Have you ever been in a social situation where you hear someone say something which you thought was meant to be confidential, and because they said it you dive in and say more? What the hell! The cat’s out of the bag, the damage has been done, there’s no harm in it.
But then you realise after some quiet consideration and the counseling of good friends, that what actually happened was the original person let a little kitten poke it’s head out of a bag, and you released a whole menagerie of flea bitten old Tomcats who immediately sprayed on the furniture and caused a right old kerfuffle.
Well, that’s sort of what happened when I opened my big blog shite.
I should have ignored the reports in the papers, as lovely Danny John Jules and Chris Barrie have done. Craig says stuff, he lets things slip out. He’s very funny, he makes me laugh just standing next to him. But there’s no need for me to pick up the ball and run.
There are a lot of people working very hard behind the scenes to bring a project like this off, it’s complicated and negotiations are delicate, some peoples feelings get trampled on, and when some gob shite rubber headed actor slaps a load of semi informed nonsense on his wretched blog, it really doesn’t help.
I’m channeling here, can you sense it? I’m channeling the feelings and opinions of people I haven't’ spoken to, but I can sense their frustration and disappointment.
It has been part of my life for years to answer questions about future Red Dwarf projects when I know next to nothing about them. Nothing I said in my previous post here is a lie, it’s just that a lot of decisions about possible future project are still in negotiation and I really have thrown a spanner in the works with my enthusiasm and desire to answer questions.
After Craig made his little slip up, my tweet stream was a mass of questions, I’m talking 1,000’s of tweets and I thought, I can’t answer them, I’ll do what I’ve learned is very effective, I’ll try and answer them all in one go on my bloggy thing.
Here’s the voice of a mature person, (my Mrs) ‘Why do you feel the need to answer any of them, just ignore the questions, do something useful, feed the chickens.’
Then I think about it and there is something to be said for engagement, especially on a show like Red Dwarf with such a loyal, if occasionally critical following. But I am now only too well aware that some of that engagement does, at times, need to be managed.
There are people without a twitter following, without blogs and without a public profile who work just as hard as the cast to make a show like Red Dwarf get to the screen, they deserve far more respect than I unthinkingly gave them.
I indulged in utterly thoughtless, possibly damaging engagement and I apologise without reservation to all those concerned.