03/03/07
It won't last for long better do your worst -
Categories: Another week zipps by like... a zippy thing. It's been such a good week I've run out of similies, like a rollercoaster ride, which is a leit motif that's cropped up quite a lot in conversation this week, but more of that later.
I'll try and truncate this week into one post, into a single sound it would be "PPPPPPppppppiiiiiiiiooooooowwwww!!!!" into two sounds "PPPPPppppppiiiiiiiiooooooowwwww!!!! RAR!!!" the second sound must be made with tiger claws up.
Monday morning usually brings with it an impending sense of dread to most people, but since I stopped doing full time work with nothing to look forward to but a Saturday lie in, which to be fair stopped the week I got into comedy as I suddenly found myself with a million things to look forward to, every night was another gig to either perform at or watch. Even so I still have difficulty getting up on a monday and this was no different, I was still tired from the night before and I had that feeling that you get where everything's ultra real but yet you're unable to interact with it. I'm not sure if I'm the only person who gets this, your body feels wide awake and your mind just hasn't kicked into gear.
I left my Parents house knowing I was not going to make my first lecture of the day but knowing that I'd be able to get in for the second one. I had to, I was doing a presentation for the Sexuality and culture module entitled "Transsexuality: A Modern History" As I parked up at the university and made my way across the footpath past the stream towards the library I got a phone call from my friend Fallon asking where I was, it turned out the other person supposed to be doing a presentation had forgotten and I was late. I walked in and made my excuses managing to raise a bit of a laugh, which was enough for me to latch onto.
Like in the Sandman novel Preludes and Nocturns, when Dream has been captured and put in a glass case and one of his guards starts to daydream, it's enough for him to grab onto the sand and escape.
The presentation went well enough, though I overran, I should have asked them for a light at 55 minutes, as it happens I did one hour and twenty five. I got great feedback for it and managed to get a really good mark, the day was picking up!
So after the next seminar I headed down to the library to check my emails and do a bit of writing before I had to head back home and checking my emails it turned out a magazine I'd emailed about possibly doing some writing had got back to me and wanted me to do some work for them. Whilst I was reading this and trying to figure out what I could write about for them I got a phone call, the competition I'd won last week and then missed the call back from were calling me for my address to send me some DVDs.
My Ex turned up and we had a nice chat and sorted some stuff out and a bunch of friends I've not seen due to being so busy also turned up and we chatted, on top of that one of my friends and her new girlfriend told me they were able to come along to a gig I was doing that night for the Chortle Student Comedian competition.
Today couldn't go much better, maybe I should have bought a lottery ticket.
Now it wouldn't be a day in my life without me attempting to make something right and in doing so getting myself into a scrape. Now as I can't name names here this will sound a little conveluted: a couple of weeks ago I'd said to a friend that she could come with me to this gig, now the MC for this gig was Silky. Silky had met this friends recently ex-ed girlfriend and they'd got on really wel, and said ex girlfriend who's also a friend of mine wanted to come along next time I was gigging with Silky. I couldn't invite both, or rather I could but it'd involve telling both and seeing how they both felt about it and a lot of hassle and I didn't want to get involved. So I didn't repeat the invite to the original friend who was supposed to be coming and invited my other friend who's her ex.
Reading this back I see that I shouldn't have done this, but I wanted to avoid hassle. And it was all going so well on the journey down to the gig right up until we were parking, at which point I think the friend I had with me got a call from her ex asking what she was up to. And she told her, I of course had tried to avoid telling either that the other one was invited. I think I may have caused trouble.
Does that make sense? I didn't think so either, but to either of the parties involved Sorry, next time I'll not try to spare feelings and just be honest.
Anyway the gig was a lovely one, the competition was stiff, and though the audience were quiet they were well up for it. I'd never seen any of the acts before and of the acts on the bill I was really impressed with Chris Stokes.
I really enjoyed the gig and got a good response, but at the end when Silky was going to read out the winner I oddly didn't feel any real tension, I didn't think I was going to win, I think it was that I wasn't really treating it as a competition, I was just having a good gig and getting to be on the same bill as Gary Delaney and Silky, and also having Mr Chortle himself, Steve Bennett, in the audience just made the gig a little more nerve wracking. Two of the most nerve wracking gigs I've had in the last year outside of a Jongleurs tryout and the gig I did at Spank! in Edinburgh when I was being filmed for Paul Provenza's new film were both gigs when Steve was in the audience, firstly at a Laughing horse gig in Richmond which was just a cozy room above a pub with a friendly audience, and then Monday in Birmingham. having spoken to other comics about this I know I'm not the only one. Steve's like the Emperor Caligula of Comedy and you're the gladiator who's just slayed a tiger bare handed looking up to the emperor's box and waiting for him to give you the thumbs up or thumbs down.
Now I've got an image of Mr Bennett in a toga and laurel head dress, wandering around Chortle Towers ordering the sun to rise and putting together a press statement declaring his horse is the greatest comedian ever to have lived.
As my name was read out it was great, though, and I don't want this to sound arrogant, but something I've got used to in the heats of competitions this year. I've realised that this is my last chance to enter a number of competitions so I thought I'd go for it. A couple of years ago I entered a bunch of them only to come second in every heat to Barry Dodds. This year I've managed to win all the heats I've entered only to suddenly do quite badly in the final of each competition. So I now fully expect to have the worst gig of 2007 in Edinburgh for the final.
After the gig chatting with Gary, Silky and Chris was great. Chris has only just started out, but has a unique enough voice and more importantly something to say. Silky's declaration that if he quit, he'd come and find him and force him back onto stage was the right response. And whilst we waited for the time to go home we all discussed how we started out in this weirdest of businesses, and how we'd all done that thing when we started out of just doing any gig we could to get as much stage time as we could. It was heartening to hear Gary and Silky say that they'd done the bit that I'm at now where you're constantly running at the end of your overdraft limit in an attempt to get to the point where you start to earm more than comedy costs you and that they'd both made it to a point where they can earn a living from this and that being where I am that end is in sight.
Tuesday was fun but weird, manage to make more ammends with my ex, though there was a strange moment where I got told off by her for leaving the house after our fight the other week my argument that it was quite obvious I wasn't welcome was met with "That's your problem, you keep running away from things, and you leaving only benifited me, you should have stayed and made things more awkward for me." This confused me, but not as much as when this moved on to where I'm going to live next year and how I was going to have to get a one bedroomed apartment in town somewhere, to which she said "You can't afford that. No, you'll stay here, it's only another year. We'll sort something out." The only way out of this discussion was to say "Wait a minute, only four women get to tell me what to do, My mum, my girlfriend, my boss, and the Sat Nav lady. And you're none of them."
On Wednesday when I explained this to Dug and Doley, Dug just looked confused and Doley went "Eeeeuuuuugggghhhh! It's a trap! she's using some kind of witchcraft!"
As bad an idea as it seems, the rent is £32 a week. And I've yet to make a sensible decision in my life.
The discussion on Tuesday was in order to restore some cosmic balance. As I was driving home from the Gig on Monday night I'd not even made it home before I started getting texts of congratulations on winning my heat, the first one was from Sarah Millican, She won that one! But the next morning as I was woken by the woman from the press office at Revels for a quote (so I jokingly gave them "Damn right too!" though I'm faily sure that it will come back to bite me on the arse.) I realised that I'd got a text from Ray Peacock congratulating me, so I sent him one back about how yesterday had been such a good day and that I was looking forward to the Trent FM competition I was in the next day for a grand. within minutes he'd replied telling me I'd jinxed myself quite spectacularly.
He was right, so to atone I spent the day talking to Sarah, oh and writing Last week's blogs.
Wednesday came with all the inevitability of a phone bill, and I packed up the car and headed off to Nottingham, I love Nottingham it's a lovely town where last summer on a really hot Saturday I got to see my close friend Jonathan Mayor marry his partner Leon at the City Hall. It was the first time I'd been back since and even with the Sat nav I managed to get lost, as it seems the winding streets near Jumping Jacks, the night's venue, don't respond well to global positioning satellites, so as my car apparently drove through the ground floor of John Lewis' into Starbucks, I decided to abandon the car and find my way on foot.
It was odd, I suddenly felt really nervous, but there was a grand at stake here, enough to make sure that I was able to eat until my next instalment of student loan comes in, something that is a very real danger at the moment. Looking round I'd not seen many of the other contestants before. Having had the competition reduced down from heats and a final to just a final, and then being told that I wasn't doing 10 minutes but five and that it was a gong show format before I arrived I was surprised to find out that in the end it was going to be three minutes all together. Most of my stories take about three-to-five minutes to tell, but you know as Mitch Hedburg once said "If you can't make an audience laugh in three minutes you're not a comedian, you're a humourist."
It's a strange gig with a combination of people who've never ttempted stand-up before and one or two who have and with a pseudo-x-factor judging panel, which is a bit strange.
The two best moments for my money of the whole competition was the first act on doing some one liners and one of the judges talking to him afterwards in a conversation that went like this:
"Didn't you enter last year?"
"Yes"
"Didn't you do all that material last year?"
"Not all of it, some was new."
"Didn't I say last year that I'd enjoyed it all much better when I'd heard Jimmy Carr do it on his last DVD?"
And the other best moment, after an act who suffered from ankylosing spondylitis had been on the same Judge Saying "I wasn't sure whether that was supposed to be a joke? Are you really disabled?" he replied that he was and her tone changed to that of someone saying "Good dog" when she replied to what he's said by saying "Well in that case I think you're very brave getting up here and doing that."
I nearly shat out a kidney laughing at what had to be the single most patronising thing I've ever heard.
IN the end I got nervous as I went on stage, which I shouldn't have and that threw my timing for my first minute, but I still managed to get a really good response and relaxed into it.
In the end I came second, I wish I could say to the guy who'd done the Jimmy Carr jokes, but it wasn't it was to Ed Patrick who did a really good set, and I believe won his heat of the Chortle Student competition the next night.
According to the judges there was one point between us, so I took the second place prize of £250, cheque to follow.
And this is why after this year I'll be glad to not do any competitions again. I've never in my life been pissed off for getting £250 before. I've never walked away from a gig having had a great gig, having got lots of laughs and applause breaks, with a cheque for £250 and still been in a foul mood.
And I was, all the way back to Manchester. When I got to Dug's I chatted with him and Dolan about it, and was still pissed off, right up until Dolan said "Yeah... But... you just earned £250 for three minutes work."
And he was right.
Thursday was spent watching DVDs, TV Heaven Telly Hell, and then Jerry Seinfeld's Comedian, or part of it.
Watching Orny Adams on that, it was looking at the worst bits of every comedian you've ever seen, all the bad character traits and ego distilled into one person. It was like looking back at my arrogant behaviour when I'm on a downward mood swing.
It's like that moment you know when you've been drinking loads and you wake up in the morning with that feeling of pain that runs right through your soul where you feel like if you can will it hard enough you could go back in time to just before you started drinking and stop yourself. Where you don't want to see anyone you knew before this very moment, that if you can just start again it would be alright.
Watching this guy's behaviour gave me a flashback to feeling like that.
This was shortlived though as I went off to a meeting about a new Comedy night that I'm running at Vanilla in Manchester's Gay Village. It's the first regular comedy night there (outsid eof Jongleurs that closed down a while back) and I like to confound stereotypes by having a comedy night in a Lesbian bar. The girl I'm working with to get this up and running is fantastic, and the meeting went on for ages longer than I thought because we both just managed to click and talk shit with eachother, which is a quality I value above all others in everyone I want to work with or be friends with.
That Evening Driving with Toby Hadoke to Runcorn I thought back to Orny Adams and was talking about it. I never want to be like that guy, but it's like so many of these things what we hate most is looking out and seeing ourselves reflected back to us, it's why I don't relish going back and playing gigs in Chorley Lancashire.
Yesterday I tidied my room at my flat in Crewe, something I've not done since November as I always found something more important to do.
As I'm going to be there for another year now I thought I'd sort it out. Also I was supposed to be Driving Scott Capuro about this weekend, so I'd not made plans for Friday night, only to find half way through the day that I'd got the wrong weekend. So that means the dinner party I was supposed to be going to is going to have to be called off.
I didn't want to go straight back to my mum's for the weekend so I called in to see Dug, he wasn't in and I couldn't get hold of him so I gave his flatmate Ruth a lift into town. She's ace. I was about to go home when I just thought, you know what fuck it I'll go down to the frog.
I'm glad I did, there was a great line up starting with Silky and ending with Jason Manford, plus I got to hang out some more with Jonathan, who'd been ill, we went for a couple of drinks afterwards and talked about the script we're writing together, it's starting to get really exciting. I can't wait until we've got a draft of it written. Then we deconstructed each other's stage craft, boring ot anyone other than ourselves, and we realised that we work well together as friends and as comics because between us we've polar oposites.
As I left him heading off to company bar I got into my car, happy after a great week, right up until I saw the parking ticket on my car. Entirely my fault, I thought that Disabled parking spaces were ok to park in after midnight, but as the ticket on my car was timed at 1:38 I guess they're not.
I can't afford it, but you know, money keeps on flowing both in and out of my life.
everything in cycles.
This too, shall pass.
I still love you all with all my heart.
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