Diary – 16 February 2017

I’m boning up on conversational Spanish for a trip to the Primera Persona festival in Barcelona with Alexei Sayle. We’re due to talk about The Young Ones — the comedy series we made together 35 years ago. For some reason the show is huge in Catalonia — perhaps it’s scatological: one of their regional symbols is a pooping peasant. The Catalan-dubbed version is still playing on TV, so, as well as Spanish, I am refreshing my catchphrases in Catalan. When I visited Barcelona last year to make a travel programme called Catalunya Experience for Catalan TV3, people asked for selfies and threw peace signs at me in the street, because I played the hippie character, Neil, in The Young Ones. I found I could make the Catalans collapse with laughter by saying, ‘Hey, tius, mol a,’ which, roughly translated, means, ‘Hey guys, this rocks.’ I put on my glum Neil face and whined ‘Mal karma’ to their phone cameras. In order to have the desired effect, I had to do this, not in my own, nasal Neil voice — something I perfected long before The Young Ones — but in the voice of the Catalan man who dubbed me. My biggest laugh line was ‘Baj mes calen que la moto d’un hippy.’ Which literally means ‘I feel hotter than the engine of a hippy’s moped,’ but apparently implies horniness.

In the past 30 years I have often been accosted in the street by people saying strange things to me such as ‘1172 is not a bit like John’ or ‘Oh no! I’m being hassled by a chick’ or — one that is at least recognisable as a joke — ‘What’s the world record for stuffing marshmallows up a single nostril?’ Sometimes the quotes are so obscure that it takes me a few seconds to clock that I am experiencing what we in the bizz call ‘rek’, as in ‘recognition’.