Believe it or not, this is the third Royal Wedding that Smith has seen. The first time around it was Charles and Diana’s in 1981, when I was doing the strip for myself while I was still at school. Those jokes got recycled for their son’s wedding to Kate Middleton thirty years later. And now the heir’s got married, it’s the spare’s turn. And I’m going to have to come up with some new jokes this time round.
Just to repeat, we’re back on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. And I’ll be answering questions from Tapas readers on Sundays…
Funny how the midnight madness always stops as soon as the sun comes up.
This started off as an April fools’ gag but it went somewhere else.
You never know where an idea will come from. This one came from a book of transcripts from Melvyn Bragg’s BBC Radio 4 programme ‘In Our Time’. If you don’t know the show, it’s essentially Melvyn and a hand picked panel of experts shut in a small room with a microphone dissecting a different randonly chosen academic subject for 45 minutes live on a Thursday morning. One show might be about string theory, the next about the fall of Constantinople, the next about Mary Shelley, and then one about the Dreyfus affair. This show was about the origins of life, and Richard Corfield (I’ve spelled his name incorrectly in the strip) mentioned this fact about cat litter in it. You can listen to the show here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p004y29f. And then you can go through the archive – there’s over 500 shows there dating back to the first edition in 1998.