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Eric 's big in Japan

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Thursday, 10 July 2008

I spent a week in London and York recently filming for my new TV series, yawn! It’s hard being a Sublebrity - I guess I’ve just shifted from the D to the C list, and as my fan base consists of young rough straight men between the ages of 16 and 35 it feels a little churlish to complain about their endless and very friendly attentions. It’s killed my shoplifting though, I can’t go in a Woolworth’s in the land without some young hooded tattooed oik, burberried up and dressed in muscles and tattoo’s wanting to get his photo with me, it seems after so long of being disdainful about it, that I am Cool.

It makes me laugh, me Cool! How ridiculous is that? I am a working class welsh queer from the deepest valleys in Wales who has spent the last 20 years doing exactly what I choose to do, always with meaning, but not always meaningfully. Cool is the last thing I want to be, feared yes, challenging certainly, but high-five palm slapping cool, hardly poppet! I am happiest listening to an Handel Oratorio whilst skating along the seafront on my blades, with the tightest shorts on I can find, leaping and jumping like the salmon of effervesce and yet these young ruffians avidly follow my adventures on the Tellybox and somehow translate that fiction in me being a cool guy and alright, even ‘their hero’

My current series is running on Network TV in the UK at the moment, so it’s a little worse than it usually is. But my public (as I am starting to think about them) are always polite and kind and as long as I’ve had a cup of coffee I’m glad to stop and smile, drop my arm round their shoulders and let the photo’s roll. I have my special ‘fan’ smile, a ‘slightly surprised’ but ‘gosh how much fun I’m having draping myself over this perfect stranger and making like mates’ face.

The worlds a small place these days and that means that I have a Peruvian fan club, I’m huge in Brazil! The Germans love me, I’m a hit in Japan, the Koreans banned me, and I regularly get lovely emails and flowers from a collection of students in Canada. None of them know anything about my serious work, or my passionate, intellectual and very funny writing, oh no, they just want to roll out my catch phrase! I’m learning to loath it, but perhaps that serves me right, after all everybody gets what they deserve.