23/08/08
Life imitating art -
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3 days to go and try as I might, I can't hold back the highly self-indulgent philosophising. I'll do my best not to do all of it 'out loud’ as I’ve spent the last week reading a lot of other people’s blogs and realise that in many cases with blogs, not only is less more, even less is practically morish.
The problem here lies in that the final few days up here are spent thinking whether your Edinburgh has been a success or not. Last year I had a breakthrough year, so keeping the momentum was going to be tricky. And it has been. But that’s a discussion for another blog; you never have a true perspective of how good your festival has been until it has finished; and seeing as it hasn’t yet, I’ll hold back on that one.
What I will do though is talk about the effect doing a show for nearly four weeks can have on you. For a start, it’s groundhog month. Doing the same show every night has massive advantages and disadvantages. The advantages are simple; you get to perfect and polish a body of work in a way you’d never be able to do on the circuit. All that stage time – no matter what level you are at in your career, can’t hurt. The disadvantages are slightly more cryptic though; on top of the drain (emotional, physical, mental) of doing your show each day, you start feeling almost like someone with a day job; true enough, it may only be an hour a day, but you start to run out of the motivational energies that keep you pepped the other 11 months of the year. And this year I’ve found that if you include a personal / heartfelt element in your show the net result of saying it each day is the complete polar opposite of what you think it might be.
I’m not saying I’m at Jason ‘death’s door’ Cook levels of personal tragedy* (please note this is a running joke with Jason after an earlier blog insinuated that Jason is a near-suicidal character. I would like to reiterate that I still cannot confirm or deny this.) but the passing remarks within my show about my ongoing and increasingly difficult divorce – which aren’t discussed in any detail and are played for laughs – are actually getting harder to say each night. I originally thought that putting a personal element in would numb me to the effect of the true story behind it, but actually it just throws it into sharp, repeated, focus each day, and that’s not what I wanted to do at all. But then even worse, is the actual premise of the entire show, which is all about how I’ve come second in life. The purpose of this show is to try to celebrate my near-miss successes both in my social and professional life, by highlighting and laughing off my failures, but actually it’s making those “almost-moments” of this year’s Fringe even more stark and annoying.
And by this I mean the review that was editorially bumped down from 5 to 4 stars which could have changed the whole perspective of my fringe, the press people who ran out of space and time to publish their pieces on me, the important TV and international festival bookers who just missed the start of my show and therefore couldn’t see me, the three ‘completely random’ shows that were frankly abysmal and just so happened when the if.com judges / main reviewers were in; I could go on, but I won’t, because it makes me sound like a whinging tit. The only problem is, whereas in previous years, I could laugh off and move on when these sort of bad-luck stories surfaced up, I am now doing a show about how they have shaped my life; and therefore they’re plaguing me each day as I relive my most famous (and anecdotally funny) failures. Anyway, in summary, my show topic was a very good one, but the net effect of doing the show each night has backfired. Some days I just feel miserable after reliving it all and it’s all of my own making. Nuts.
With this in mind, it’s probably quite poetic that I came 2nd in Comedy Countdown to Alex Horne (who, might I add, has been on ACTUAL countdown, proving how bloody good he is). I lost by a single point. I would have won if ‘dueted’ was a word, but it wasn’t. Arse. That said, I clearly had an evil streak in me; I managed to get the numbers game to 666 and thought the audience conundrum was ‘daemonics’ when in actual fact it was ‘comedians’.
Alex quite sportingly allowed me to keep half of the trophy (the top half) of a glass bowl. Here I am wearing it as a hat.
And spreading my dirty ‘coming 2nd’ curse involved top Brighton new comedian Seann Walsh who came 2nd in this year’s So You think You’re Funny. Seann wasn’t helped by a – shall we say - ‘not quite on form’ Rhona Cameron bringing him on cold for the start of the 2nd half, but he still acquitted himself admirably. Sean won £1000 for coming 2nd – not bad – but I know how much the £4K for winning would have actually changed his life (genuinely) so I think he was gutted in that respect. Either way though, he’ll go on to be an immense comic. What’s so good about him after just a year of doing stand-up is that he’s utterly unique in delivery and he’s getting there in content too. The best definition I’ve heard about him so far is ‘like a surfer Dylan Moran’ but even that’s not that close. Look out for him.
Oh, and speaking of winning a grand – but less poetically – I came 6th in the 'best joke in Edinburgh' poll on the TV channel Dave. The winner (who got that grand) was fellow Brightonian Zoe Lyons (and yes, Brighton really is the new up and coming circuit, in the same way Bristol was 4 years ago and Manchester 4 years before that). Her joke – and mine – is here. Well done Zoe.
Anyway. Unlinked to today’s post, I saw Andy Zaltzman’s show , which was ace (and I shared a cab there with Karl Spain who was performing in Stand 2 upstairs at the same time, which was embaressing as I really should have seen Karl instead), I bumped into a very svelte looking Jimmy Carr on the way home and stopped for a great chat about his brutally busy upcoming tour (to give you an idea of just how famous he is now, people were taking cameraphone pictures of him while we talked – just surreal), then I went home to eat and go for a quick meeting before my show, which went surprisingly badly and frankly upset me; and for a completely unrelated reason, had the show from hell today in which 2 people were ejected by security for heckling not just me, but other members of the audience and the warm-up computer. That’s right, they shouted abuse at an inanimate object. One for a future blog entry again, methinks.
And then it was racing off to Jongleurs Edinburgh to host the show there – I got there in good time but that still didn’t stop the Jongleurs staff getting confused and thinking I was 2nd act Steve Williams and delaying the show until I ‘arrived’, while I was actually there. Easy mistake. The other acts on the bill were Kerry Godliman and Janey Godley which makes you wonder how much of the booking at Jongleurs is done alphabetically. Afterwards, I met Maria Kempinska (sp?) - the Jongleurs co-owner - who was in the audience. I’ve never met her before and she’s really nice. I had no idea what to expect though – though you do panic slightly thinking, “if she hates me, that’s a fifth of my weekends diary gone”. Oh well. Let’s see what calls I get on Monday.
I was going to finish my blog by slightly (totally) ripping off Paul Kerensa’s idea, as I’ve also got a big list of shows I’ve seen; including ones I’ve been in, and then the rest of the shows that were on my ‘to do’ list and what happened to them. However, it’s dead late now and I’m off to the food festival tomorrow and need an early (it’s 3:30am) night – hence I’ll do that tomorrow. So I’ll finish ‘on topic’ by saying the one place I hope my ‘coming second’ curse doesn’t spread to is my original tip for if.comeddie success; Russell Kane. In fact, I really have put my money where my mouth is; If this bet comes good, it’ll cover the money I spent on badges and yo-yos in 2006, which still haunts me to this day.
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