Much ribbing at school
took place after the screening of the second series of A Bit of Fry and Laurie on BBC2. I got some tickets for the recording on two consecutive days and there were several sketches which involved the comedy duo interacting or walking through the audience. My gurning, grinning face was painfully apparent several times throughout the series which led to Lillian, a girl in my year, asking me every week "Brian, didn't I see you on Fry and Laurie last night?" I thought when it finished that that would be it, but when the series was repeated about six months later the piss taking started again.

What's worse, is that at the begining of the series they trailed it on BBC2 with a clip of a prerecorded sketch which I had been in the audience of when they recorded the laughter track. Rather embarrassingly I saw where the joke was going before the punchline and laughed very very loudly and very distinctively before the joke was completed. You know how often a trailer for a new comedy series is shown on the BBC? Well I'm painfully aware. For about three weeks, when looking away from the TV or just walking into a room I could hear my (what was then) distinctive and amusing cackle of laughter several times a day. I actively tried to alter my laugh after that. Reasonably successfully. I hope.

Rather randomly I was wandering through Leicester Square one day when I bumped into a friend of mine from University - Jeremy Maxwell Kramer (an actor from Los Angeles who spent a year at my University on an exchange programme and has recently starred in The Hazing and has been in all sorts of random stuff). He was over visiting people, and told me that fairly recently, in Los Angeles, and being a fan of British comedy, he had hired a video of A Bit and Fry of Laurie from Blockbusters and had been pretty startled when my laughing red face had appeared out of the gloom of the studio audience.
( brianftang www.brianftang.co.uk, Thu 11 Nov 2004, 20:50, Reply)