19/09/07
Life beyond Edinburgh -
Categories: Life beyond Edinburgh does exist. I took the train home at 11am from Edinburgh to London on the Tuesday, like many, many other comics. I made the reasonable observation that should that train crash it could potentiallly bring the UK comedy circuit to its knees. Pulling into Kings Cross was an oddly anticlimactic experience. Al's wife Anita was there to meet Al, and was applauding the comics off the train, which was just lovely.
I then took a break of ten days in a tent in Cornwall, with the intention of leaving Comedy aside for a little while. It's impossible, of course. That's one of the main paradoxes of being a Comic; your time off is supposed to be relaxing, but it's only when you relax that ideas come through more easily. I think the ideal holiday for a Comedian would actually be a stint of hard labour in a mine.
For the duration of the holiday, I left my fish (Michael Palin) without food to try to kill him. To the innocent bystander this could be construed as cruel but nothing could be further from the truth. He's lived far, far too long for a fish. If he were to mysteriously die then I could get pretty tropical fish to replace one fat boring goldfish. He survived ten days without food, and now I'm beginning to suspect I own an immortal goldfish. How shit is that? Were immortality to be bestowed upon any beast, I think a sodding goldfish would be in the bottom ten on the list. Why couldn't I have an immortal puppy?
I'm now a few gigs into the new season, and it's both enjoyable and frustrating. The benefits of Edinburgh are reaped immediately in terms of stagecraft and performace. This is tempered by doing the same bloody material that you've been doing for a relentless month, not having had time to produce new work yet.
I plan for this account to chart the year between Edinburghs I suppose; I'm definitely going back up next year and I've already got a few ideas rattling around, so work starts now. I've learnt a lot, and there's no substitute for hard work. There will be the usual gigs, and hopefully some new and interesting projects: already a few things are coming through on the back of a relatively successful first year at the festival, some of them fascinating. If nothing else, it should provide a more readable blog than me relating my various successes at Pro-Evo and Age of Empires.
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