Here-below Please Find My Daily Notes From A Working Trip To Beijing As Reporter For The Race Of Champions November 2009

DAY 1------------------------------------------------------------
10-hour flight. Not much sleep. Window seat provides a degree of economy-cosiness. Disappointingly, the most recent inflight movie was Sex and the F**king City. Wouldn’t even watch that on a plane if i wanted to, for fear that someone would see me watching it. Actually watched “Leatherheads” which was much better than “Dorkings” and “Epsoms”
After a looong stretch of Siberian whiteness - during which I Laughed Out Loud at least 5 times at the Adam & Joe podcast - and a quick doze, then we are over mountains. Must be China. Looking for the Great Wall? Is that it? No it’s a motorway. After the mountains, some clusters of buildings, factories, small towns, predominantly with roofs painted swimming pool blue. Why?
Suddenly we’re in Beijing airport. Immigration cleared (visa worked then) Out of airport, sunny but a little chilly, maybe 10°, a light smog.
Bird’s Nest stadium is nuts, and huge. Inside is bigger than all the stadiums I’ve ever been in. Almost put together.
Huge hotel – 13th floor. Gas masks in wardrobe – is that just for floor 13? About 6 miles from central Beijing (forbidden city, Tiananmen Square, secret dissenter prisons) so no proper sightseeing yet. Tried to buy local SIM cards, but wouldn’t work in my phone - first linguistically-broken interaction with Chinese was successful, socially, but unsuccessful functionally. This walkabout also yielded no local bars or pubs... Started to feel a little wobbly-of-knee entering my 24th hour awake.
Buffet dinner in hotel – spicy gyoza, shark fin soup, chocolate fondue. Waitress kept giggling when we ordered more beer. We had four beers – is that wierd?
Went to sleep watching Fulham beat Liverpool on CCTV9. Which is state television, not an elaborate security camera system.
DAY 2 ---------------------------------------------------------------
Proper night’s sleep, which will hopefully stop jetag (or “flight-blight” as my son calls it.) Opened curtains in bedroom – snow. What? Thick snow, settling. That was unexpected. The people coming from the final F1 race in Abu Dhabi will get a shock... The little tuk-tuks look even more exposed & dangerous in the traffic chaos.
Staying put in room. Making it home. A nest, if you will.
Eventually ventured into the Bird’s Nest. Chaos –Race Of Champions is a European motor-racing format which is never smooth to mount even in European stadiums, now being crow-barred into a massive State Olympic white elephant with a largely non-English-speaking workforce. I just kinda hid & made my own preparations, popping out once the snow stopped to take photos of the Elvis quiff-building “next-door”.

Back at the hotel, the lobby bar played host to a pianist + crooner doing Dido... *run awaaaaaay* swift exit upstairs, catch the last few laps of the Abu Dhabi F1 Grand Pix with a beer from the mini bar – 4 times cheaper than a beer from the bar, and in a can with an old-fashioned ring-pull. Vettel wins, and is on his way here tomorrow. And sleep.
Day 3 -----------------------------------------------------
Strange night’s sleep. Must have slept in a strange position – woke up with a frozen shoulder... of lamb (joke!)
Stadium COLD (between -3 & +2 so far today) & still big patches of unthawed snow on the grass within the track. V tempted to draw a massive cock in the snow, which would only be seen from the high-wide “beauty” camera position... and space, probably, like the Great Wall up the road.
Lunch – microwaved Big Meal.
Track – slippy, adhesive might help.


Got Mao-style hats from a street hawker. 10 RMB each, about a quid. That’s the only shopping we’ve done so far...
Drivers have arrived – Pastrana, Gronholm, Mikko Hirvonen, Ekstrom, all to practice. Brilliant fun – the 2-seater cars, like Focus WRC & Solution F – the drivers ride shotgun to see how it’s done. Everyone wants the hotseat next to Bosse in The Ford as he pops, bangs and drifts brilliantly around the tarmac.
So many of the Bird’s Nest staff wearing surgical masks... if combined with glasses, one eye is always steamed up. I think the main reason for masks is that it is obviously normal in China not to cover mouth when cough, sneeze, hawk & spit. Which happens a lot. *mental note – buy a mask*
The Red-Bull X-Fighters are struggling – these extraordinary freestyle motoX space cadets have landed, and the stadium ain’t quite ready for them. So they just wing it and, in front of the crowd & cameras, the first one is nearly decapitated by a trailing spidercam cable... then the first one to actually jump the gap goes too big, wipes out, rips the landing CARPET hits the base BAMBOO sheeting, and breaks his hand & wrist. Off in an ambulance (eventually), his co-Fighters unfazed, pulling backflips.
Ended evening driving Ho-Ping Tung’s (aka Dong He Bin)’s winning VW Scirocco round the circuit into paddock. Look at me! I’m a helper! Shit it's automatic! Mind your feet!

DAY 4 ---------------------------------------------
Same food. Sleep in.
Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Blogger are all banned since the summer riots ... no wonder they get so much work done.
Disney-esque music piped into stadium starting to get to me... much better to hear the roar of the engines than a post-Olympic state-sanctioned “it’s a small world” motif.
Lunch, again, is a warmed-up “Big Meal”. This is like having Chinese take-away twice a day every day, except with unnamed things you wouldn’t usually order.
Here comes ol pal Travis Pastrana – I’d forgotten he’s so stiff from so many injuries he walks like he’s wearing ski-boots. Also, watching the body-language, looks like Sebastien Vettel really doesn’t like Jenson Button very much.
So today we find out the snow 2 days ago was because the Chinese government seeded the clouds with chemicals to make rain... except a cold snap landed, so it made snow. The chemical snow killed all the flowers & my lungs hurt. Help. It’s like an evil future sci-fi world.
Nation’s cup racing was good – Tom Kristensen crash in open KTM was inches away from decapitating co-driver (who happened to be Ford WRC PR Mark Wilford) and himself.
All the fake snow has melted. It’s starting to smog-up again. Late out of stadium. 3 beers. Sleep
DAY 5 ----------------------------------------------------------
Shit – this smog is thicker than the snow. Woke up with a Jones for junk... popped to KFC, which is next to the Bird’s Nest & it’s Metro station which has NEVER BEEN USED. Interesting KFC meal – chicken burger, with chicken & OJ.
Drivers clearly went pretty large last night, there’s talk of Schumacher (or "Chewbacca" as he appears to be known locally) in a bar with his trousers down. And here they are – 20 of the world’s greatest drivers, riders, World Champions, heroes – all sparkly-eyed eating a table-top banquet of MacDonald’s. Someone’s been to the Forbidden Arches...
Race Of Champions runs without a hitch apart from an enigmatic & slightly bolshy Le Mans & DTM ace Tom Kristensen taking me to one side and saying “Neil, you do realise that in the whole of the last 2 days, you have not interviewed me once? Not once!” Crikey. High-maintenance. (Not my favourite, to be honest - last year he pushed cameraman & friend Jean-Michel backwards off the podium while he was filming live...) My response? He was my next interview after LOSING to Ekstrom.

Day 6 ----------------------------------------------
Sluggish. Very little achieved, unexciting writing & voicing the highlights which have been beautifully edited through the night by the French post-prod team. Who are sleeping at their desks when we arrive in the morning. Poor fellas. Hubert wakes up momentarily, pokes head out from under his hood, says “Putain!” and goes back to sleep.

Day 7 ----------------------------------------------
Day off! Must make effort to see the sights. Might never be in Beijing again.
Breakfast – noticed the dragon-fruit for the first time which, thinly-sliced, looks like carpaccio of dalmation
Taxi journey – through parts of Beijing that smell of treacle - to the Forbidden City. Incredible. All wood, with ati-fire gargoyles & huge ornate cauldrons for anti-fire water. An extraordinary place, popular with hundreds of thousands of unyielding Chinese tourists. Walking through the Gate of Heavenly Splendour, past the Mountain of Accumulated Elegance, up the Staircase of Dwindling Stamina. Enough time to get out of taxi one end, shirk someone trying to sell me a fake Rolex, walk through Forbidden City, find taxi rank at other end & get ride back to hotel. 3 hours. Then on mini-bus for a BRILLIANT nap & then the wonder of the Great Wall – highlights being the breathtaking ride up in ski-lift, and the breath-taking ride down on the toboggan chute. The wall itself is amazing – just like a 5,000 mile castle made entirely of stairs. Which, apparently, you CAN’T see from space. At the base of the wall, everyone bought panda hats. Except for me – it’s cruel,and anyway aren’t they nearly extinct or summink? In the end - we're all friends with the Mongols now. Especially if you pay them 20RMB (about 2quid) for a photo & a go on their axe:

Quick note – firstly Hello.

Secondly - For those interested in seeing me doing stand-up, a good London gig this weekend – Saturday 4th July, Downstairs at the King’s Head, Crouch End... or there’s The Forum in Sheffield on Monday. Also the B-Lo Bar Marchmont Street, Holborn London on Tuesday. But the Saturday gig is at one of the best clubs in London, so I would go for that one if you can drag yourself indoors.

Thirdly – the next World Rally TV show on Dave will be on 2nd August.

Fourthly – I have taken a sabbatical from my NME Radio show, but don’t panic... something exciting will be on the horizon...

Fifthly – thanks for being there.

Sixthly – Bye!

Seventhly – Neil x

When I first moved to London and started my career as a “serious actor” (haha), my first job was an off-off-off West End production of Joe Orton’s “The Ruffian On The Stair”. I was playing the, um, ruffian on the, uh, stair (fundamentally the same part as Hal in “Loot”, which I also played while at University, and the equivalent part currently being played by Matthew “Gavin not Stacey” Horne in “Entertaining Mr Sloane” in the West End... Orton wrote different versions of the same character, all based on himself) and I remember having to say I was “from Sligo”. That was one of my “lines” (sorry to get all technical on you), and it required a lot of “acting” as not only was it a lie to have come from there, i hadn’t even been to Sligo. Well, I have finally remedied that about 12 years later, as I am in Sligo right now, in the north west of Ireland. Rally Ireland is happening all around me, and we’ve been nipping back and forth across the border – spending pounds one minute, euros the next... making free phone calls one second, being charged international roaming the next... but the unifying factor is the unending rain. We saw a huge amount of the west coast thanks to a breathtaking helicopter ride on Wednesday, which saw us putting down at the edge of a very windy cliff to shoot the beginning of the programme.
Have spent a couple days drifting with Boyzone’s tattooed bad boy, Shane Lynch. I say drifting because he is currently a pro driver in the British Drifting Championship. He was also quite a tidy rally driver a few years back. Luckily he is the first to distance himself from any sense of credibility associated with being in Boyzone (which saves me the job) but he did give an insight into the recording process of the forthcoming new album... the Boyz and the producers etc bring in some of their favourite songs, Blondie was mentioned and KRS One, strip them down to barely-recognisable musical bones and then build new songs over that skeleton! So its kinda the musical equivalent of Dr. Gunther von Hagens’s Body Worlds plastination.
Top fella, nonetheless.
***time passes***
Its Tuesday now.The rally was hard work, as The Network have thrown us a couple of curve balls to try and make this year’s shows even more appealing to a non-Rallying audience, which on one hand suits me because I have a broadcast & performance career outside Rallying... but also frightens me because it will inevitably alienate hardcore rally-fans, who I fear will wholesale blame me for the process of turning their beloved motorsport into a Light Ents format... I have just had an exhausting and frustrating journey home, [which involved leaving Sligo at 8am Monday to drive to Knock airport to checkin for a flight to Luton, which was then cancelled, because of some snow, so we all got ourselves booked on a flight to Birmingham 2 hours later, which then got cancelled, so we hired a car and drove 3 hours to Dublin thinking “bigger international airport, more flights, more likelihood of getting home” – and we were right. Temporarily... We got ourselves booked onto, checked into, and Gate got-to a flight to Gatwick. Which then cancelled, because of conditions at Dublin – conditions which seemed fine to me! So, having briefly considered getting the ferry(!), we had to find a hotel – which proved hard enough, no room at the inn – and get ourselves booked onto a 6.40 Gatwick flight this morning. Which took off (after i had inexplicably barfed an entire Starbucks grande skinny latte into a surprisingly watertight sick bag...) and eventually got me home, which is where i am now...] but the only truly unpleasant moment of the whole trip was a rally fan at Dublin airport, i guess trying to be friendly, saying in a borderline aggressive way, to me “I’ve taped your show, it had better be good or I’ll come and find you at the next rally and sort you out...”. Nice. He wasn’t Irish; the Irish rally fans were warm and friendly all weekend, and I have resigned myself to the fact that I am now, universally called Dave. From Sligo... Now, back to NME Radio tomorrow – an interview with Little Joy (Fab Morretti’s band, 20% of The Strokes)... as long as the travel logistics are less chaotic.

Happy New Year

I didn’t imagine i would be writing this in my thermals, but when the UK is "COLDER THAN THE ARCTIC!1!!" screams the Daily Mail, that is the only option. I hesitate to call them long-johns any more, sounds a bit too Brokeback.

Hope you are all well. Let me take this opportunity to answer some of your questions (yes, no, hardly, yes, only if its anthracite, municipally) and update you on activities over the next month or so...

I shall be returning to the small screen on the UKTV channel Dave, with a new & improved World Rally Show, starting with Rally Ireland on Sunday 1st February, followed swiftly by Norway "COLDER THAN SLOUGH!1!!" on Sunday 15th February.
I have the following stand-up gigs around the UK, please come and see me and the other funny people do things.

JANUARY
Fri 9th – Comedy Store, Oxenden Street, London (late show – starts 00.30h) http://www.thecomedystore.co.uk/

Mon 12th - Set-up Punchline, Builders Arms, 1 Kensington Court Place, London http://www.chortle.co.uk/venues/15/london_west/2687/set_up..._punchline?PHPSESSID=2a1eabe28c5d9a3bf9035ad0347df6e3

Weds 13th – Mirth Control West Hampstead
http://www.mirthcontrol.org.uk/clubs-london-west-hampstead.htm

Mon 19th - The Folly Wine & Ale House, Petersfield, GU31 4AD
Sun 25th – The Market Comedy Club, Alton, GU34 1HD

Finally, my radio show continues in the meantime – weekdays 10am-2pm on NME Radio. Tune in, and help yourself to a request while you’re at it.

I have taken up enough of your time, thanks for your attention, go about your business and i hope to see you along the way.
Cockle-warming regards
Neil x

A sequence of events at a small-time stand-up gig on Saturday in Kingston (Surrey, not Jamaica unfortunately) meant that I decided to invigorate my act by walking onstage in a pair of ladies’ stilletoes (as opposed to men’s stilletoes?). This was not a foray into Izzard territory, nor is it the sign of some kind of Neil-crisis. I simply spotted an opportunity for a joke, a bit of on-the-night reincorporation, and spurred on by my own need to Make Things Interesting, put all my eggs in that improvised Kaufmanesque basket. And it worked! It’s hard to explain the exact circumstances leading up to that decision being taken, and it did then involve me removing said heels and re-affixing the double security blanket of my scruffy all-black Converse & my usual “jokes” while onstage, but still – if I am to continue to grow as a comedian in interesting ways and reach the standard I strive for, these are the hoops I must make myself jump through. As well as writing new jokes. This was my last gig of 2008, and the penultimate gig had been a much more pressured affair, compering a 120-seater theatre in Dorset last Thursday... but even that brought plenty of opportunity for mischievous freewheeling, which I frollickily relished. No cross-dressing, though. That Dorset gig was on the grounds of a posh boy’s school, an Alumnus of which was Chris Martin. I wondered if there were a connection, cos when I looked around it was all... Yellow. :-P But it rounded the year off neatly, having got an accidental world exclusive with Mr Paltrow himself last week, and then monkeying around in his old school theatre where he probly did house music and Shakespeare and had his first confusing proto-sexual experiences. And maybe even wore high-heels.
SO. This is Christmas. And what have you done? Lots, I hope. My heartfeltiest warmth and goodwill to you. I am on NME Radio right now, playing through some of my Records Of The Weeks from the last 6 months... what’s that Skip? You want a list? Oh, OK – Attic Lights, Bear Hands, Clinic, Department Of Eagles, Frightened Rabbit, Jaguar Of Love, South Central, Strange Death Of Liberal England, TV On The Radio, Crystal Castles vs White Lies... since you ask! Plus the seasonal one is Hot Chip & Peter Gabriel doing Vampire Weekend. Kitschy!
My eyes hurt, i get this occasional unpleasantness where my eyelids swell & get itchy. Perfect for radio, not so great for TV or Actual Real Life – it looks a bit Karloff. Apparently it’s stress-related. I dare not google a self-diagnosis, as I would end up with choleric-botulised eyelid-AIDS. Which I am not discounting, but a second-opinion is always useful. Dr Yahoo? Are you free?
Bad eyes or otherwise, I wish you many happinesses & a bounteous New Year. xXx

Hello
Happy Advent.
Here's a quick update about what's happening Neil-wise in the next few weeks.
This week, I shall be in Swansea & the surrounding South/Mid-Wales region enduring sub-zero vertical mud for the brilliant Wales Rally GB - which you can watch this Sunday at 6pm on Dave (in the UK).
Then I shall be back on NME Radio from 8th (interviewing Kings Of Leon on 11th at the O2).
Comedy-wise, I have the following stand-up gigs:

Tues 9th - George Pub, The Strand (London)
Weds 10th - Ministry of Comedy, ULU (student gig)
Weds 17th - Propaganda (Andover)
Thurs 18th - The Powell Theatre (Sherborne)
Sat 20th - Laughing Horse (Kingston)

In between I will be working at Race Of Champions, Wembley 13th & 14th. And then having Christmas.

Hope to see you soon?
N x

Greetings!
Hope you are all well. I have just returned from Japan, where, totally overshadowed by Lewis Hamilton becoming the youngest ever F1 Champion, Sebastien Loeb became the first rally driver to win 5 titles... and that happened in front of me, close enough to touch.
I seem to have mastered jetlag... oh no, hang on...
falls over, asleep
sleeps restlessly for 15 minutes
wakes up with a sweaty jolt
Damn you, Jetlag!
Anyway, here’s a quick update on what’s coming up in Neil-world...

NME Radio – from tomorrow morning (for those of you listening in Black & White, that’s Wednesday 5th November BOOM sparkle BANG*) I shall be back in full effect on NME Radio – you can listen online at NME Radio 10am -2pm GMT

Stand-up comedy – here are some of my upcoming comedy gigs, all in November:
Thursday 6th– I will be compering at The N Bar, Endless Street, Salisbury
Friday 7th - I will be compering at Ware Football Club Function Rooms, Ware
Tuesday 11th - I will be compering at Cheeky Monkey, Birmingham
Tuesday 18th - I will be compering at 12 Bar, Swindon
Thursday 20th - I will be compering at Buzz Club, Beverly (Yorkshire)
- - - - - - > Sunday 23rd – LAUGHING HORSE , Dogstar, Brixton (S London) < - - - - I have highlighted this one for everyone London-based who regularly ask when I’m gigging in London – this should be a good gig, and I am doing a set (rather than compering)

TellyVision – I will be on the UKTV Channel Dave with my World Rally show on Sunday 30th, and Sunday 7th December – for the season conclusion, Wales Rally GB. And then I will be interviewing Schumacher, Loeb, Coulthard, Troy Bayliss & Travis Pastrana at Wembley Stadium at the Race Of Champions 2008. That’s on Sunday 14th December.

I think you are up-to-date now.
As always, there’s (ir)regular ramblings form me here at my blog: Neil's blog
Spread the word, peace and love.
Neil

*fireworks

...at www.theneilcoleshow.com