Regular readers of my blog will remember this perhaps - http://blogs.chortle.co.uk/stephen_grant/2006/10/25/dear_dairy - where a small friendly gig at the Marlborough Theatre in Brighton teetered on the edge of a fight - sans provacation, I promise you!

Anyway, I found out a little while ago there was a reviewer in, so I've been sweating somewhat on the outcome of that. Thankfully, it was sympathetic, so I'm putting a link up for it. It's interesting to see that the audience's impression of what was happening was so similar to mine.

Here is the review.

I appreciate that my blogging frequency has dropped off considerably since my stint at the Edinburgh Festival, but then I'm discovering that leaving a story for a few days before I post it up is having some advantages.

For a start, it allows me to be somewhat more pragmatic and level-headed when writing about something that has irked me. It might come across that many things do; but that really isn't the case.

And what's more, getting irked about something that quite obviously won't be artistically inspiring after the event isn't likely to generate much empathy, and with reason. So let me tell you about early last week, when I went to Bristol.

The gig was a special gig organised by a credit card company who were organising a set of 'laugh and lunch' days across the UK. The idea being, that random punters picked from the street get to come inside a tent in the middle of a shopping centre and watch free comedy with some free food thrown in too, in the afternoon. The comedy had to be clean too, in both content and language.

A rather ambiguously worded sign outside asked punters to 'try stand-up comedy for a change' - and there was the first problem; some people thought that THEY were having to do the comedy. But then, with Patrick Monahan compering, some of them ended up having to anyway. Patrick - bless him - is quite mad. It's the right sort of mad for comedy; engaging, high energy, and charismatic. But it also has the side effect of him not knowing how long he's been on; if you've ever seen Patrick attempt to do a 'swift 5 minute intro' then you're unlikely to have spent only 5 minutes doing it. Additionally, his take on the standard compering fayre of asking people where they are from is made especially bizarre by virtue of the fact that he doesn't know where anywhere is.

There's *involving* people in the show, and making them part of it, and suffice to say not one of the shows went by without Patrick getting people on the stage.



Now, it has to be said, that despite the 'room' having good lights and sound, and the line-up being half-decent (the lineup was : Patrick compering, with Keith Fields, Paul Sinha, and myself, rotating two acts each over three shows), the main variations from 'that which we know' were as follows:

* Nobody is drunk/drinking
* Everybody is eating (and no-one laughs with a mouth full of quiche)
* Everybody is stood (no chairs)
* It's midday
* It's a tent
* It's free to get in

That in itself made getting laughs very tricky. And this is where someone like me can come to pieces. My timing goes AWOL without feedback; it's times like this when I massively envy people like Jo Enright who are so polished and full of natural 'acting skills' they can do their show just as well to a near-empty room as a full one.

There were lots of plus-sides though. Naturally, it was a good earner; and the organiser was Andrea Payne, who up until this year was my flatmate every Edinburgh.



And seeing Paul do his stuff - even to a room full of people who would have laughed if they weren't gob-full of free crisps - is always a joy. Here's the widest smile Paul managed backstage.



Oddly, from the audience perspective, this was quite a success. People were suddenly given a free lunch and 3 well-above-average acts to watch and even if it was tough for *us*, it was great for them. I'd like to believe that some of them made a mental note to go and watch live comedy in a comedy club after the event. I'm going to cling to that thought.

At the end of it, I rang my agent and sang a little song down the phone to explain how it went. I'd like to say I've put it all behind me, but you can actually see a video me making 10 minutes feel like 30, at their website, which is now fully functional. Highly recommended to those of you who slow down to look at car-crashes. You'll have to find it on the site, but the clue is where I was.

Going to write a slightly more substantive entry later, but I've made a major achievement in the world of comedy.

I've just confirmed Henning Wehn at the Komedia tomorrow night - in German. I told him start times, duration, arrival, who he is on with and the money in German, and he replied in kind, and I understood. Seeing as I only did the language in school 15 years ago, I'm enormously proud of myself.

If Britain ever succumbs to a deadly MRSA style virus where close contact with work colleagues is the most virulent form of infection, the stand-up circuit will be dead in a fortnight.

I can qualify this with the fact that last Monday at 'Outside the Box' one of the performers was ill; and since Tuesday, I've been feeling pretty groggy and rubbish all week. Sharing a 'stage' seems to have the same viral impact as a needle or sexual congress. It's Friday now, and I'm on the up, but I still feel like I've been gargling with fibreglass.

I'm fairly hypochondriacal anyway, but it never stops me working. For two reasons; firstly - even with the worst cold or stomach bug, you can usually hold it together for 20 minutes of performance, and secondly - getting up on a stage makes you feel a whole load better. And also, I dread pulling a show through sickness as much as the sickness itself, so it's often the lesser of two evils.

So despite this, it was odd to have two gigs this week; one that I didn't think was happening that I performed at, and one that I did think was happening, that I didn't.

On Wednesday, I was supposed to be in Hastings at Steve Furst's/Wendy Wason's 'Venue M' gig. (The more eagle-eyed amonst you will see that my MySpace diary has this down as a double-up in Sheffield, but that got pulled mutually when one of the gigs disappeared and Anthony J Brown agreed that a 500 mile round trip for a single gig in Sheffield probably wasn't very realistic for me).

The Hastings gig was put in the diary during a brief conversation with Wendy, a newish act who is the partner of comedy stalwart Steve. And that was it - no details other than the venue name, nothing. I realised that the gig was a dual effort between both Steve and Wendy when Steve rang me a fortnight ago to say it had been moved to the Wednesday. This was now free, so I shifted it across, and thought nothing of it.

Normally I let the promoter contact me with details of the gig, so I was surprised to have heard nothing by the end of Tuesday, when I was beginning to feel the worst of my cold. On Wednesday, I made two phonecalls and two emails to Wendy, with no reply. A search of the internet found no line-up for this gig, and no mention of comedy at the venue's website. I even went through my phone's logs to find the home number she called from, and rang that too. A woman answered, and told me that Wendy had gone to America today. Eh? I told her I was supposed to be doing a gig with her. This woman told me the gig was yesterday. So obviously the message from Steve moving it was wrong, and I'd missed it. No worries. Secretly I was pleased, knowing that I had a night off to rest and try and recover. I got into my pyjamas and went back to bed...

... to be woken up by my mobile at 8pm from Steve Furst, asking me where I was, as I was on stage in 25 minutes. Yes, the gig was on, but nobody had sent me any details. Steve thought Wendy would, and vice versa. The subsequent note of panic in Steve's voice showed that my non-appearance was going to be cataclysmic.

So I agreed to go. Honestly, if my wife was at home, she would have locked the doors and tied me down, but for some reason I felt like I'd be disappointing too many people. So within 5 minutes, I was changed, dosed up on sinutab, and racing across the southcoast for the 45 minute journey to Hastings. I got there with 10 minutes to spare until my slot; and ranted and burbled my way through a hazy, ponderous, yet surprisingly funny 20 minutes that had me pausing every other minute to wipe my nose. I think they thought I was a coke addict. Good; that's a damn sight more rock and roll than 'the sniffles'.

In fairness, the drive home was tougher than the gig. That's the problem with performing when ill; the car bit. It's six times longer than your set, with much more serious implications if you can't concentrate on the job in hand. And yes, the adrenalin of performing gives you a little 'not feeling ill' buzz, but the flip side is that when that wears off, you plummet back to sickness, and that feels even worse than when you were just 'a bit ill' beforehand.

Thursday was going to be tougher, as I was compering Jongleurs Battersea. Compering when ill is bloody odd. You get the roller coaster of feeling up, then come down, then feelilng up again, then come down, each time you take to the stage. And with Battersea being a good gig but one where you can't relax as it's technically a trickier room to play (for a few reasons, including it being wider than deeper), this was going to be more of a challenge. Added to that, the fact that I felt worse (probably not helped by the gig the day before), meant that I was dreading this show from the moment I awoke.

By midday I was really considering pulling it, as I wasn't sure the show I would do would be up to muster. But I knew the arseache that would generate with Jongleurs would be far in excess of the one created by me being a touch off-colour on stage. So I focussed on getting as much rest as possible for the show that evening.

And then later that afternoon the phone rang; it was Jongleurs, to tell me that the show tonight had been cancelled, as it had clashed with a corporate booking. I tried to feign disappointment, but sod it, this was great news. There was no cancellation fee, but on the basis of how I was feeling, I would have probably paid £240 to have the night off. All of a sudden, it didn't matter how ill I was that evening, as I could spend it under a duvet on the sofa watching box-set DVDs. Strangely, I perked up immediately.

I'm there tonight though, and looking forward to passing the virus through another dressing room in the time-honoured fashion of the circuit, and possibly dealing with hecklers by sneezing on them. It's an experimental new tactic.