As someone who spends about a fair part of his week working on my club in Brighton (the Komedia), I'm always aware - sometimes too aware - just how much work it is to get an audience into a show. Thankfully at Komedia we have a ten year reputation and an enviable venue and location and that helps get 1000+ people through the doors each weekend. But the main reason why this happens is that there aren't another 800 comedy shows also on at the same time, fighting for the same audience.

Which may seem an obvious statement, but in Edinburgh, you don't have that luxury. So, to make sure show and audience may actually meet eachother, you rely on your foot soldiers - the flyering team - to go out there and push, push, push. In the early stages of your Edinburgh career it's considered the done thing to join them on the pavements, regardless of how demeaning it might feel. I still raise a wry smile when I remember the expression on Steve K Amos's face, flyering on the Royal Mile for the big value show at Cafe Royale back in 1998. You've never seen pissed-off like it.

I'm guessing Steve doesn't flyer that much these days (and to be fair, neither do I) but even he turned up at our 'meet and greet' night when Bound and Gagged (the producers - from now known as 'B&G') made sure the acts and their flyering team got to know eachother prior to kick off. I'm totally aware of how important this is - no matter how impartial they attempt to be, the gang will only put their heart and soul into promoting something where they like both the act and the show itself, but I find this gig as tough as any Saturday late show.

Firstly, each year the flyering team seem to get younger. They aren't; but at 35 I'm nearly double the age of half of them (18 and 19) and so that day isn't far off at all. And this year, Nigel Klarfeld (head of B&G) has elected to pick about 15 girls - half of them drama students. Even though they're studying towards a job not too dissimilar to my own, I just scratch my head as to what we might have in common to talk about. Small talk with an 18 year old can't be far off 'grooming'.

And secondly, like a surprising number of comedians, I find 'social occasions' uncomfortable and difficult to manage. I always thought I was in the minority for this - but it turns out I'm not alone. Jon Richardson (not even with B&G) had turned up for a quick drink and his shoulders were practically at ear-height from the awkwardness of it all. However, there were exceptions. I was watching in awe as the real Edinburgh pro's, like Lucy Porter, glided effortlessly from group to group wowing and charming different flyerers and making them all feel like long-term personal friends. I'm years off that skill.

Thankfully though, I had nothing to worry about. This year's group are so wildly enthusiastic and positive they could probably revive dead puppies just by smiling at them. I'm hopeful they can squeeze a few more punters through my doors. Here's a few pics from the do, with a full range of act comfort zones; from Nick Doody (camera shy) to Paddy Lennox (barely able to restrain his sexpesting urges surrounded by young girls (hence the branding)) all the way up to Tom Craine, who could only repress his sexual urges by kissing me.


A genuinely camera-shy Nick Doody


Maff Brown and Ian Stone, who were able to control themselves.


Paddy Lennox, who was on the verge of doing something bad. So we branded him as a warning.


The lovely Abbey and Tom Craine, who had to hold this pose for about 45 long, long, seconds while the flash recharged. The key phrase here is 'uncomfy'.


Some of the flyerers. Most are called Amy, though there's a Bernadette and a Laura IIRC.


Eva and Cat. If I've got that wrong, I imagine they'll spam my facebook fanpage with swearies.

Stephen

I regularly get asked if I still get nervous going on stage. Well, I used to - all the time - my first two years were so wracked with nerves that my favourite bit of every show was the bit when I left (and on half of the occasions, that sentiment was shared by the audience). But then I found the solution - not 'breathing exercises', necking a few drinks or any sort of meditation - monotony. Gigging near enough every night made the process of going on stage feel almost ordinary, and the nerves got fed up of being ignored and went off to sulk.

However, I will still from time to time get nervous - when I'm going to get reviewed; when there are important people in the audience; and when I've invested a large amount of time, effort and expense in what I'm doing. And therefore, by ticking all 3 boxes, Edinburgh typically reinvokes those open-spot emotions, and with some force too.

So with this being my 6th Fringe, I was hoping that repetition would help dull those jitters, and therefore on arriving yesterday I went off and did all the things I typically do on arriving in Edinburgh to see if re-establishing a routine will help calm my fears for the next four weeks, of which I have many. In fact, my need for routine was so great I even decided to drive up past the angel of the North even though my in-car traffic management thing was telling me the road was jammed. Familiarity: Check.



So after arriving at the flat (which I've stayed in before - check) and unpacking and making myself a peppermint tea using the weird brown-tinged water only Edinburgh locals think is clean (check) I went for a walk, bumping into my tech from last year (check) and putting my head round the doors of my favourite haunts (check). I'm even performing in the same room, the Pleasance Upstairs, at the same time, 6pm. (Double check). So far, the only indication you'd have that this was 2008 was the fact that half the roads have been cut up with tram tracks and that between every Starbucks, someone seems to have built a Starbucks.

So far, so normal. I nipped by the Pleasance Courtyard where the place was still a building site (check - it always is even with just 48 hours to go). I had a mild panic when I saw a building had suddenly sprouted proper air-conditioning, but relaxed on realising this was the box office portakabins.



Thankfully the main rooms will still be roasting hot and sweltering even on muggy days, so no break from the norm for me to contend with there - phew. In every sense.

Heading on to the Royal Mile, I even stopped for a burger just down and opposite the fringe office, before completing my lap of nostalgia, and I was already feeling chilled with familiarity. This was going to be a fantastic routine break from the old routine.



But then, I stupidly put my head round the door of the fringe office. Except I couldn't, because it was closed. The ticket problem here - which was recently upgraded from problem, to calamity, and then crisis - has now developed into a full blown state of emergency. No tickets for sale (as per the websites) and the office would only be open the following day for collections - assuming those tickets could be printed - or even found. A few phonecalls to people in the know has revealed the full horror of the ticketing nightmare; the fringe still can't take nearly all orders, the website is failing, and only the venue's own offices can deal with the sales, and not always either. That's all well and good if you're with the big four, but for some venues, no fringe box office equals no box office whatsoever. And there's a very real rumour going around that sales in June have been lost from some of the systems. This could actually shut down whole venues, it's that bad, I'm not exaggerating.

It is now just 24 hours until my first show and I have no idea how many tickets I have sold, and those ever-present internal neuroses I'd almost managed to placate has found this fact a perfect springboard to get those pre-fest nerves jangling again in full effect. Bugger. The woman I stumbled across painting the 'self-service box office' sign may end up having to use those skills to draw those tickets when they fail to be printed, ordered, or collated. No wonder the ticket guys and gals have the best aircon this year, they're performing the trickiest gig of the lot.



Stephen

Well, I've just lost an hour's worth of blog, clicking the 'save' button which crashed the blogging software as it tried to save what I wrote.

I'll try the blog entry again tomorrow. It was quite interesting, so hopefully will be again, when my red mist about losing it all has subsided. Moral of this story: cut and paste it into notepad and save it there instead - web browsers are not your friend.

That red mist is somewhat prophetic as my Edinburgh preview at Fat Tuesday tonight had all the notes printed in red. My Hewlett Packd-up printer decided to run out of black ink when printing out the script and I could only get it done by turning the text red. If you saw my performance tonight and was wondering why it was so angry, that's the reason. Before going on stage Phil Nichol warned me that he'd done that before - highlighting important notes in red - and found the red spotlight 'wash' on stage rendered them invisible. Thankfully, no such problems here.



Still, not hugely annoyed as my debut on Radio 4's political animal went out tonight and I got a healthy large chunk of the airtime. Very cleverly edited and good to see how radio editors are able to take out chunks of your set-up that you always thought was essential, but clearly, isn't. You can hear me alongside Chris Addison and David Cross (yes he of Arrested Development fame) alongside Andy Zaltzman and John Oliver here.

Yesterday I got up at 4am, today I'm off to bed at 3:45 am. I'm already on Edinburgh time it appears.

Stephen

Edinburgh 2008 - Sleep, interrupted.

I've just woken up at 4am, dreaming about my show . I'd like to believe that this counts as 'rehearsing' but unfortunately I wasn't reciting the lines to this year's performance, so I'm not sure that qualifies. Which is a pity, as my aversion to rehearsing has now got so great that I sometimes mistakenly refer to it as 'revising'. As someone who gave up schooling at 17, I last did any form of revision over half my life ago so the whole creative process must be waking some dormant memory, and not a good one at that.

So, I'm blogging again, and hopefully this time for nearly every day in the run up to, and during, this year's festival. I'll also be including some pictures and maybe even some video, courtesy of the very expensive and yet strangely inflexable hard-disk drive based camcorder I bought from Hong Kong last autumn. I'm always dead impressed by those comedians who now how to edit video at home and stuff their own showreels and stand-up segements onto YouTube (I always have to get someone else to do it for me) so I can't guarantee that it'll work, or have audio, or be synced, or not just be 3 minutes of green lines. I feel immense guilt for abusing my time management; so when I'm doing anything OTHER than working on my Edinburgh show even when at the festival itself (and that includes time spent blogging) if a part of my show falls flat or I get my words muddled up, be prepared for me to blame that on a nicely edited video sequence that I shot outside the Meadows for no discernable reason (other than giving me an excuse to say why bits of my show have gone pear shaped).

Looking through last year's (and the previous year's) blog, I realise the first thing I do is a 'catch up', of where I was, where I am now, and what's happened inbetween. Its probably important I don't over-elaborate so I don't lose everyone before I've even started, so here we go, September 2007 to June 2008:

I... am in middle of seemingly never-ending divorce from hell (in a literal sense also? Quite possibly. See my show this year for details), moved home twice (and Edinburgh will count as thrice - I'll explain in a later blog), decided to leave my radio show (on discovering that decision was going to be made for me anyway), won the 2008 Chortle award for best compere (still happy about that), turned 35 (was always going to happen), flown my second plane (technically my first plane as the first one I got into 30 minutes beforehand suffered mechanical failure - see picture below), filmed and helped edit my second DVD (you will not believe how much work this was) and got, according to my peers and the odd punter, a bit funnier.

Doesn't sound like much, does it? But that's because so much of this year already has been taken up with getting ready for this year's Edinburgh - which I have been reliably informed is likely to be my make or break year. And that's not a baseless, arbitrary statement; those people I work with regarding production, PR, and venue management have given me (and been given) targets on everything from ticket sales, press coverage, critical expectations and the work that I need it to generate as a result. No wonder I can't stop thinking about it. It's going to be an equally tricky effort this year just to enjoy myself. But no worries, I will.

I'm going to try to get back to sleep now. This blog has taken me over an hour and a half to write - pathetic. I could have used that time to revise, sorry, rehearse my show. It's not as if not doing that is interrupting my sleep or anything.



Stephen