"When they said they'd film my entrance, this is not what I expected." "I even trimmed it and everything!" "They haven't even got me a car." "It's absolute bollocks." "Rubbish." "Oh!" "Lovely!" "Really excited!" "All these people are here for me!" "Aghhh!" "Hello, audience!" "Hello!" "Hooray!" "There's the audience." "Just got to transform into something a little bit more talented." "APPLAUSE" "Hello, I'm Alan Davies." "Welcome to As Yet Untitled." "This is a show where I have four guests and we have a bit of a chat." "I don't know what we'll talk about." "We don't even have a title." "We work towards the title." "We will conjure it during the..." "Oh, just get 'em on." "Please welcome my guests!" "APPLAUSE AND CHEERING" "Hello." "Hello, everyone." "Welcome." "So let me..." "I'll introduce you all, if I may." "This is Hal Cruttenden." "It says here, "It's all about him."" "Hal Cruttenden is here." "Zoe Lyons." "Zoe worked on a banana farm with "Snake Lady"." "It's true!" "Stephen Mangan." "Stephen Mangan went to a girls' school... and will never again buy a takeaway coffee from a service station." "Stephen Mangan!" "And Sarah Millican." "Already national treasure status has been bestowed." "Really?" "And you should think twice about borrowing her Nissan Micra." "Sarah Millican." "I consider you a national treasure." "Oh, that's nice." "Thank you." "I don't know what it is about you." "You're treasurable!" "And I'm national!" "You are from the nation." "Who else is a national treasure, just so I can say what gang I'm in?" "I think the head one is Thora Hird." "She's the head one?" "She's up there, yeah." "But she's dead, isn't she?" "So you're in the league with her." "You've got an advantage on her already!" "The motion is imminent." "So you still keep the position if you die?" "I think she's still a national treasure, yeah." "OK." "You're right." "You're probably right." "Don't be hard on her." "If you include dead people, how are you gonna expand the category?" "Nelson, Wellington." "Sorry, I'm speaking of national treasures." "They're not national treasures!" "They're just highly privileged members of the aristocracy who ended up in charge of thousands of men who couldn't go anywhere without fear of being executed for desertion!" "It's already got very, very left-wing, hasn't it?" "I only do that on weekends, so it's not every day for me." "Now, you're the youngest one here." "Did you know that?" "No, I'm not the youngest here, am I?" "I think you are." "Now it's getting awkward!" "It's probably me." "Seventies babies." "Are you seventies?" "Seventies." "Sixties." "Just. '69." "Sixties." "Really?" "You're very well preserved." "You look great, Stephen!" "What do you use?" "Just drugs." "And plastic." "Drugs and plastic." "You just get plastic and melt it onto your face." "Works every time." "You've got cracking skin." "You've got cracking skin as well." "Thank you." "What about my skin, Zoe?" "Very good." "I don't think "cracking skin" is..." "I mean, I know what you mean!" "This is why I don't work on the ground floor of Selfridges!" ""Hello, madam." "You've got cracking skin."" ""Can I direct you to the hardware department?"" "I hate walking through the ground floor of department stores." "It's terrifying." "Because of the women working on the make-up counters?" "Terrifying!" "If you're a single woman, do they leap out at you?" "You just get drenched in a sea of nose-bleedy perfume that you don't want to be in." "By the orange people?" "The orange people." "Yeah." "The orange people." "One of my friends said that this man said to her, "Can I ask how old you are?"" "And she added 15 years onto..." "Cos he was about to say that she needed X, Y and Z products." "So she added 15 years on, and he said, "Actually, you look really good for that."" "She got away with it, totally got away with it." "Sometimes they squirt at you as you're going by." "Yeah." "It's all I can do not to react like John Prescott!" "Don't squirt Prezza!" "You'll get chinned!" "I've got Hattie Jacques, I've got Yootha Joyce." "I cannot think of a living one." "Judi Dench is a living national treasure." "Judi Dench!" "Judi Dench!" "Oh, yes." "There's a sigh from the audience going, "Wish she was here!"" "Victoria Wood." "Maggie Smith." "Maggie Smith, yeah." "She's not cuddly, though, is she?" "No." "What are you saying?" "She's not warm, is what I mean." "Warm." "A particular blend of characteristics." "Being a brilliant actress isn't enough." "No." "You admire her..." "It's like having a rake." ""Ooh, this is awkward." "I'll put it back in the shed."" "You mean physically..." "It's much nicer to hug you than a rake, that's what Zoe is saying." "He's not getting any hugs, but you can." "WOMAN:" "Dame Helen." "Who?" "Dame Helen." "Very famous male..." "You don't even need the Mirren." "I once worked in a restaurant, and she came in, Helen Mirren." "And she's cool, Helen Mirren." "She's really cool." "She was so polite." "When I worked in the restaurant, you could go off celebrities instantly." "Gambon I'll never talk to again." "I know..." "No, very rude." "Very rude." "Oh, no." "Lucian Freud, a delight." "Anyhow, so I was serving Helen Mirren in a restaurant once and she had a few glasses of champagne and was really enjoying herself." "And she got up to leave and left the restaurant." "And she'd left her glasses on the table." "So I ran after her down the street." "And I was running down the street going, "Dame Helen!" ""Dame Helen!"" "And in the end, I just wolf-whistled and went, "Oi!" "Helen!" ""Your specs!"" "And she was lovely." "Which restaurant was this?" "I worked in Moro on Exmouth Market." "Which is quite trendy." "Are there that many celebrities in..." "It wasn't just a dream?" "No, no, we got a lot in, yeah." "We got them all in." "Moro?" "Yes." "Spanish." "Spanish food." "Is it like Nando's at all?" "We occasionally had..." "Not dissimilar!" "Get chicken in there?" "Get spicy chicken in there." "Do you have to get your own cutlery?" "No." "I do that." "Zoe will bring it over." "If you're nice!" "I was the worst waitress in the world." "Have you ever done waitering while you..." "I did it for one Christmas when it was like pre-done menus and I got my bum pinched." "STEPHEN:" "Sorry about that!" "It's a lovely bum." "I was 21 at the time and it was a hen night." "And they were really flirting with me." "It was my one moment of experiencing what women put up with all the time." "But it was awful." "I'm a bad example of it." "Cos I got it so rarely, I slightly enjoyed it!" "Somebody wanted me!" "Someone wanted me!" "Leaving your bum hanging out just a little bit." "Yeah. "Would you like to see the dessert menu?"" ""Ooh!"" "So, Hal, can you tell me why it's all about you?" "What does it refer to?" "This is my problem in doing a little show like this where we talk about things." "Socially, I admit this, I am one of those awful people that turns conversations back to them the whole time." "But even my family notice it." "This is a real conversation from my youngest daughter when she was eight." "I picked her up from the first time she'd gone to this little drama class and I was having a hot chocolate with her later on and we're sitting there drinking hot chocolate and I said, "How was your drama class?"" "And she said, "It was brilliant." "My teacher's very gay."" "And I said, "It doesn't matter if someone's gay or straight or not" ""but you shouldn't make judgements about people's sexuality based on how they come across." ""You know I do comedy about people thinking I'm gay and not being gay."" "And she sat there at eight and said, "Daddy, since when did my drama teacher become about you?"" "I get it the whole time, now." "Every time I try to give advice it's, "Daddy, it's all about you."" "But as other comics, do you suffer from that or are you quite..." "I want to know firstly, was he gay and are you gay?" "That's my two questions." "I don't know if he's gay or not." "OK." "It was an eight-year-old's opinion." "She actually left the drama group quite soon afterwards." "But..." "Homophobe!" "Dreadful homophobe!" "But my oldest daughter, Martha, came up to me when she was seven, and they're quite obsessed with my sexuality." "I don't know if it's a phase all kids go through, about their parents' sexuality." "No." "Just so you know, it's not!" "Martha came up to me when she was seven and said very seriously, "Daddy, are you gay?"" "But you are delightfully camp." "Yes, but I didn't notice it until I went into comedy." "Cos I was at drama school, and being an actor, everybody's wildly camp." "No." "But I think you're right." "Comedians have a brilliant way of bringing stuff back to them." "She said, grabbing the conversation!" "It's true." "For example, my mum's going into hospital for an operation next week, and I had to go through my diary and go, "Tuesday would be better for me."" "So..." "I did a terrible thing that I know my mum would like." "But my mum died about a year ago." "I was telling somebody on the phone that my mum had died, sitting in my mum's bedroom downstairs - she'd been ill a long time." "And I thought up a joke about it as I was telling someone and wrote it in my phone." "I know that's sick." "There's somebody there holding their face going, "Oh, my God!" "Is this man..."" "My mum loved it." "It's a bloody good joke." "Tell us." "Does it work?" "It is a good joke." "I can't tell it now cos I've said too much." "But I went a bit nuts when my mum died, but I didn't go psycho." "I couldn't fit into her clothes." "I ruined it with the build-up, didn't I?" "But..." "Good joke!" "As I was telling someone, yeah, I turned it back to my job." "But I do think comics do share this." "I think it's cos everything I ever do, I'm always thinking, "Is this funny?" ""Can I write this down?" "Is there something in this I can use for work?"" "But I know what you mean." "I'm like this, as well." "When I write cards, birthday cards for family members," "I have to stop myself putting my surname on the bottom." "Cos I'm so used to writing, "Lots of love, Sarah Millican."" "Yeah." "My agent does all mine!" "Noted!" "I don't think it's just comedians, though." "I think there's a narcissm in all sorts of people." "Somebody will just ask you a question. "How was your journey?"" ""Alright." "Oh, mine was a nightmare..."" "Everyone knows those people." "And they turn it around and they want to tell you everything that's happened to them." "And I don't know why they get that way." "Perhaps you need to nip it in the bud early." "If your children are doing it, if they say, "Dad, what did you have for breakfast?" "Cos I had..."" "Just stop it. "No-one's interested in what you had for breakfast." ""No-one's interested in anything for the rest of your life", tell them!" "It looks like I've groomed her and gone to prison!" "Oh, a few years ago, we decided to go, my fella and I, to Morecambe for a day." "We'd done Blackpool for a day and lasted 45 minutes!" "Cos it was horrendous." "Just the threat of violence wherever you go." "So we go to Morecambe and we were walking along the beach and I said, "I don't want to walk on the pavement, let's go on the sand."" "So we go to the sand, and we walk past a sign that says "No swimming at this point."" "And careful of quicksand which we laughed at cos that's hilarious." "That's just in films." "And within about five minutes, I got stuck in the quicksand." "It was literally five minutes." "My feet just sunk in." "You walked past the quicksand sign?" "Yeah, because that's just in films!" ""Ha-ha, quicksand!"" ""Ha!" "That's hilarious!"" "We got stuck." "It's not as dramatic as it sounds." "I got stuck up to my ankles, though." "And my husband was laughing, like crying." "I'd never seen him cry laughing so much." "So the first thing I did was give him my handbag cos it's really heavy and I thought that'll lighten me a bit." "Genuine logic." "And then I saw further ahead some pebbles near the surface of the sand and my logic was, "If they're not sinking, maybe I won't sink." ""Maybe that's a safer bit."" "So I said in a dramatic way, "Get me to the pebbles!"" "So he started to pull me but then I left a shoe." "So then I just had a socked foot." "Your automatic reaction is you put it back down again." "Put it back down again into the horrible - it looked like shit, but it wasn't shit." "It was like a murky brown ick." "So eventually I got over to a big boulder, sat down, and my husband's still howling, still crying with laughter, still holding my handbag but almost wetting himself." "And I hauled my shoe out and it was covered, again, in what looked like shit." "I said, "Don't worry." "I'm rinsing it off in this little stream I've found."" "Which turns out it wasn't a stream, it was a sewage outlet!" "So I was rinsing what looked like shit off my shoes with actual shit." "Then I didn't have any tissues in my handbag, which is very unlike me, Stephen." "Very unlike me." "I know that." "But I did have a sanitary towel..." "AUDIENCE GROANS ..clean!" "Shut your face!" "So I scraped it all off and sort of held it up like this and then walked off the beach with what looked like a full nappy in my hand." "Was your husband still laughing throughout?" "Just crying." "Still had my handbag, though." "He's a good man." "Still holding the handbag." "We decided that was us done for Morecambe." "So we got in the car and I had no shoes so he decided to drive." "And I checked my phone and somebody had sent me a message on Twitter saying, "Did I just see you on Morecambe beach?"" ""No!" "No!"" "Do you know what I think has gone on there?" "I suspect it's not quicksand at all." "I suspect it's a raw sewage outlet, but they don't want to put up a sign saying, "Raw sewage outlet."" "So they think, "What can we put that will stop people going down there?"" ""Put quicksand!"" "It didn't work." "Someone will say, "People won't believe that." ""They think quicksand is only in films!"" "Is it real?" "It doesn't kill many people." "Is it a thing we worry about but actually people just go up to their ankles in it?" "You're supposed to swim or something, aren't you?" "You're supposed to..." "Lie down." "Yeah, disperse your weight." "Take your anorak off." "Right?" "This is when being a lesbian comes in handy cos I've always got one near me." "Anorak - standard issue." "It's the lesbian emergency pack!" "The cat." "Anorak." "It used to be cat." "And then you'd get on that and disperse your weight, I think." "How do you disperse your weight?" "Just like lie down?" "Lie flat." "Don't take that..." "Don't do that." "You'd just go straight down." "No, you go out like that." "Then you're supposed to swim." "I can imagine you swimming through effluent!" "On Morecambe beach!" ""It's sewage!" "No, it's quicksand!"" "If in doubt, think, "What would David Walliams do?"" "At least get sponsored next time!" "You do worry about quicksand as a kid, far more than you do later on in life!" "It's not an issue that's come up for me that often." "But I'm amazed that it's out there." "I'm ready for it next time." "Yeah, you are." "Quicksand and snakes coming up your toilet tube." "Yes, or rats coming up the toilet." "It's a childhood thing." "Rats CAN come up the toilet." "Can they?" "I've heard that." "I still panic about it." "Yeah." "My sister-in-law had that." "Really?" "And bite her?" "A rat come up the toilet." "Really?" "Is that a euphemism for something?" "No." "I wish it was!" "It would be a good one." ""Begging my pardon." "I got a rat up me toilet." No." "Literally, rats are coming up and..." "Yeah." "They love it." "Swimming." "They love it?" "It's like Alton Towers, for them!" "Woo-oo!" "Like the water slide!" "Woo-oo!" "Takes them a long time to get to the top, but it's worth it!" "It's horrific, the things you don't think about, like rats coming up the toilet." "Did you know there are great white sharks in the Mediterranean?" "Am I stupid to not know this?" "I didn't know that." "I went to Croatia this summer and I was out snorkelling with my kids." "And I suddenly thought, "I should check."" "Do you get nervous going out of your depth, "It's OK." "It's fine, kids."" "I would if there was a great white lurking nearby!" "I went online, and there's been shark attacks off Croatia." "There's been very few..." "You checked afterwards?" "I checked afterwards." "What a good dad you are!" ""Yes, kids, it's fine." I had to go in the next day, terrified, pretending I was fine with the kids." "Who have so little respect for me." "I should have just said, "I'm too scared to go."" "They'd probably researched it and taken YOU in!" "Thinking, "It'll go for the biggest thing, won't it?" ""It'll think it's a whale." "More of a challenge."" "I was at a Save the Rhino fundraising dinner the other day, and they had some guy..." "What were you eating?" "Rhino horn, which is really delicious!" "Sprinkled with ivory, it's gorgeous!" "A hippo sandwich, please!" "Exactly!" "And he said you are ten times more likely to be bitten by a New Yorker than you are by a shark." "Oh." "But a New Yorker can't do the damage a shark can do." "True." "True." "It's a rubbish comparison!" "A really weird comparison, isn't it?" "Do you have to be in the water for the New Yorker to attack you, as well?" "Yeah." "They're very vicious." "They're off the coast of Croatia!" "Don't go there." "They come up your toilet!" ""I'm swimmin' here!" If you hear that, get out of the water." "Can you tell me about being in a girls' school?" "What's that about?" "It was officially not a girls' school." "It was my first school until I was seven." "Right." "So from five to seven, there were 140 girls and four boys in the school." "And it was a convent school." "So it was run by lots of nuns." "I mean, we sort of learnt all the normal boy stuff like ballet and knitting, so it was OK." "But there were four boys." "I think it says a lot about men that with only four boys in the school, and we split into two gangs." "Daniel Curtin and I had control of the sand pit, and the other two had the climbing frame." "And it was weird." "It was very, very weird." "But Sister Metallica, I think, was my nightmare." "Sister Metallica?" "!" "That's what I called her." "I wish she was called Sister Metallica." "She was called Sister Scholastica, which is more crazy." "Wow." "Scholastica sounds like some sort of underwear appliance." "Some sort of fabric." ""Now made with Scholastica!"" "Yeah, it was a very odd time." "There was a lot of kiss chase, cos at that age, cos you're like, "Wa-hey!" You haven't got to "Girls smell!", well I hadn't, at that point." "That's it." "That would be terrifying, kiss chase." "Four boys and that many girls." "That's a stampede!" "Yeah." "So strange." "And so this was gonna be a short-term thing?" "Yeah." "For some reason, we were only allowed to go there until we were seven." "I don't know what happens to boys at seven that they couldn't stay." "That's when your penis emerges." "Oh, it emerges?" "Really?" "Yeah, I don't know how it's affected me, really, long term." "I really liked being in a mixed primary school." "Yeah." "Girls were great." "You could be the patient in doctors and nurses." "Yes." "There was one boy at our primary school who'd make the girls do handstands and their skirts would fall down so you could see their knickers." "Or they'd line up and he'd lift their skirts and look at their knickers." "Did you say this was a teacher?" "No, it's not a teacher." "I thought for a second..." "I know." "He was just one of the boys, but yeah." "Another episode of Operation Yewtree, sounds like!" "Yeah." "Were you at single-sex schools after that?" "Yeah." "I went to a boys' public school." "I was until I was 13, then I had girls in the last two years." "But the rest of it was single sex, yeah." "I had totally boys schooling and yet lived in a very feminine house." "It was a weird thing." "I did become two people..." "This isn't about you." "Sorry, I turned it back to me again!" "Aghh!" "I'm just talking to Stephen over there!" "I told you I shouldn't have come on!" "I can't do this." "We've got the title of the show - "It's Hal Cruttenden!" Hal Cruttenden." "Hal Cruttenden." "Please, please, do that for me!" "No, but that thing of how much it affects you, being in a single-sex school." "I think it does." "It makes you more..." "I don't know." "It's just are you happy there or not." "That's really..." "I wasn't happy in that school." "Which school were you at?" "Well, it's called Bancroft's School." "And one of the maths teachers there, has been grooming a teenage girl and he's been jailed." "The Daily Mail have been keeping up with this story, as you can imagine." "It's not been touched upon in any of the other papers." "So they reported the fact that this guy's been sent to jail, it's not a reflection on the school or anything like that." "And it said, "Maths teacher jailed for four years" ""at school once attended by Alan Davies."" "Don't put me in the..." "Why do I have to be in the grooming maths teacher headline?" "There's a big photo of me." "And a girl who I don't know, a girl who's in TOWIE, you know, the Essex..." "Cos she went there as well." "Very pretty girl with a fake tan." "And there's me and her!" "Suddenly we're in the..." "It looks like I've groomed her and gone to prison!" "So I was "Oo-ooh, oo-ooh..." my way around it." "Right, Sarah Millican." "My wife is from the north-east." "So I know a little bit..." "I don't know her, in case that was the next question!" "So I am familiar." "And there are a lot of Nissans on the road, aren't there, in the north-east?" "Yes." "Cos that's where they're born." "There's a big factory there." "Is it loyalty to the region that sent you towards the Micra?" "No, I only just passed my driving test and I didn't want anything too big that I couldn't cope." "What have you done in it that you wouldn't want to lend it to anyone?" "I don't actually have it any more." "Somebody else does have it." "Really?" "Yeah, um, I..." "Hmm." "I got..." "I got stuck in traffic." "I was driving from where I lived in Manchester to a gig in Birmingham." "And I got stuck on the M6." "And got stuck for, in the end, two and a half hours." "So I'm keeping an eye on the watch." "I'm having to say, "I'm gonna be late for the gig." ""Somebody's gonna have to replace me." All this is happening while I'm needing a wee." "Now." "Don't judge!" "Hear the story." "Now, because it's two and a half hours, men were getting out of their cars and going onto the side and were all having wee's like you do." "And it's not so easy for the ladies, is it, Zoe Lyons?" "No." "No." "I sat in the car for a good long time, bursting for a wee." "And then got to that point where everything was starting to hurt." "I thought, "I have to do something."" "I know that sometimes men wee in bottles, and I thought I could give that a go." "And because my car is a comedian's car, the footwell was full of shite and there was an empty coke bottle." "I thought, "I'm gonna have to give it a go."" "What sort of sized bottle?" "Just a normal, standard... 500ml?" "That's the minimum I would go for." "500ml." "That's got to be minimum." "That was all I had, remember." "So it's like a 250ml." "You've got no chance." "You're better off doing it out the window." "It wasn't so much the volume that I was bothered about, it was the entrance." "Right." "Because I've got twin jets." "Of the bottle?" "Yes." "You've got twin jets?" "!" "It just goes everywhere." "So I knew I wouldn't be able..." "You can't trust yourself to get it in the neck of the bottle." "No." "So I decided, you know a coke bottle has the next bit down which is a lot bigger." "So I thought, I wonder if I could hit that?" "So I'm reducing the volume, but also creating a bigger..." "You thought you'd break the neck off it?" "Well, it wasn't..." "It was plastic." "Oh, OK." "Chew the neck off it?" "I didn't have any scissors on me, which I normally would have, cos I'm quite prepared." "But I did have my tweezers." "And to be fair, I'd been in the traffic for so long and the little mirror with the light, 'tache was perfect!" "You're not gonna waste that time, are you?" "So I looked amazing." "But still was full of piss." "So I stabbed the side of the bottle, and sort of "Oo-oo, oo-oo, oo-oo" my way around it until it became two parts." "You don't see that on Bear Grylls, do you?" "You would if I was on." "It doesn't count getting stuck on the M6!" "He should do a programme about that, though." "What you do." "How much a bear grills!" "If I'd been in the woods, I would have been fine, but on the M6, I was screwed." "Got lost in the car park!" "So then I looked at the jaggedy edge..." "Ooh!" "..and thought that wasn't gonna work." "I couldn't." "After all that effort." "But it was worth a try." "So then I knew I was just gonna have to wee." "So I..." "Haa." "..moved across to the passenger seat." "And I wee'd." "On the seat there." "Just on the seat." "Don't judge me!" "I've still got lovely working kidneys, and thanks to this, this is why." "And then I moved across to the driving side and..." "And shit!" "Surprisingly not, no." "That's what the glove compartment's for!" "And then I moved across." "God knows what the people behind me must have thought." "I was like, "I'm bored with this seat." "I'll go and sit over there."" "There were people in the back of the car?" "!" "No!" "Suddenly realised afterwards!" "She was working as a taxi driver at the time!" "The people in the car behind!" "And then I obviously missed my gig, so I just went home and then I took the car into the garage the next day and told them, "My friend's got a dog and it had a wee on the seat." ""Can you give it a proper deep clean?"" "A proper deep clean." "Oh, God." "And you know what, I'd do it again." "I'd do it again." ""I'll do it again." If you ever give anybody a lift and hit traffic in future," ""Oooh!"" ""Just give me ten, 15 minutes." "Move out the way." "I need your seat."" "They weren't leather seats, were they?" "In a Micra?" "!" "Good point." "You've not sat in a Micra before, have you?" "It's a nightmare, though, as a girl." "It's just..." "Just pull your pants down, squat and wee and go!" "I get so self-conscious, I've got to..." "I had a horrible experience once at a Pride festival in Brighton, years ago." "You know what it's like when you go to a music festival with two toilets and 1,000 people, "I need a wee!"" "So we had to go into the bushes and I had to go quite far into the bushes because I'm very nervous and shy about this." "So I went deep into the bushes." "Ant it had been rayni g0a¼ wgn÷ which is important for the next part of the story." "And so I was up a little hill and I got myself into the zone, which I have to do." "I have to concentrate when I'm doing a country wee-wee." "And I closed my eyes." "And then when I opened my eyes, there were two gentlemen in front of me, scantily clad." "They were much more interested in each other, shall we say." "What they were wearing was predominantly buckle and leather and yes, they hadn't seen me and they were going at it hell for leather." "I obviously got a shock, mid wee-wee, went, "Ooh!" and because it was wet underfoot, lost my slipping and louched down into them!" "It was the weirdest sexual Olympic Games I've ever been part of." "Tell me you slid really, really slowly." "I slid into them, with my knickers around my ankles." "It was brutal." "It was brutal, yeah." "Fantastic." "That is forever emblazoned on my mind." "And theirs, I'd imagine, as well!" "Yeah." "That's some gate-crashing they weren't expecting." "Were they quite nice about it?" "They were having a really great time themselves, shall we say, so it was fine, it was fine." "Yeah, I'll see them again - every Christmas!" "For a re-enactment!" "Yeah." "It's a nightmare, though." "Anyway, on more serious topics, what is it with you and takeaway coffees in service stations?" "I had a bad experience on the M6, funnily enough." "Sorry about that!" "I did see you in your car, actually." "Hopping from seat to seat!" "I was filming in Manchester, and it was a split day, which means you film a bit during the day-time and a bit at night." "So we finished about midnight." "I got in my car, driving back to London." "I'd been filming a 12, 13-hour day." "I thought I'd get a coffee ready for this three-hour drive." "So I drove into the first service station on the M6 heading south." "You're all comedians." "You probably know exactly what that is." "It's Knutsford, isn't it?" "Knutsford?" "OK." "Comedians, you all know about service stations." "Do you sing the Tina Turner song when you go through it?" "# Knutsford city limits" "# Knutsford city limits. #" "I'm so lonely." "Is that what you think the song's about?" "So I pulled over, and I walked in, and there was two employees of the coffee thing having an argument behind the counter." "There was a girl of about 19, and I presume her boss who was probably in her 40s." "And the 19-year-old was screaming at her, "You don't know!" "You don't know!" ""You don't know!"" "And the girl kept saying, "You don't know!"" "I stood there for a bit, and this went on for quite a long time." "And I said, "Excuse me..." She said, "Wait!", the 19-year-old." "And I went, "OK."" "Cos I'm very polite, and I waited." "Just go to Watford Gap!" "Well." "Eventually, they finished their argument." "The 19-year-old came over to me and said, "What?" "What do you want?"" "I said, "Can I have a cappuccino, please?"" "And she went, "Yeah." "What size?"" "I said, "I'll have a medium."" "As she went to get the milk, I said, "Can you make it with skimmed milk?"" "She looked at me like..." ""You fucking wanker!"" "She took it over, and she had one of the large, massive cups which I didn't want cos it's like having a hot milk." "I said, "I'm really sorry." "Could I have the medium size?"" "That was it." "Another dagger's look." "She brings it over to the thing, and I can see her, you know those coffee machines have those stainless steels bits." "I can see her face." "I think I'm gonna keep an eye on her." "And I saw her go..." "No way!" "And just this long dribble into my drink." "Oh, my God!" "So I said, "Excuse me." She went..." "She went, "What?"" "I said, "Did you just gob into my drink?"" "She went, "What if I did?"" "I went, "Dunno." "Whatever." ""Dunno." "What." And then I left." "That was it." "I was too gobsmacked, if that's the right word, to really do anything." "Did you drink it?" "Yeah, it was lovely!" "Far too frightened to do anything about it." "But yeah, it's not good." "It's like when you order..." "If you end up in hotels a lot, you order room service, you're always incredibly polite to the people who do room service." "Cos you know they're just gonna masturbate over your chicken burger." "That's sometimes an option." "Is it an option?" "Tell me about the snake lady on the banana farm." "You were working on a banana farm." "I worked on a banana farm for two months in Queensland, Australia." "OK." "With some of the roughest people." "You sound fascinating." "I'm not taking the piss." "You've genuinely had an interesting life." "I travelled round Australia." "We bought a van and travelled round." "We ran out of money." "We ended up in Queensland and we had to get a job." "And the only jobs around were on banana farms." "You had to get up at half past four in the morning, stand by the post office while the farmers came along in their Yutes." "Their vests, all dribbled down the front." "And they'd look at you, like that." ""Yeah, you." "Get in the van."" "And you were like, "Yeah!" "I've either got a job or I'm gonna be killed!" ""Woo-hoo!" ""Either way, dinner's sorted."" "So we got in the van and ended up on this banana farm and I had the worst job on the banana farm." "And there's a lot of bad jobs on a banana farm." "Cos they take the bananas..." "There's one job, isn't there?" "Getting the bananas..." "Off the trees." "Right." "The guys go out and get the bananas off the trees." "They bring them into the shed on the paddock." "They cut the bananas off and at that point, the snakes fall out." "Cos snakes love 'em cos they're like natural hammocks." "They grow like that, and the snakes are like, "Lovely." "Comfy."" "And then the bananas were thrown into a big water bath and it was my job to pick the bats, cockroaches and frogs off the bananas as they came round in a big bath." "Were you in the bath as well?" "No, I was just, no gloves on..." "Having her morning wash, as well." "With my rubber ducky." "Bat!" "Yeah, that was a sponge." "Frogs are good for the skin." "Highly absorbent." "And every now and again, you'd flip them over and the frog would go," ""Hiya!" Voomph!" "Voomph!" "Were you wearing a sort of Silkwood suit?" "Oh, no." "Shorts and..." "It was proper rough-arse Australia." "But I worked with a lady called Snake Lady." "She used to work with a pillowcase beside her, right?" "And every now and again, the frogs I'd missed she's pluck off and put them in an empty milk carton beside her." "And then she'd turn to me and say, "That's for snakey, later."" "And at lunch time, she'd get her pillowcase and the milk carton full of frogs, and pour the frogs into the pillowcase and the pillowcase went..." ""Doo-doo-doo-doo-doo."" "And she kept a snake in her pillowcase that she fed frogs to in the afternoon." "It was a happy, happy time(!" ")" "Most of the people who worked on the banana farm were missing at least one digit because there was a lot of work with machetes and alcohol." "Were the bats alive?" "Oh, yeah." "I've been pissed on by more fruit bats than I care to..." "You'd be stood under a tree and it was..." "And after a while, you just got used to it." ""I've literally just been pissed on by a bat." I was just..." "Like an angel crying on your tongue." "I was with my girlfriend at the time, and as you can imagine, we were quite a treat in the village!" "It was like the circus had rolled up!" "There's two lesbians covered in bat piss, here!" "Oh, well there's the title of this show!" "We don't even need to have a conversation at the end!" "It was the most attention I'd ever got as a lady, shall we say?" "Yeah." "My step-mother's dad worked in fruit and veg at Stratford fruit and veg market." "And his descriptions of it are fantastic." "The steam trains would come in from the docks at the far end." "It's all gone now." "And then these big gates would open up and everyone with their barrows." "There was a lot of shouting, and you have to do a lot of sums quickly in your head and he was the best ever." "But he said when it was really busy, he'd stay there overnight." ""I used to sleep in with the bananas cos it was warm."" "It was how to keep the bananas warm." "Sleep in with the bananas!" "I'd go, "Did you really?" Her dad, he'd say, "Yeah." ""Unions put a stop to that."" "As if that was a bad thing!" "He's done a 16-hour day, he's so shattered he can't get home, he's lying asleep in a load of bananas." ""The unions put a stop to those happy days."" "I once worked for a week, when I was a student, I worked in the laundry of a mental hospital." "Which was really..." "I did have that thing." "I was very up myself..." "Well, I am now!" "Was?" "I used to sit in the canteen, the only person that wasn't in the mental asylum, going, "This is fascinating." "Who is mad?" "Who is really mad?" "King Lear?"" "And you would do that thing of picking up laundry and turning round and someone would be there, in your face." "Staring like that. "OK!"" "Were they incinerating things there?" "Not the people." "You know, the bed sheets and stuff." "No, we were just cleaning them." "Cos there was a hospital called Claybury Hospital, near where I grew up." "And it was on the hillside and it had a big chimney next to it." "And for quite a long time, they would incinerate bedding." "Because they thought there was a possibility that it was a contagious disease." "When we were at primary school, you'd say, "You're from Claybury", to each other, as a taunt." "Then my gran ended up there after she had a nervous breakdown after my mum died." "We had lots of funerals when I was growing up cos there was a five-year period where three grandparents and my mum died, so there was lots of funerals." "And I didn't go to any of them." "We'd have a nice weekend away with the Bennett family who used to live next door, and they'd take us on boat trips on the Thames down in Berkshire." "And only years later, only in adult life, did I... "Oh, God, that must have been a funeral."" "No-one tells you anything at that age." "It's terrible when kids lose parents that they aren't taken to funerals." "I remember a friend of mine's died when he was about eight." "And he didn't go to the funeral." "Kids should be..." "I think one a week." "Obviously people you know." "You'd get used to it." "Just sit at the back." "No-one ever questions you." "Look sad. "If anyone comes near us, start crying."" "We know John." "Bob?" "Tony?" "Alan?" "I had to go to a funeral about three or four months ago." "And I was in the middle of a diet where I wasn't allowed to have carbs." "It was probably quite serious at the time, but seems comical now." "I just stood in front of my husband and cried and said," ""I can't do a funeral AND no carbs!"" "And he said, "What do you want?" "A chip butty?" And he made me a chip butty and I must have looked awful cos I went into the funeral like, "I'm ready!" ""Ready to mourn." "I'm so happy!"" "We had a friend die who was a distant friend of the family." "It was a funeral I should go to." "And there was a year in my career where I dyed my hair." "Cos my agent told me to." "And the last time it was dyed, it was too strong." "And it went too dark." "I said, "I'm not doing this again." "I'm too embarrassed." "I said, "I've dyed my hair." "I'm told I look younger." Do a Berlusconi!" "But it was too strongly done." "Anyway, this friend of ours had died." "A distant friend of the family." "And my wife walked into the room and I was like this, going..." "She went, "I didn't know you were so close to him."" "And I went, "Look at my hair!" "It's so obvious!" ""I'm going to a funeral and everyone I haven't seen for years will know I dye my hair." Awful." "You said earlier, Hal, "It's all about me."" "And I was going, "Lots of people are like that." ""Not just performers, all kinds of people."" "But you really are!" "It's a new level, isn't it?" "It's a level of..." "It's appalling." ""People are gonna notice I've dyed my hair."" "It was really..." "You're burying someone!" "I know!" "No-one gives a shit about your hair!" "I know." "Anyway!" "I can tell." "There's a look people have." "They look at your hair and you go, "I know you know!"" "Wear a hat!" "I can't wear hats!" "If you look at this face, it's weird with a hat on it." "Put a cap on me." "Anybody got a cap?" "Can I put that cap on?" "It's nice!" "Wear the hat!" "I prefer it." "Maybe it's baseball caps." "You look like you should be driving a steam train!" "Oh." "I feel better, now." "Someone said to me, "Never wear a hat" and it's bothered me." "Sorry." "I exposed your baldness there." "Wear a hat." "But it looks nice." "It's ageless, actually." "Casey Jones, that's what you looked like, then." "Who's Casey Jones?" "Am I a bit..." "Sorry." "Oh, God, what have I done?" "Well, it's interesting." "I'm not that much older than you." "What year were you born?" "End of '69." "That's three years." "That's enough for you to have missed Casey Jones." "Black and white TV series that was on in the mornings in the school holidays." "Oh." "Casey Jones steaming' and a-rollin'." "There was that, Champion the Wonder Horse and Robinson Crusoe." "Yeah." "And they were on all the way through the school holidays every holiday!" "Can I ask a question?" "Do you know all the words to the theme from Champion the Wonder Horse?" "Cos there was always a line that me and my mam didn't know what it was." "My uncle knew, but then he killed himself - not cos of that." "But he was the person we knew who knew that bit, and now he's dead." "So do you know all the words?" "# Like a streaking flash of light across the sky" "# Like a hu-hu-hu-hu-hu-hu from above... #" "Does anybody know?" "You need to ring up." "Bob Mills did this once." "They couldn't remember - this is comedians coming back from a gig type conversation - all the words to the theme to Top Cat." "So they rang up." "They rang up Hanna-Barbera!" "And cos it was late at night after the gig, you know, it was day time in California." ""Hanna-Barbera."" ""Could you settle an argument?"" "And they came back." "You couldn't Google anything then." "You could just Google it, right?" "They came back." "And said..." "I can't remember..." "# Top Cat, the indisputable leader of the gang #" "I don't know why I'm doing it like this." "Rap. "Close friends get to call him TC" ""Pro-vi-ding it's with dignity."" "Wow." "That's really..." "That was the line." "That's amazing." "Champion the Wonder Horse..." "It's not actually a great lyric, is it?" "Yes!" "Champion the Wonder Horse over and over again." "Desperate rhyme." "Now, we have to think of a title for the show." "And I know we have got Two Lesbians..." "What was it?" "Two Lesbians covered in bat poo." "Covered in bat piss." "To be honest, that sounds like a film that's already been made!" "Yeah!" "How about "Two Lesbians Covered in Bat Piss Talking About Hal Cruttenden"?" "Yes." "Ooh, that's exciting." "I don't think we can use Nissan Micra in the title." "Pissan Micra!" "What about..." "What was that one about you distributing weight on the quicksand?" ""Get me to the pebbles!"" "Get me to the pebbles!" "I can be quite dramatic when I need to be!" "I think I still prefer "Two Lesbians Pissed On By Bats"." "Yeah." "Well, I think we've settled on it." "Please, everyone, will you thank Hal Cruttenden, Zoe Lyons," "Stephen Mangan and Sarah Millican." "You have been watching Two Lesbians Pissed On By Bats." "Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd"