Special Guest Blogger: Tony Slattery

Am I famous? Was I ever? It’s a slippery little eel, fame. For a brief, glittering, and frankly blurry period in the nineties, I was what you might call ‘televisual’. I was on the box so often you probably got sick of the sight of me. A whirlwind of questionable shirts, razor-sharp (and occasionally razor-dull) wit, and a metabolism powered by adrenaline, champagne, and cocaine. Mostly cocaine to be honest. Whose Line Is It Anyway? was the epicentre of it all. Thirty minutes once a week of pure, unadulterated improvisational terror, followed by a lifetime of people shouting 'Songs from the hat!' at me in Sainsbury’s.
They don’t make them like that anymore, do they? The modern route to fame seems to involve crying in a jungle but in my day, to get on the telly you had to at least have a go at being interesting. You had to learn your craft like I did at the Cambridge Footlights and then earn your stripes in grotty comedy clubs above pubs, dodging flying peanuts and the occasional heckler . It was a grind. It was character-building. It gave you something proper to be grumpy about later in life.
And then there were the ‘lost years’. The period where the main stage was swapped for a much smaller, sadder one. I won’t bore you with the details but it was what we call in the business 'an extended period of illness' and I hardly got any work although i did get the gig as the vending machine in Red Dwarf.
You know what though? It’s part of the tapestry. A rather frayed, beer-stained and smelling of Cocaine part of the tapestry, but it’s there. You can’t tell the story of the triumph without acknowledging the time you spent face-down in the carpet and waking up three days later. It adds texture.
Which brings me to the main event: my demise. Since we’re here, let’s get it right. How did I die?
Tony! Your suggestion from the audience is… a fatal heart attack!