One of my goals over the next three years was to meet Stephen Merchant, Ricky Gervais and Karl Pilkington (I happen to love them).

So this post comes after seeing Stephen Merchant perform his stand up, on his tour, 'Hello Ladies'. First off, Stephen Merchant was awesome. He had a great (tall) stage presence and his show rocked. For those that haven't seen his show, after the encore he comes back and says that he wants to re-enact his school play and asks for a boy and girl from the audience.

At this point, my mind was saying 'GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY - YOU HAVE WON THE GOLDEN TICKET. JUST PUT YOUR HAND UP AND YOU WIN'.

Stephen then proceeded to check my breath to see if I had been drinking beer, and he confirmed my breath was 'minty fresh' - which it was. I was up on stage at the Apollo, awesome.

We were de-briefed and microphoned up backstage about what was going to happen and given our scripts. I was a tiny bit anxious during the small wait but not so much. That anxiety went when I was out on stage for some reason. I think it was because you are so enraptured in the moment when you are on stage, you are just trying to breathe it all in, soak it up - it was addictive.

The script was quite apt/ironic as in my stand up comedy that I did a couple of months back I was doing jokes about AIDS and homophobia (in a nice way) and I ended up playing a gay man who was worried about getting AIDS. The irony.

It was awesome being in stage with Stephen, saying I loved him and touching his leg - even if he didn't want my hand there, it felt right.

I think it gave me a little liphaphy (I just made that word up - life epiphany)... the whole world is a stage (as Shakespeare said) and that really, you never really walk off that stage. There are so many opportunities in front of all us and by walking on the metaphorical stage and putting yourself bare out there, it doesn't get better than that.

Please, put yourself out there and treat every opportunity you see as completely GOLDEN.

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