elf-isolation has seen me try to find ways to keep messing about doing comedy without actually being paid for any of them. This has meant Facebook Lives, YouTube bits and Instagram Lives. These are all things that, had they been suggested to me a few years ago, I would have dismissed as media wankery and got angry with the person who’d brought them up. Now they are proving a valuable way of quickly making contact with people. The other issue with lockdown is that I am proving to be extremely annoying around the house. I am a generator of mess. I am obsessed with hygiene, but equally negligent when it comes to tidiness. I am only allowed to cook occasionally because when we first moved in together, I made a stir-fry that took two hours and managed to involve every pan and piece of cutlery in the house. My wife had assumed, it turns out, that the mess I had been generating while working was the maximum mess that a human could generate. What she didn’t realise is that, because I was working, it was only part-time chaos generation. Now that I’m doing the same on a full-time basis, it has begun to outweigh the benefits that my conversation and company bring to the household. This is gradually starting to convince my wife that she might be better off without me. The broadcasting hasn’t helped. I initially started in what I believed to be a spirit of public service but now realise is narcissism. I am broadcasting myself doing all sorts of inane crap under the guise of helping people forget about their circumstances. The other day I left a Facebook Live so that I could take a delivery. For two full minutes, I was broadcasting an empty chair. To put this into some sort of context, there were only 200 people watching, so the idea that I am doing a public service is ridiculous, and the life choices of those 200 people questionable. Just yesterday I was doing an Insta Live with the comic Tom Davis. We were having a chat when my wife walked in, and wanted to say hello to Tom. She did so, not realising she was also saying hello to a couple of thousand people watching. She ran out of the room. Later she said, “It would be lovely to walk around the kitchen without being in one of your productions.” She was laughing as she said it, but there is no doubt in my mind that the message was real. The long and the short of it is that, if I continue to turn our house into a home studio while simultaneously destroying it, they are going to have to add me to the list of secondary coronavirus victims suffocated in their sleep by partners during self-isolation. What terrifies me the most is what I am going to have achieved by the time lockdown ends, which currently stands at nothing. I am constantly moaning to my agent and mates about all the great stuff I could write if I had the time. Now I do have the time, and last night I spent an hour on an Insta Live discussing how to use an arse-washing teapot. The benefit is that it has left me completely unworried about the virus itself. I am much more concerned about destroying my home situation than getting ill. But what if this is such a sophisticated virus that it doesn’t even need to make contact with you to get you? It actually traps you with your family, and the real illness is them discovering how annoying you are. In which case, it’s got me bad.