A Secret I'll Tell Nobody Never

The Colin Mochrie story? Gladly. This is a good story.

So I go to this college, and it can best be described as a little weird. It desperately wants to be Cambridge, but it’s not Cambridge, so it takes out its frustration with not being Cambridge on weird collective mockeries of Cambridge stuff. So far so good.

One of these weird mockeries is the debate club.

It’s hard to even properly call the Literary Institute a debate club - it is a club, and it does debates, but the debates are 100% stand-up comedy in a parliamentary format and the other half is bullshit pantomiming. For instance, every year at matriculation, the club drunkenly rushes the stage, interrupts the ceremony, and calls everyone in the audience a horse’s ass (occasionally while quoting Dune). It also puts on a yearly event called ‘Tuck-Ins’, in which people in the dorms can sign up (or sign their friends up) to have the entire LIT burst into their room, give them bedtime snacks, give them bedtime beer, sing some bedtime songs, and tell them a bedtime story. Except, the LIT never does anything seriously, so the bedtime song was always Barrett’s Privateers and the bedtime story was almost always something we called ‘The Rat Story’. Let me tell you about the Rat Story.

The Rat Story was a piece of… literature… that a LIT member dragged out of the dregs of the internet many years ago. Nobody knows where it came from, and my efforts to find it again were unsuccessful, but good lord, it was bad. It was a page-and-a-half-long Hermione/Wormtail (rat form) smut fic and it was awful. So awful. I’m cringing just thinking about it. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever read, and at this point I basically know it by heart. We read it aloud, from the poorly worded introduction to its horrible closing line (AND HE SCAMPERED AWAY WET! STUNNED! AND THRILLED!) dozens of times in a single night to unsuspecting students. It was an experience.

Now you might be wondering how Colin Mochrie fits into this.

So, one of the other things my college does powerfully and often is pretension. We are the most pretentious college you will ever see, and our college clubs are proof positive of this. Every year, various college clubs send out dozens of official-sounding letters inviting our various favourite well-known-people to attend our meagre college events (I, as president of the James Bond Society, personally invited Barack Obama, Sean Connery, and the Queen to our AGM). However, this year the Comedy Club was riding particularly high, and it sent out quasi-sincere invitations to speak to a variety of Canadian comedians.

And Colin Mochrie showed up, one fateful Tuck-Ins night.

He gave a talk, which was very good, but noticed as the talk finished that many students were rushing away to something in an awful hurry. We explained that it was the night of Tuck Ins, an important and sacred college tradition and that

We would be delighted if he would join us.

And that, my friends, is the story of how I found myself crammed in a dorm room with 20 other people, listening to Colin Mochrie describe Peter Pettigrew’s rat boner to a couple of second years who had no idea what they were getting into.