmas show.

Whenever people talk to me about B.A.D they more often than not say that the Christmas show was their favourite one. Earlier this year I watched it back on video on one of those nights where you are looking for a blank tape and end up getting distracted and watching the tapes instead. Have to say, it really wasn't great. The problem for me was the fact that the show was no longer just the three of us.

That's not, incidentally, a criticism of the other performers in ability - far from it - but we had established a near-perfect dynamic with just us three and then gone and added another two people. Add to that the fact that the B.A.D tendency to wander off script was a little infectious and you begin to see that the Chortle review of the Christmas Show (here) had a degree of merit to it (for once). It just all got a bit messy.

Again we had striven for greater things with the show though. There was a self-contained plot (something we had previously discarded once passing the point of premise) as well as an overall resolution to the 'trilogy through line', there was a proper set that revolved to make other environments, there was a short film at the beginning of the show, and there was specially recorded music. We were also in a much bigger venue (The Gilded Balloon Dining Room at Teviot). It was about as high concept as we were going to get.

Andre Vincent had replaced Johnny in the role of Father Christmas, as Vegas had scheduled his own show for 10.30pm (half an hour after ours ended) and there was a genuine concern from Karushi that he would die. Johnny always said he wanted to come on stage with us on the last night dressed in a home made Santa outfit. Adam Bloom was drafted in at very last minute to play a little orphan slave boy. We found out late on in the run that he was advertising it in his own show by saying he was in a 'proper play'.

The opening night of the run in Edinburgh went veeeery badly. None of the jokes were sticking, there didn't seem to be audience love for the characters, and you always knew when Big And Daft was going badly as a performer because you suddenly started to feel self-conscious about dancing. We were concerned that we had dropped a major bollock in abandoning the tried and tested format of just myself, Rob and Jon doing 'sketches'. On that evening during the post mortem of the show Adam Bloom announced that we had just done our bad one for the run, and it was good that it was out of the way. It turned out to be a prophetic statement, and reinforced my original assessment of Adam which was that, despite being a bit of a full on Rain Man, his wisdom was without question. I had heated run-ins with Adam during the run of the show, mainly because he sometimes took my aggressive onstage behaviour as genuine, but I remain a fan of the lad.

In fact, as a little aside, it was the characters we played in Big And Daft that eventually destroyed it. As I mentioned earlier, we ended up playing exaggerated versions of ourselves, but this meant that we ended up exaggerating our bad points. My nastiness was tenfold, as was Rob's daftness and Jon's 'maturity', and when you are experiencing this on a nightly basis you do start to believe in it. Towards the end I was getting infuriated with Rob's "showing off" onstage and believing he was pulling focus all the time. This may have been the case, but he was just doing what his character was meant to be doing. On one of the nights that Adam Bloom and I fell out I tried to explain this to him as we sat in the Teviot bar. Within a couple of months I was no longer heeding my own assessment of the situation though.

I'd insisted on a full writing credit for the Christmas Show. At the time it felt like a primadonna thing to do, and looking back it seemed like a primadonna thing to do, but there was a good reason for it. Truth is, I could have had a full writing credit on the space show as well - never claimed I wrote the lot, much was added in rehearsal and performance - but I wrote the bulk of it and wanted a bit of recognition for that. Rob had naturally emerged as a favourite character for audiences, and try as I might it was hard not to feel badly done by when reviews singled him out given that his character was being penned by me. Having the writing credit never made a blind bit of difference mind you.

As the run of the Christmas Show went on, we were having more and more meetings about our future. There was an offer of representation on the table from James Taylor at Avalon, to look after us as a unit and as individuals too. Rob also had an offer from PBJ for management, but this did not involve Big And Daft. For myself and Jon this was naturally a no-brainer, we would be better off keeping together to avoid any future inter-management wrangling. As soon as I saw that Rob was weighing up his options, I decided to do the same and asked James whether he would still take me on as a client with Avalon without Big And Daft. Self doubting as I am, his response surprised me, and I am truly grateful to this day for his vote of confidence.

Once my back was covered, I felt a degree of relief yet a sense of impending doom for our little threesome. I still wanted Rob to come with us, especially given that this was the only situation that would meen Jon was covered too, but had resigned myself to the fact that he probably wouldn't.

We left Edinburgh 2001 with our run of good reviews still intact, and our fanbase increased again, but the writing was on the wall. We had started to do interviews for the forthcoming tour, and our revelation that it would be a "best of" tour meant that the articles being written from them were also speculating sadly that this was to be the swansong.

It was only a matter of time.

Ahem...in my opinion;

Going up to Edinburgh is expensive - no revelation there - but you have to bear in mind that at this point, our only experience of Edinburgh was with a fifty quid profit, so getting a statement through saying we owed thousands was quite a shock.

Actually - "quite" doesn't even begin to do it justice.

The thing is, you should have your accounts presented to you before the fringe begins, with every conceivable outcome. Of course you kid yourself that the worse case scenario won't be the actual case (although it's usually a damn site closer than the nice numbers at the top), but you should be made aware of the financial risk.

Not only had we not been presented with accounts by our management before the fringe, we had also been told (when we tried to double check) that we would "not have to write a cheque". I know I mentioned this in my last post, but it's very important so I am mentioning it again because on our return from Scotland in 2000 that was essentially what we were being asked to do.

The goalposts had not only been moved, they appeared to be in another fucking ground.

There was a state of panic. Real Talent had got wind of the fact that we were more than likely on our way, and we were certain that this was why we were suddenly getting debt statements through. I had begun writing the third part of the Big And Daft trilogy whilst still up at the fringe, but we were becoming used to the idea that there may be no third part after all.

The three of us had a meeting.

It wasn't just the cash thing though - we felt that our interests weren't being best served. The BBC deal had collapsed. We had been asked to work with a new producer and our manager had seen that as an opportunity to fold on the deal. With the benefit of experience one can see how stupid this was, but at the time we just kept being told to 'trust' him. He kept on saying that he had a long term plan for us. If his long term plan was to destroy our collective career then he made good on his promise. I have heard the phrase "slowly up slowly down" used many times in the entertainment business, and I believe it holds a great deal of merit, but you do have to be moving. Slowly - yes - but moving nevertheless. This was the problem Jon and I were having with Real Talent. We were doing nothing.

Rob, as I said last time, was pretty happy with the state of his stand up career. During the meeting when Jon and I announced our intention to get the fuck out, Rob dropped his bombshell. He was staying. He would come with us for Big And Daft, as he was no more happy with the state of play with that than we were, but he was leaving his stand up management where it was.

I remember staring speechless at Rob for the longest time, then at Jon. I'm not sure where we were but it was in London and we were outside a pub, sat at a beer keg that was being a table. Jon shook his head and scowled with resignation as only he could. I had one last stab at appealing to Rob's sensibilities, trying to put it in simple terms. If a decorator fucks up your bathroom, you don't then let him do your kitchen. Rob was always too keen to try to please everyone.

We went into the Real Talent office by Goodge Street and Jon and I stated our case and intention. It was heated and, at times, emotional. We expressed our disappointments, and made it very clear that we didn't feel that we (as in Big And Daft) were ever made aware of any potential debt and so were not accountable for it. There was little of the defiance that we had charged ourselves up for, just an empty feeling. There were flashes of anger. I think in our heart of hearts we already knew that we had missed the chance for Big And Daft, that's where the angry bits were coming from. We'd invested a lot of love, time and care in Big And Daft. It felt as though our baby had been mugged.

Jon and I left the office for the very last time and went to the pub. Rob stayed to have a 'chat'. I can remember the feeling in the pub was what it must be like to know your girlfriend is being fucked by somebody else at that exact moment. Jon and I said very little to each other. What happened with Rob thereafter at Real Talent is not my story to tell, but he wasn't there much longer.

At the time I was severely pissed with Rob over that. I felt like he should have stood shoulder to shoulder with us and didn't. Thing is, it was never a lack of loyalty to us, more that thing I said about him trying to keep everyone happy. I've always maintained it's as endearing as it is annoying.

I buried myself in writing the final fringe show. It had initially been suggested (by Real Talent) that we produce a Christmas show for the Soho theatre in 2000. However, the deal with the Soho theatre wasn't put together properly - in fact, it wasn't put together at all. When we found out it wasn't going ahead the confirmed cast had consisted of the three of us, Trevor Lock, Count Arthur Strong & Terry Titter, and Johnny Vegas as Father Christmas.

I know I know...Doesn't bear thinking about does it?

So we decided that we would do a Christmas show the following August in Edinburgh. Fuck the seasons, we'd work around it.

The script I had written for the Soho theatre was an hour and a half long. It also had an interval in it, so no sooner had I written it, I was cutting massive chunks from it. It was heartbreaking in many ways - especially taking out the roles that were written for Count Arthur and Terry (they were to play some of Santa's helpers). We still didn't even know how we were going to get the show up there as we had no management and no cash, but then a call came through from Karushi asking if we would like to meet.

It took twenty minutes in a pub in Clapham for me and Jon to sign our third show to Karushi promotions.

It was the promise of the tour straight after that swung it really.

So the television series we were offered during rehearsals for "Big And Daft In Space" was called "Terrorville".

There had already been a pilot made by the time we got the call, and it seemed that we had been lined up to replace Catherine Tate who had appeared in that, alongside Noble & Silver. It was a very hasty replacement. Usually you get a bit of time to mull over these things, but we were asked to do it on a Thursday and the recording began the following Tuesday. We also had to write our segments.

The show was for UK Play. UK Play no longer exists, and the reason for this is that it was rubbish. Every show was a mixture of comedy and music, and for every gem it threw up ("Rock Profiles") there was a turd to go with it ("Terrorville").

The premise for the show was that it would be seperated into segments around music videos, each one looking at the lives of the residents of "Terrorville" (a cyber world, entirely computer generated). It was filmed on blue screen with all the sets and scenery added later, just like The Phantom Menace the year before. I believe George Lucas may have had a slightly larger budget with his Star Wars prequel though.

If I may paraphrase Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park, the producers had got so excited at the possibility that they could make the show, they didn't stop and think whether they should make it. It did however mean that we were able to commit our favourite sketches from the first year of Big And Daft to film for posterity, even if that posterity was fated to remain on an old VHS cassette that's gathering dust in one of my cupboards somewhere. The computer generated imagery also meant that we could finally realise a sketch that we had written that involved Rob building a rocket, but that's about it really. We had another sketch that involved Rob killing K-9 from Doctor Who but we were refused rights to K-9 at the eleventh hour, even though it had already been located in the BBC's props department and would have been treated well. We ended up using a shitty little remote control dog that was bought at some market.

The budget had all been used up on the CGI so we got next to nothing for appearing in it, and the fact that a stunt man couldn't be afforded for a scene where I jumped through a window meant that I had to do it myself and culminated with me popping an intercostal muscle. I regret to this day not pushing for compensation, I still have problems with that side of my ribs from time to time. I just thought it might fuck up future working relationships. I have since learned the value of loyalty in television...

So anyhow, we filmed eight episodes in two days and then got back to concentrating on the Edinburgh Show. Real Talent (our then management) had sorted out some preview dates for us (we didn't even know what a preview was) and before we knew it August arrived and we were back at the Gilded Balloon - this time in the more professional and bigger surroundings of the Studio.

The Studio was such a brilliant space to perform in, it's heartbreaking to think that it's gone to ash now.

The show looked better than anything we had done before. We had a set, including a massive 'flat' (a free standing wall) with a hole in it for our puppet alter-egos, and a window frame suspended from the back wall (complete with a 'special effect' of concrete falling down behind it). We also had different lighting states, and gels in the lights. We were going up market.

The show took the same form as our 1999 offering but with a quickly ignored premise (that of us being encased in concrete in a house on the moon) - it was basically a device to once again stop our characters being able to leave each other. We found out later that an episode of The Goodies once had a similar premise, and as we were being more and more compared to The Goodies this caused a degree of alarm, but I can tell you now - hand on heart - that The Goodies were never an influence for me. I can see the comparison, especially now that I have seen a few more episodes of it, but to be honest, I was never really a fan. None of us were familiar with their work - the concrete encasing was just Flukesville.

I have always been adamant that Big And Daft In Space was our strongest show. It was no coincidence that when we did our "Greatest Hits" Tour it was built primarily around the 'Space' show. The audience responses were greater than we had previously experienced, we sold more tickets, and girls started turning up in the audience with posters to be signed.

However, the 'industry' folk who had been so keen the previous year were apparently less impressed. We had got great reviews again, but the whisper from the telly people was that we had lost the 'edge' from the first show. This was an utter pile of bollocks, especially when you consider that there was an occasional sketch in there that revolved around Jon and I repeatedly saying the word 'cunt' to Rob, but there was little to be done if they didn't like it.

The fractures were appearing between the three of us again too, especially as myself and Jon were rapidly coming to the conclusion that we were perhaps not with the right management. Rob had his stand up career going great guns (as a result, I hasten to add, of his own hard work), so perhaps wasn't noticing how little attention we appeared to be getting from Real Talent, but Jon and I had, and weren't loving it.

We were also believing, rightly or wrongly, that the television interest was waning as a direct result of how our relationship with the BBC had been taken over by Real Talent. If you remember, when we initially signed with the BBC we were without representation, but now suddenly there was a go-between who, from all accounts, was treating the commodity of Big And Daft as far more valuable than the BBC (or ourselves, for that matter) believed us to be. We'd had a decent first year at the Fringe, and from the ticket sales in year two, we were clearly developing a 'fan' base, but you can't go chucking your weight about at such an early stage. News began to filter through from the industry contacts we had made ourselves the year before...it seemed that this was happening on our behalf - in our name - but not by us.

We kept our mouths shut for the most part though, especially given that they had brought us up to Edinburgh with no mention of any cash changing hands - in fact we had been assured that we "wouldn't have to write a cheque" for Big And Daft In Space. That was a pretty good deal in anyone's book. We decided between the three of us that once we got back to London, we would have a proper sit down and chat about our management situation, discussing what we had 'heard through the grapevine', what we individually thought, and a decision would be reached.

When we did get back to London we each received a budget report. There was a minus sign in front of a massive number.

We were apparently accountable for this.

We were apparently in debt...