Massive apologies to anyone who came to the book-launch-that-never-was at Borders tonight. It was cancelled very late and for reasons I couldn't really control. I tried to spread the word as quickly as I could, but I couldn't get online to do a blog on MySpace. I'm very sorry to anyone who wasted their time turning up. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Really.

Tomorrow's event is still on, in Regent's Park. It's the Gloucester Gate entrance, which is near Camden tube. You should be able to find us as there will be small-scale merriment going on.

Sorry again and I hope some people can come tomorrow. It will not be cancelled. Unless I die.

M

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As I've mentioned briefly before, there are going to be two Things occurring in London to mark the publication of my Crap At The Environment book. Which is an amusing, but not piss-taking, look at the upcoming end of the world and our ability to stave it off.

So. On June 12, at Borders Oxford Street, the book is launched. You know. Readings. A bit of wry commenting. Buying/signing books. Sheepishly glancing at other books and wondering if it's OK to buy them while you're here.

Then, on June 13, there will be something we are calling the Cate Fete (an idea had a long time ago by Sam on the CATE blog). It'll start in Regent's Park at 6pm. We'll do stuff like hurl wellies, look at/eat/wear things people have made, sample the great outdoors generally. Someone might have a guitar. And so on. I'm open to any ideas of outdoor fun.

And then we'll go to a pub, the Crown and Goose, and get organically drunk.

What would be great is:

(a) If you could come to this and bring people;

(b) If you could bring stuff you have made/found/bought ethically;

(c) And by 'stuff' I mean food, games, fun-makers of any kind, instruments, balls/frisbees, you know.

In particular it would be lovely to have people who've been involved in, or just interested in, CATE over the months, and are looking forward to it restarting properly, which it will now the book is out of the way.

At neither part of this launch will there be pressure to buy the book. It's really just a symbolic launch. The way you launch a book and then drink to its health and walk away crossing your fingers it won't smash to pieces with the loss of hundreds of lives.

Please come!

You can email me for more details any time you like. Of course you can.

Mark

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I will post a proper blog soon, but just to let you know, I did my first climate change lecture-in-the-style-of-Al-Gore to 1500 people in Melbourne Town Hall. It didn't go too badly. Some bits were slightly ragged but overall I think it was successful. Anyway, the point is, you can watch a clip of it at the link below...

http://www.acfonline.org.au/articles/news.asp?news_id=1637

’What about Crap At The Environment then? Sort of given up on it, have you?’

On the contrary. I admit the blog has been quiet to the point of non-existence, recently. However, I have been pouring my efforts into my first ever presentation of the Comedy Version Of Al Gore’s Lecture, which I trained for, some of you might remember, in Melbourne last September.

It’s taking place on March 29 - two weeks from now - in Melbourne Town Hall, which holds (in theory) about 1500 people. I don’t know how many will turn up, though it is almost free (well $10) because I’m not allowed to make a profit from it. Anyway. However many people appear, it’ll be a lot more bloody people than I ever envisaged I’d be doing a climate change lecture to. What a world.

As you can imagine, this is one of the scariest things I have ever taken on. I have on my hands an enormous amount of scientific material, most of it pretty dry and fact-laden, assembled by Al Gore over a period of more than two decades. I have to make it into something that’s interesting AND fun, while keeping the sciencey bits together, over the course of about 150 slides. Slides as in Power Point. I’ve never even used Power Point, let alone designed my own presentation based on an ex-Vice President’s.

I’ve never even operated a REAL slide projector.

So, I’m practicing and practicing, tinkering, hoping for the best. It’s a weird feeling because, unlike any other show I’ve done (with the possible exception of the 24-hour shows), there is no way of ’trying stuff out’ by slipping it into other shows - I think most gigs would go downhill if I tried to cram in a line like ’we are witnessing a collision between our civilization and the planet which we inhabit’. I’ve simply got to get my head down and hope very much it won’t be shit.

I’ll report back afterwards. Wish me luck.

And once it’s out of the way, I hope to refine the show and start doing it elsewhere in the UK and Australia. And of course, to go along with it, there’ll soon be the official Crap At The Environment book, which comes out soon.

If you’re interested, you can see a little advert for the show here:

http://www.comedyfestival.com.au/season/2008/specialevents/markwatsonearthsummit/

Goodness me.

MW

It's been a long time, I know - I've been kept away from the blog by writing the CATE book, which is now more or less completely finished (more details to come)... and also by the enormously long tour which I've been undertaking - without any flights, needless to say - and which is now two thirds (or twenty-three shows) finished.

There's a lot to catch up on, but I wanted to draw CATE-wide attention to something which is happening soon and is great. You might remember that last autumn, we began a campaign of cycling/walking-rather-than-driving to places, known as the CATEwalk. The idea was to symbolically 'offset' the trip to Australia I took to do Al Gore's climate change course, but also, to promote the idea of not using cars.

Long-time CATE person Knox O and her sister have decided, as part of this little ongoing campaign, to cycle from Portsmouth to my show in Southampton next weekend. It's about 24 miles, which is a fair old ride. I reckon even I would struggle with it.

They're being sponsored, with the money going to Sustrans (as in Sustainable Transport), which is an organisation that works towards creating new cycle routes and promotes public transport and so on, with the aim of getting people off the roads. If you've been on a road recently you won't hesitate to agree this is a very good idea, both environmentally and not-wanting-to-kill-everyone-ly.

Please go to the link before and sponsor these spirited women to pedal their way to funny-land. They're trying to get to five hundred quid. They have a hundred. Do, as they say, the math.

www.justgiving.com/wasiandzainabcycletosouthampton

It's bloody Christmas, or as they say this days, the Christmas period! Yep. December is here. The cold nights, rampant consumerism and travelling to see loved ones mean this time of year offers many opportunities to trash the planet. So what better time than this, the start of Advent, for CATE participants to start dreaming of… a green Christmas. Ho ho ho! (Get it? Like a white Christmas, but green.)

The Guardian yesterday published a huge guide to green goodies and, inspired by this, I'm going to try and get something at least reasonably eco-conscious for my nearest and/or dearest. Of course I won't be able to blog about these gifts until after the big day, because that's what Christmas is all about! Surprises! Joyous faces!

We're also going to be encouraging green practice at our Christmas party by asking people to bring locally-produced food and booze that hasn't come all the way across the globe. And we'll try to consume less electricity with pretty use of festive candles and whatnot.

Speaking of locally-produced food, last week I took the wife to Acorn House, the 'greenest restaurant in London', which is a little oasis of good in the grubby whorehouse that is King's Cross. This is a place I would never conceivably have visited in the pre-CATE era; I met the owner in June when I was doing that talk at the British Library. They have a big bowl of apples on the front desk, all their wines come from France, all the food is made from animals that had a pretty good time in the process, or vegetarian. And they have a wormery for their leftover food, and they make their menus by re-using old menus, and their staff are encouraged to cycle to work, apparently, which is probably very nice if you can do that sort of thing. It is fairly expensive, but the food is fantastic, so if you fancy eating out in London without the guilt normally attached to restaurant patronage, I strongly recommend it.

You might remember I did a gig at my sisters' school to raise money for their eco-friendly Young Enterprise project. Shortly, you will be able to buy canvas bags from them by means of a rudimentary system whereby you email me if you want one, and I get my sisters to send you one. They cost about five quid and you can get any message on the bag you want, or alternatively settle for one of the slogans contributed by CATE members. I'll put some pictures of the bags up on the site soon.

As you can see in Trip Hazard's blog, Stephen Fry has come out as a gentle spokesman on the side of CATE in the eco-debate. His position is that, if it's true that the planet is nearly fucked, obviously it's urgent to do something about it; if it's not true, we're still going to benefit from taking action, because we'll be using cleaner sources of fuel, and, moreover, sources which will not run out like fossil fuels will. Also, we'll have cleaner air and healthier lives. You may recognise this as a version of Pascal's Wager, by which Pascal basically argued that you might as well believe in God because if He doesn't exist, you're dead anyway; if He does, you really cash in big-time when the Last Trumpet sounds.

Al Gore used this exact same argument during the course I went on. He was asked (in the Q+A session which, you can imagine, was pretty lengthy) what he said to people who asked 'what if you're wrong?' He said: 'it would be lovely if I was wrong. It's still worth reducing carbon emissions massively.'

So that's Fry and Gore and I wouldn't want to argue with those two big, articulate men, would you?

Please let me know if you've managed any walking-to-save-carbon-emissions during the current bitter weather, or if you have any more news, or even if you're not up to much really (Serendipity posted a lovely, heartening blog about the little ways her life has changed over the course of this year, with CATE-activities). And more news soon. The CATE book is nearly, nearly finished. There's only 23 sleeps till you-know-what! Ho ho ho!

Hello again. I've been spending a lot of my time writing the CATE book, which will be finished about four weeks from now. But in the meantime here are some smaller things I've been doing:

Last week I did a fundraising gig at my sisters' school, half of the money going to environmental charities and half to their Young Enterprise scheme (to give them a massive, unfair advantage over the other team at the school). Their Young Enterprise product is canvas bags and they adorned some of them with slogans/messages submitted by CATErs, including the Gandhi quote suggested by Serendipity. There was also a banner that said 'GLOBAL WARMING - SO NOT HOT', thanks to Trip Hazard. I talked about CATE and showed slides about it and stuff. So that was good.

I've been continuing to get local veg delivered by Abel and Cole, as directed by The Nag. It really is very nice and my wife (Emily) has been making parsnip and apple soup that you really have to taste to believe.

Tonight I'm taking the missus to a restaurant called Acorn Lodge, which is meant to be the greenest in the country. All their stuff is local produce and the place itself is mega-eco-friendly. I'll write up this hopefully tasty and CATE-worthy experience tomorrow.

About forty miles have been added to the CATEWalk tally, taking us to about three hundred. I have now posted it as a general challenge on the Facebook Group in our name.

Speaking of which. More and more people have been saying to me 'why are you using MySpace still, when nearly everyone has gone over to Facebook?' They're exaggerating, of course, but they do have a point. Facebook is attracting more and more people, and it is extremely easy to use. We've added about a hundred people to the Group over the past few days. Without neglecting the MySpace page, I am going to try and update the Facebook group as often as possible, in the hope of reaching out to more and more CATE sorts.

That's me. I'm off to write to more celebrities to try and get them to do things.

M

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Sorry, it has been a bit of a while hasn't it? And I never wanted to be the sort of person who starts blogs with 'gosh, I've really let the blog go recently...' But there it is.

There has been plenty of CATE activity on my part; it's for that very reason, in fact, that I've struggled to actually keep the site updated. For one thing I've been writing the CATE book, which is going to come out in April (in Australia) and June (in this country). This has meant, among other things, ploughing through the archives of all the blogs people have done and the many bits and pieces of CATE material that's cropped up here and there. Quite soon I will start emailing people asking if I can use or that quote, photo, etc. Anyway. It has to be finished by Christmas and you'll know if you have been anywhere a shop or TV recently, Christmas is coming surprisingly quickly. (The most depressing Yuletide thing I've seen so far is the cover of 'Glamour' magazine: 'HOW TO MAKE IT LOOK LIKE YOU'VE SPLURGED WHEN YOU HAVEN'T!' It's hard to see how they could get much further from the innocent traditional joy of present-giving without running a cover with a line drawing of Tiny Tim being kicked in the face.)

At the same time, I am starting to use my Al Gore education to prepare a sort-of-comedy version of his world-famous lecture tour, which I'll be performing in Australia next year while I'm over there for the festivals, and then in Britain next summer. This is all assuming I'm able to come up with something that isn't rubbish. I may just have to do the lecture straight, in a Southern States drawl - it's worked pretty well for Al.

This coming week I'm doing a talk on the environment/comedy show at my sisters' school to promote their Young Enterprise scheme, which involves the promotion and sale of good old canvas bags. (Thanks to everyone who suggested slogans for the bags; I'll be posting some photos shortly.) I'm not entirely sure how I am going to approach this, but it will be the first time I've properly tried to fuse environmental talk and laughter. My mission for the next twelve months is to become good at this so that I can get a large number of people interested in CATEry.

In the meantime, the CATEWalk is going slowly but surely on. This, if you've just tuned in, is a scheme where we're trying to all make journeys on foot that would otherwise have been taken by car, with the eventual aim of collecting enough non-carbon-producing miles to offset the trip I took to Australia to do the Al Gore course. So far, according to people's posts, we have walked a princely 127 miles. Not a bad achievement, although some way short of the 21,124 needed to complete this immense undertaking. I am going to throw the challenge open to everyone I meet and to my audiences on tour next year. I will not be beaten on this.

The same goes for the CATE Celeb Challenge. The letter's still not been printed in any of the newspapers but I am emailing famous people like nobody's business. More news soon.

If you've walked anywhere or done anything, please do keep posting here on the site. Sometimes the site may go quiet when I'm trying to live the rest of my life but it is never abandoned, and it will always come back stronger. Like God. I think.

Well, the CATE Celebrity Challenge letter hasn't been printed in any newspapers yet. But in the meantime we are ruthlessly targeting some celebrities via other avenues, as they say in business. More news soon.

I'd like to remind everyone, if you haven't already done it, to sign up to www.thenag.net. You get sent an email every month to prompt you to do something small for the environment. This month I got told to buy a hamper of locally grown fruit from a website which The Nag recommends. It arrived this morning and I'm looking forward to getting stuck into some produce that wasn't grown thousands of miles away. I've been making an effort to choose locally sourced fruit, veg, wine and so on, but The Nag's gentle elbow-tugging is priceless. Sign up, it's really easy.

Now for some plastic-bag-related news. My sisters, who are 16, have decided to make and market fashionable canvas bags as part of a school project which is like one of those Young Enterprise things. Their business is called Globe and they are head-to-head with another company of 16-year-olds. Naturally, I want to give them every possible unfair advantage so I have agreed to do a sort of environmentally-based gig at their school in a couple of weeks.

This will be my first chance to try out some of the material from the Al Gore lecture course, possibly. It is a frightening proposition to attempt this at all, but doing it in front of teenage girls, whom I've been afraid of since I was a teenage boy, is a challenge indeed. Nonetheless the planet demands it. I will let you know what happens.

In the meantime I would like CATE members to suggest slogans for canvas bags which my sisters could sell. Indeed, you may even like to commission your own bag with personalised slogan (they will be about four quid probably). So far they have slogans like 'plastic is pointless, canvas is cool' and pictures of a happy-looking planet and so on, but can we raise the bar? Please post any suggestions here and I will set them to work on CATE-inspired bags like poorly-paid teenagers working for GAP. But with the opposite moral position hopefully.

Also, if you have been walking rather than taking a car for the CATEWALK, I want to do an inventory of exactly how many non-carbon miles we've chalked up so far, so please post your tally on the original CATEWALK blog (to be found somewhere below). Then Miriam will post a counter on the website, like the one in Children In Need showing how much money they've got, and we'll know how close we are to one of the greatest offsetting feats in history.

Thank you in advance for your walking/bag design ideas/knowledge of celebs who might take part in challenges/etc. 

MW

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After taking everyone's suggestions into account, I've sent off this letter to all the national newspapers. It challenges famous or influential people to get on board the CATEmobile by doing something noteworthy for the environment. There's a mixture of quite achievable and rather far-fetched things.

Now there's no knowing if any of the papers will actually print this, so in the meantime, I am going to busy myself targeting specific Well-Known People of my acquaintance. What I'd like is for anyone else who knows a Well-Known Person to pass this letter on to them. This way, it becomes a two-pronged attack.

Let's see if the world's luminaries take up this exciting opportunity.

MW

AN OPEN LETTER TO BRITAIN'S CELEBRITIES IN THE LIGHT OF AL GORE'S NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

Dear great and good.

Hope it's all going well. I enjoyed your show on TV/downloaded your single/wore clothes from your range/cried when you went out of Wimbledon/campaigned for your release from jail/have always just admired you in general.

Two things:

Firstly, whatever you make of this Al Gore business, most people agree that the environment is in trouble. It would be nice to something about it without giving up too much of your time. But what?

I'm a comedian; you may have seen me on such satirical treats as 'Mock The Week'. I have set up an organisation called Crap At The Environment, which, as the name suggests, is for people who are not very green at all, but keen to do slightly better before we all find ourselves underwater. I now want to recruit some more important people to take on some challenges alongside me.

Indeed, even if you're not famous at all, but influential in some field or other, I would love you to pledge to do one or more of these things. If you're a captain of industry, for instance. Or the speaker in the House of Commons. Or Alan Bean, the fourth man on the moon.

Here are the challenges:

Switch to a green energy supplier. This will actually save you money in the long run, which might come in handy given the famously fickle nature of fame. Wanted: 50.

Decorate a canvas bag with your own design, be pictured using it, and auction it off for environmental charities. Wanted: 50.

Only use taxi firms which deploy 'green', e.g. hybrid, cabs; and vow to use trains/buses instead of domestic flights. Go on. I have. No-one needs to fly within the UK.

Wanted: 30.

Hijack the airwaves to promote eco-friendly living. Mention it on your radio show. Do an 'unplugged' performance. Slip it into a 'Parkinson' interview. Do a stand-up routine about it. Mention it in the Queen's Speech if you are the Queen. Wanted: 10.

Wear only second-hand clothes for a week. Wanted: 10.

Give up your private jet! Now this requires a celebrity of considerable stature, both in terms of status and morality. Wanted: 1.

Do some other noteworthy thing of your choosing. Become a vegetarian. Edit your film on a single computer instead of a whole suite. Hold a high-profile dinner-party with locally sourced ingredients. Use your imagination. You must have a lot of imagination or you wouldn't be the great and good. Wanted: infinite.

I'd be very grateful if you would join in this modest, but genuine, attempt to do something worthwhile.

Mark Watson