Armstrong and Miller Time

When looking in charity shops I am principally hoping to find another batch of old comics, or maybe some Choose Your Own Adventure books, but I buy other stuff as well. Such as this:

Children's Hour was the second Radio 4 series from Armstrong and Miller, in which they starred as newspaper critics Craig Children and Martin Bain-Jones (characters the duo later reprised for their Channel 4 sketch show), and as the little episode guide on the booklet tells us, it was broadcast in December 1998 (in the 11pm slot, which will become quite important later on).

Hmm. There's got to be a story there.

A Slightly Convoluted and Badly Told Anecdote About Armstrong and Miller I Have Just Remembered

Back in 2010, I attended the first night of The Armstrong and Miller Tour at the Bristol Hippodrome. And it proved to be significant that it was the first night.

The show was predominantly live, but there was a pre-recorded series of animated inserts where Armstrong, Miller and the sole other member of the cast, Katherine Jakeways, voiced characters in an MMORPG (basically not unlike the later E4 sitcom Dead Pixels)... except for most of the show, the screen wasn't working, and only the audio was played in. And nobody seemed to notice; perhaps the audience were too polite to try and bring it to their attention, but nobody on the crew picked up on it, and the cast certainly didn't!

Eventually -- possibly this is a false memory, but it was before the very last insert was played in, certainly after quite a few of them had been -- Ben and Xander broke character to say, slightly embarrassedly, that we should have been able to see things as well as hear them in the bits where they and Jakeways were off-stage, but the projector wasn't working, and they managed to get things fixed in time for us to see the last one. Suddenly having visuals did make that one sketch much funnier, at the cost of basically ruining every other one... and the punchline to the whole thing, where the cast came back on stage dressed in the same ridiculous costumes as their MMORPG characters, who had agreed to meet up in real life, which had far less impact as a result.

Although it strikes me just now that we potentially missed out on something even funnier if nobody had noticed anything was wrong until that point...