Weird Alan Moore /
IT Crowd Coincidence

I'll just start by saying I don't really believe in fate or serendipity or any of that stuff, but I do think that, in this crazy, complex, interconnected world we live in, weird coincidences happen occasionally.

So here's one of them.

This all happened after Graham 'writer of Father Ted' Linehan bought a copy of Mustard magazine (the one with the Alan Moore interview) at Gosh comic shop in London. He later asked for it to be one of the "cool geeky things" to be used in the IT Crowd set (read that story here).

So, because of that Alan Moore interview sparking Graham's interest, I end up being invited to the audience recording of The IT Crowd at Elstree studios.

So I'm waiting with the rest of the studio audience, standing in the parking lot by the studio entrance. Each of the parking bays had nameplates on them, and I happened to glance over at the one near me, which says 'Alan More'. Which I thought was quite a funny coincidence, what with Alan Moore kind of leading to me being there, and especially as he talked a lot about coincidences in his interview. So I took a pic on my phone:

Some of us were then herded round to the other side, where I ended up standing in another parking bay which, rather inexplicably, had the nameplate 'Wizzard'. Now that's a weird coincidence (Alan became a wizard on his 40th birthday).

When I told Alan about this later he chuckled and said "Ah yes, my occult influence gets everywhere".

(Postscript: another Mustard coincidence, this time with John Cleese »)