On Saturday lunchtime I headed off to distant WEST LONDON to Holland Park, there to attend the recording of the last ever edition of I Am The Eggpod. For those who don't know this is a GRATE podcast series in which Mr C Shaw talks to people about their favourite Beatles album or sometimes just The Beatles generally. It is not a COMPLEX idea for a podcast but it has been a LOVELY one as Chris himself is a BRILLIANT interviewer and the whole thing gets carried along on an immense wave of ENTHUSIASM. When it comes to The Beatles, that is precisely the sort of attitude I prefer!
On my travels I got as far as Actual Holland Park park itself but then got a bit lost, and so was DELIGHTED to see, hoving out of the distance, a coterie of INDIE TYPES led by Mr S Love heading my way. I followed them round and through a GARDEN to the Holland Park Opera place, which turned out to be a vast TENT with luxurious seating. It really was very nice in there, you could actually stretch your legs out a bit and get by easily when you needed to go to the loo. I guess Opera Types demand this sort of thing!
The spacing turned out to be extremely handy because the audience was - HOW SHALL I PUT THIS - the sort of audience who would get a bit excited, have a beer beforehand, and then desperately need a WEE halfway through. FOR LO! as expected the vast majority of Podcasts About The Beatles enthusiasists turned out to be middle-aged men of a slightly INDIE bent. It has struck me before, and it struck me again here, that The Beatles is very much my generation's answer to what The Second World War was for the baby boomers - something that happened JUST before they were born that is endlessly fascinating and spawns hundreds of documentaries and especially BOOKS to be read on holiday.
I like this idea a LOT and was all ready to give of it if asked - when Mr R Manuel (for it was he) got the event started he asked everyone to prepare a BEATLES THEORY as he was going to come round and ASK people for them during the break, but alas I spent much of that time in the queue for the aforesaid LOO, looking around and thinking "Oh look, that's ..." as all sorts of people drifted by who I recognised from various aspects of TV, ROCK and comedy. It was a bit like Indietracks, but not as drunk!
The event itself was GRATE. In the first half Chris talked to Stuart Maconie, David Quantick and Laurence Rickard Out Of Ghosts, and it very quickly turned into a live action version of what I always imagined meetings of SELECT magazine would be like. At first I thought "I bet I'm the only person who'd think that" and then looked around and thought "No, no I'm not". The second half started with Samira Ahmed and Mark Lewisohn (who everybody had kept looking at throughout and saying "Have I got that right?") and then David Janson, who'd played the small boy in "Hard Day's Night". He was there because, in theory, everyone was meant to be talking about THAT, but as usual with Eggpod that was just the starting point for everyone to go "Aren't The Beatles GRATE eh?" which, as previously noted, is something I fully support.
At the end Chris thanked everyone and pointed out that the nicest thing about Eggpod was that it had made all of us Beatle-types realise that we weren't alone and that there was a whole WORLD of fans like us out there, and then it all got a bit EMOTIONAL as we all stood for a standing ovation and EYES became DEWY all around. It was all rather wonderful, and a fitting end (if it MUST have an end) to my favourite ever podcast! Thanks Chris!
