East London, You're Killing Me

I went to the recording of a web TV show the other night. I was sitting in my seat in the audience before it started, on the front row, in a room above an old Victorian boozer in East London, and people around me were tweeting that we were on the FROW. I tweeted one of them to say hello to her, the four-feet distance between us feeling too far to shout. Then I recognised someone a few feet further down and tweeted him, too. I was tired. Everyone around me was wearing something tight on their legs and something bright on their tits. And then there were the women! Somebody ran into somebody else and screamed, “I haven’t seen you in forever! Well, only on Instagram.” An open window had been covered up with foam, and we were advised not to lean back and fall through it, “as we don’t really want £250 from You’ve Been Framed”, the man said.   Some grown-ups walked over to our row and said, “We see that you’ve got your phones out.” I said that I was sorry. They said, “We are the social media managers. Can you go to the show’s page and retweet our last tweet.” The gin was free. It was poured into my glass from a jug, held by a man from Made in Chelsea, who was dressed as a cross between Margaret Thatcher and the cat from Red Dwarf. I don’t know if this look was intentional, but it was certainly effective. His bar was decorated with zigs on zags and parrots on pineapples. Then the three actual presenters came on and had a Google Hangout, live on stage, with one of their mums. The mum was in her house somewhere else, peering into her laptop. They asked the mum why she had put the kibosh on a section of the show, in which they had planned to suck flavoured condoms, blindfolded, and try to guess which flavour was which. She replied, in a nicely-spoken posh mum voice, "because a condom is designed to go on the end of a man's dick". Then presenter Gemma interviewed a woman called Fred, who was sitting near me with ice white hair, like a Khaleesi. Fred designs hats made out of geometric patterns and plastic that shines with the rainbows of the night. She talked about the future and the past and how it will all be about authenticity one day. Finally, I actually spoke to my friend Matt, who I haven’t seen in years. We reminisced about the time we got sent on a press trip to Las Vegas together, where we had to stay in the Playboy Hotel for a week and re-enact some things that Cameron Diaz and Ashton Kutcher had done in a film, to promote the film’s release on DVD, for a celebrity gossip website. This included gambling, cooking and standing outside a car maintenance place called Terrible’s Lube. We remembered how the Playboy Hotel was staffed by women with plastic breasts, breasts that seemed to stare straight outwards, as if they were eyes with no recourse to gravity. And how we had largely spent the week hiding in our rooms, alone and crying. It was then announced that Misha B was about to come on stage for the web TV show. Misha B! Wasn’t she the – oh no, this is the one from X Factor, I’m thinking of Mischa Barton. Mischa Barton who used to hang out with my friend W when he lived on my sofa in LA. Mischa who used to phone W saying, “I’m outside the Chateau in the car, come down! Come quick, the paps are here!” And W would put on his best English gent voice and go, “Oh dahling, the paparaaahzi; FUCK the paparaahzi,” and he’d give me the thumbs up sign while saying it, and then he’d wait five minutes longer before setting off just to make sure there were as many paps as possible before he arrived. Then he’d leave my flat, cross the road and somehow make it look like he had just exited the hotel that she was parked outside – the Chateau Marmont, which is very expensive. My sofa was a considerably cheaper place to live. Once, I came home to that flat very grumpy, and told W that the Times had sent me to meet a big old classic British popstar, but that he had been mean to me. “If it’s any consolation,” said W, “I’ve slept with his wife.” And it was. Anyway, it was Misha B on stage, wearing silk pyjamas with the Virgin Mary all over them. But I had to leave before she was finished, to go to another show, in which a comedian called Bryony goes back to all the men she’s slept with in the last few years to find out which one gave her chlamydia. There is a part of the show where she passes some bottles of Jack Daniels into the crowd, along with some containers and scissors and says that if we are prepared to cut off some of our pubes and donate them to the container, we can have some Jack Daniels. So we did. My friend Aisha and I took it in turns to semi guard each other and shove our hands down our own pants and trim some pubes, which then got passed around in a communal cup. “Bloody hell, London,” said Bryony, when the pube cup had made its way round the whole room. She peered into it. It wasn’t very full. “You’ve got nothing on Glasgow. And they were ALL ginger.” Then she made a moustache with the pubes. She shoved them all on a piece of sellotape and stuck it on her face. And there our bunch of hairs sat, glued on to her upper lip, as if she had just been getting her face stuck into us all. “You know those scissors you just cut these off with,” she said. “Well, I’ve never washed them. And I’ve done 67 shows with them. Also, those Jack Daniels bottles are what I use to decant cheap bourbon into, and it’s probably been slugged or sipped by 5,000 people now.” Then she explained the statistics of chlamydia and venereal disease to us. “The lesson here is to never do what someone tells you to,” she added. I took another swig of the sexually transmitted bourbon, and thought, it really is an undeniable fact that I live in East London.

Follow Sophie on Twitter: @heawood

Previously – I Have Decided to Stand for Election