15/07/08
Edinburgh 2008: Sleep, interrupted. -
Categories: 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
Comments:
No Comments for this post yet...
Leave a comment:
Trackback address for this post:
http://blogs.chortle.co.uk/htsrv/trackback.php/1479
Trackbacks:
No Trackbacks for this post yet...
RSS Feed