The mission/ bet, it's a bit of a long shot to be fair, but enjoyable!

Last year, my wife made a bet with me that I wouldn't be able to grow a beard for a year with shaving it off, or even trimming it.....the end result wasn't pretty, because despite my hair being brown and my eyebrows being blonde, my beard turned out to be bright ginger...and no moustache grew, leaving me looking extremely amish, (not that there's anything wrong with looking amish, but I'm not, so it wasn't a good look).

This year however, she made a completely random bet with me, one that I was eager to take on....the bet is as follows;

I must meet 12 of my favourite stand-up comedians for at least half an hour, have a drink and a chat with them, conduct an impromptu "interview" with them, in their local, (or a venue of their choice), and this must be accomplished over the course of the year. The number twelve was picked as there are of course twelve months in a year, so that's one comedian per month.

I thought this was a reasonable bet, especially as I'm a massive stand-up comedy fan, I have a rather large collection of stand-up comedy recordings at home, on dvd, vhs, cd and even vinyl, not to mention many, many, many books about comedy and comedians in general. I've followed many stand-ups careers over the years, seen thousands of  comedy gigs and met quite a few, (albeit briefly).

There is a saying, somewhere, (I think, otherwise I've made this up, but I'm fairly sure it's a real saying), that goes something like; "never meet your heroes, it'll end in disappointment", well that's kind of what I want to do! I think it'll be a good thing in the long run, just to be able to say I've at least had a drink and a chat with these brilliantly funny individuals, one of the problems I can see is as follows; I can see why this proposal is good for myself, but I need something to tempt them into meeting me, and as I'm not a particularly interesting individual, and add to that that the whole thing is a bit "stalkerish", (I mean, a complete stranger, who is a fan of theirs, asking to meet up for a drink is a bit odd by anyones standards...ok not by stalkers standards, but still, you get my point), so I am going to do a "scavenger hunt" for them, I shall attempt to find them an item they require, (within reason, after all I'm not loaded), as random as they like, (I have a two-headed pickled chick at home, so random is good), in return for an "interview", so consider the item as their fee I guess.

Now, my wife will be unbearably smug if I fail this task, as I rather arrogantly said "yeah, that should be relatively do-able", so my fingers are definitely crossed that some of my personal favourite comedians agree to meet up with me for a drink, (please keep your fingers crossed for me too, go on, it'll be good karma for you).

So, in short, this blog will be constantly updated each month, after I've met each comedian, so please keep checking back! Thanks!