There has been a major lack of posting this week, for which I apologise. This has partly been to do with carting myself around the country for gigs as the comedy season is getting into full swing again.

I've been to some very nice areas and had one particularly nice gig which took place in a big tent out the back of a pub in Bradford Upon Avon. This Bradford in not like the Bradford and thus has no curries or racists, and is all rather twee and nice. We had a rather hazardous trip to the gig due to traffic and a motorway 'incident'. I always find the term 'incident' rather ominous. Its the sort of term middle class people use if a pet has shat on the carpet - 'Fluffy's had an incident'. It seems highly demeaning to use that same term to describe a car that has gone up in flames and people that have possibly burned to death.

So during the hellish journey, when one of my fellow acts rang the gig, we found out it was going to be in a tent. Now our immediate thoughts were 'oh god, this will be crap'. My only other tent gig experience was my not great set at Bestival, and the tent we were heading to was definitely not festival size. All the panic lights were going and we continued in the frame of mind that we would have to plough on through and take a bullet for the team. On arrival though, it was a huge tent with a regular comedy savvy crowd who enjoyed every gag we all said and wanted us to stay for the beerfest that weekend. What could be nicer than that sort of reception?

The bizarre thing about this was that while the unsure gig in the tent was great, a gig earlier in the week in a nice seeming pub, was truly bad. There was a nice crowd, it was a nice place and from that you'd think it would be a cinch. However, what was completely wrong was the room. Some people scoff if an act blames their gig on the room, but it plays a massive factor. At this gig, the audience were on all three sides of you, so wherever you turned, you ignored one side. This wouldn't have been so bad if there weren't loads of pillars blocking the view everywhere and the stage hadn't been so far away from everyone. Essentially an atmosphere could not be created, let alone developed on.

I was a drama student some years ago and regularly the idea that the space was important would appear. I became increasingly bored with 'finding a space and making it become something' and tired of reading dull book's such as Peter Brook's 'The Empty Space'. Ironically its only since doing stand-up I've realised how vital to a good gig it really is. Sadly many promoters still don't. Or perhaps don't care. All it takes is finding the right place for the stage, lights for focus and the audience close together. I've been to gigs where the weirdest room has become nice because it was set out right. Yet at the same time I've been to rooms that could have been good but were placed all wrong, as well as many many venues that should never have had comedy there in the first place. This includes a mic on a carpet in front of a fire place in an estate pub, a massive dome with ceilings so high people could've parachuted in, a venue where most people are in separate rooms watching you on a TV (why not just stay at home and watch TV?) and anywhere outdoors ever (with the exception of performing on Arthur's Seat in Edinburgh because that was ace). I simply suggest that there should be some sort of list that promoters have to check before running a gig in a place. It can include questions such as: 1) Can the audience see the act? 2) Are the front row of the audience more than 5ft away from the stage? 3) Are there livestock running around during the show? and things to that effect. A 5 minute checklist could save hours of pain for comics for years to come. I might send round a memo.

The other reason there has been a lack of blog this week is because on Monday, my girlfriend and I acquired two small kittens called Bella and Rosie. They are 12 weeks old, very small, and already adapt at ruining our living room with scratches and poos. Strangely they have the ability to make the small space that is our flat very full of humour on a daily basis and thus its very hard to get anything done. There is little more entertaining than watching a tiny animal chase its own tail for half an hour. Not only is that distracting, but Bella (who is all black. Rosie is a grey tabby) seems to really enjoy sleeping across the laptop keys while I'm trying to type. Handy. And so little will now happen until they grow a bit and keep themselves busy without providing me with hundreds of cheap youtube moments. Right now I must leave this blog here as they are trying to chew through the electric cables on the TV. While the cruel of you might think that it would be a quick way to stop them from distracting me if I allow them to continue, I think I'll be nice and gently remove them from near death because I'm nice like that.

I have received a fair share of odd emails over the years since the arrival of the interweb. Ranging from an email entitled 'Tiernan?' from Tiernan Deevy asking if I was really another Tiernan as he had never met another Tiernan, all the way to my friends spontaneously written essay on the dangers of the honey badger.
However, yesterday I received a rather unique email from top political comic Mark Thomas, simply stating:

'It is short notice I know but would you like to be Nelson Mandela for 5
minutes tomorrow?'

This is quite possibly the oddest request I've ever had. I wondered if perhaps he had discovered a 'Being John Malkcovich' type portal and I was going to test drive being inside the head of world peace legend Mr Mandela. Upon further reading I discovered it was not quite as nuts and merely involved me doing a reading from Nelson Mandela's speech at the unveiling of his statue in Parliament Square. This did not seem as daunting, until my friend (and Fat Tuesday co-coordinator) Georgie told me I should 'be the best Nelson Mandela you can', at which point I wondered exactly how many ways I could get this wrong by wearing a costume or face paint. Luckily I'm not an idiot.

What actually entailed was more genius from the man Thomas to oppose the ridiculous SOCPA law of central London that requires you to apply for permission from the Police to demonstrate in the Parliament area. Mark has been protesting about this for some time, both in his well documented mass lone protests (if you haven't heard about this then check out http://www.markthomasinfo.com/demo/default.asp immediately and get involved!) which I have partaken in many of, including the mass mass lone demo earlier this year in which 200 odd people all did 20 10 minute long protests each over a whole day. This in turn meant the police were dealt over 2000 forms and it was proved once again what a huge waste of time this law is. I am very ham fistedly talking about this here, but I totally advise seeing Mark's new tour on which he talks about his actions thoroughly.

Anyhoo, today's protest required Mark filling in loads of forms and getting 5 million pounds of public liability insurance (on loan from the CND) just to get agreement from the GLA that we could protest by the Nelson Mandela statue. We proceeded at 12.45 today to hold banners and read extracts from the speeches of Richard Attenborough, Gordon Brown, Ken Livingston and of course Nelson himself from merely a few weeks ago. But why, you might ask. What was the point? Well, many of us were curious too, but Mark didn't let us down. After all the proceedings and wise words, Mark pointed out that we had permission to do such an event, but on August 29th neither Gordon Brown or Ken Livingston had got permission for their unveiling, which means they have broken the law. Again, sheer proof that the SOCPA law is a waste of time if the PM and the Mayor of London can so easily break it. Crazy huh? It also makes you really angry at the extent that the new terrorism laws have infringed on human rights. What say does anyone have if you have to ask the government before you voice your opinion about them? Slightly scary thought methinks.

Now I'm not very political in general. I try to be, but I sadly lack enough understanding to be quite as cleverly pro-active. My parents are both very sharp on politics and so is my brother. For me, I spent years thinking Trotsky was the Russian word for a short stroll, so basically I have no idea of anything. I'm pretty good at music knowledge and what happened in most Marvel comics from the years 1990-1994. Sadly I don't feel that this knowledge will change the world anytime soon. I must endeavour to be a bit more clever about it methinks, and I can only aim to help in more of Mark's antics and try and research other bits I can do. Expect me to be arrested anytime soon for getting it all wrong. However first I will spend tonight playing some xbox with my mate and discussing honey badgers.

Do go check out Mark's website (http://www.markthomasinfo.com) and his tour and the benefit gig "A Seriously Funny Attempt to Get The Serious Fraud Office in The Dock!" - Hammersmith Apollo, Sunday 23rd September. It'll all be ace and well worth your hard earned moolah. And hopefully I'll see you at the next mass lone demo (Interesting protests are best. Winner of recent times is the man from the Monster Raving Loony Party's 'More Use of the Word Globule! Excellent stuff)!

Brief other news (sorry, this is a stupidly long blog!) - possibility of me running another gig in a very lovely room in a lovely area. While this is great, I must try and maintain some sort of line between being an act and not a promoter. Even more so now there are a couple of promoters happy to book their acts at my gig but not give me a spot at theirs. That's not even stevens at all. Is it possible to be regarded as both an act and promoter? Some people do it very well, like Stephen Grant or Toby Foster. I however might lack the organisational skill for this. Watch this space for either a new gig or a full mental spazz out. I wanted to use the word meltdown there, but thought spazz out might provoke higher response.

Word.

Tonight combined two of my favourite things: a really nice gig, and a really good pie. Neither of these things can be disputed as not good. They are both guaranteed damn good things.

Good thing number one: The good gig. For the first time in ages I responded to a last minute text about a last minute non-paying gig. Previously I had been ignorantly snobbish towards this sort of thing. I believed that as I had so little time devoted to actually seeing my girlfriend and friends that I should cherish nights off and do nothing regardless of offers. Unless of course they paid. Yes, I was very shallow about it all.
However tonight's gig was perfectly timed. I have a bigger gig tomorrow and was feeling a bit down about Sunday's festival pooness (real word, says me). I also have some new material I needed to try, so it all seemed a perfect opportunity.

However, the one thing holding me back was the fact that our good friend was going to be over for dinner and my girlfriend was making a big pie. From scratch. Pie from scratch is something that is almost impossible to ignore. Pie is a truly solid trustworthy food. No one messes with pie. Some people have disputed how, when being vegetarian I can appreciate good pies, but these people are fools. There are many many good veggie pies out there: cheese and leek, cheese and potato, potato and leek, mushroom and stuff. Yes many seem to involve the same ingredients, but they are still good pies. Is it at all possible to have a bad pie? Watching Mr Scruff DJ at Bestival, he had many comedy visuals of dancing 'special pies' which included 'cheese and lead' and 'spam and tissue' which I believe would still not be as bad as the ingredients themselves, due to the pie form in which they were baked.

The best pie I've ever had was in a place called 'Pudding Face, the Pie Place' in a small village called Deddington. Silky, the lovely comic who knows far too much stuff, recommended I go there before doing his brilliant gig in Banbury. The pies were so huge that I took pictures on my phone next to a fork for scale. And it came with mash and vegetables. Unbelievably good pie. The only thing was though that after eating it I genuinely couldn't move for hours, and Silky hadn't warned me that trying to gig after one of those would only induce sickness. I've done gigs ill, I've done gigs tired, I've done gigs drunk/wasted, but the toughest was gigging after that pie.

My girlfriend has only started making home made pies recently, but has quickly perfected the art, with seriously crispy pastry and fillings that make me stay in just to eat them instead of doing gigs. Its quite a dangerous new talent she's found and its ruining my productivity. Perhaps gigs and pies do not mix?

Tonight I proved this theory wrong as the gig was truly excellent, despite a small crowd thanks to the frikkin' football. All the new stuff worked, there was some lovely banter and I felt generally perked up after Sunday's mishap. Then upon returning home, I found a large bit of pie shaped goodness heated up for me with mash and veg. Can this day ever be bettered? I doubt it, but only time, and pie, will tell.

Postscript: If after reading this you feel compelled to shout 'who ate all the pies' at me, please don't. It will only make me feel sad. I have not eaten all the pies, and I wish I could out of sheer pie love. However I have neither the stomach nor the willpower to achieve such a thing.

I had my first ever festival gig yesterday at the Bestival weekender. I had been looking forward to playing the festival for ages and had spent time thinking of a set that might work. I was only doing 10 mins, sharing a 20 minute slot with the excellent Tom Wrigglesworth.

As the slot drew nearer I realised two things I wasn't happy with. One was that unlike most of the other comics on, I had been up for the whole weekend and had consequently not slept enough, eaten properly and drank too much. Not too dissimilar from my month in Edinburgh then. This state of health was the not the best for coping with the second problem. This latter problem was that being first on at the comedy tent meant the audience were wondering in and out, some people were on severe come downs and just hiding from the sunshine, six people were eating curry and two people were actually asleep.

Hence my set was a lot tougher than I wanted it to be. Al Pitcher did a nice warm up at the top which was ruined by a woman demanding she was kicked out of the tent. Al made her smoke a cigarette so that the security guard ran in, picked her up and kicked her out to rapturous applause. This created an environment where people would just walk up to the stage and shout things at Al. He was fine with this of course, but when it got to me, my brain was not in working order to deal with impro. So I just belted out my set, and struggled to get any kind of atmosphere going. There were pockets of interested audience, but as soon as it didn't involve them, several people wandered off and started chatting and it all became a bit tough. I ploughed through to the end and walked off in a sulk. Bad way to have a first gig back I felt and I'm hoping its not the start of a bad run.

The rest of the weekend was pretty good. I don't know if its a sign of age, but after three days of camping , drinking and watching bands, I was quite sick of the lack of showers, beds and proper loos and was quite ready to get back. I'm not some sort of cleanliness freak, but there is something about uncleaned portaloos that scars the mind for about 6 days after having to use them. It took all my adult willpower not to childishly yell 'UUURRRGGHHH' every time I had to use one.

Our tent was situated right near some total arseholes too, which meant that even when we did hit the sack, they would be shouting and singing to make sure we didn't get any sleep. Well when I say we, their aim was to keep their friend 'Emma' awake. A selfish enough prospect I feel, but little did they know how far they had actually surpassed their aim by keeping several other people up as well.

To be fair I had been too organised and hired a tent and booked ferries before I got the festival info, and it was only after I found out I could have stayed in the artists area which was a shame. For once my over exaggerated sense of urgency had got the better of me. This general confusion and disarray seemed to be the theme of the whole festival though and after a 7 hour traffic filled journey on the Friday, we only found where we were going after being directed to the wrong car park 4 times. How a festival of that size can have no one working there who has any idea whats going on, I'm not sure.

Despite all this, it was a good weekend, with the highlight being Billy Bragg on Saturday afternoon in the hot sun. He was truly brilliant and played some classic stuff with a few new excellent songs. I was never a huge fan and my girlfriend hadn't even heard of him (I know. Her music taste is quite appalling in places) but we were both in awe of his great audience banter and touching songs. Other good things included Mr Scruff's special pies of the day (goats cheese and spiders, spam and tissue), Chemical Brothers, the incredible Flutebox (beat boxing and flute playing at the same time. Truly nuts), interviews with Bestival FM, the Hidden Disco, Ramases the parrot, Nachos , Liquorice, bumping into old old friends, giant pandas dancing and shagging to Phil Nichol and Ed Byrne singing old Corky and the Juice Pigs songs, my pirate costume and people dressed as bananas.

By the way. The advert from previous blogs is now out and can be seen here - www.carlsbergkaraoke.co.uk I think its quite good if I do say so myself, not least because of the Bryan Ferry 'support act' moment. If I ever get a big theatre tour I'll book him in to open I think.

Now being full time I have made an aim that as I am not at work I've got to spend my days writing and doing other stuff that I gotta do. Today I got that aim off to a roaring start by accidentally waking up at 1.30pm this afternoon. I say accidentally but this was a direct result of my productive action beginning yesterday by going to my friends house and playing xbox until 2am and drinking rum.

By doing this I was a) unproductive and b) drinking which is something else I was aiming not to do. While it was damn good fun, I have some sort of bizarre mental issue that makes me feel guilty if I'm not doing stuff I should be. Saying that, last night I truly felt like the only place I should be was smashing up cars on an xbox. Who says games are damaging and influencing the youth? Bollocks I say, although after playing Burnout revenge for 3 hours, then going out driving today, I kept wondering how many points I'd get for driving into other people and running over innocents. If life were a game it would make long journeys to gigs so much more rewarding. Manchester would seem so much nearer if I could 'takedown' and 'check' passing vehicles. Especially f*ckers in flashy cars. I'd ruin them, then gain points for it, get 'burnout' and zoom straight to the gig. Sometimes I worry how prone I am to being influenced by these things. I find myself unconsciously driving faster if I play the 24 soundtrack in the car, so I should really stop playing 'Burnout'.

I've been booking up for my comedy club too, which is always hellish. I know exactly who I want to book in, but it doesn't stop every email under the sun from swamping me and asking me for gigs. I don't know how proper promoters do it, it would drive me crazy. I remember being a proper open spot and harassing people but I had no idea of the amount of emails and phone calls I would receive. As much as I love hosting my club, I wish I didn't have to run it. I'm an act, not a promoter, but at the same time I don't trust anyone else to run it, so I'm stuck being both. Looks like we've got a grand season coming up though so I cant complain.

Walked past Simon Amstell in the West End yesterday. I was with my friend and my brother and both of them with their high level of humour found it hilarious to goad me and say, 'go on, say hello to your friend, say hello'. I hate these situations as I do know him from gigs and he's a truly lovely man, but he was talking to Miquita Oliver and media looking person and I thought I'd just walk past and ignore him and all would be OK as he would ignore me too. Annoyingly, Simon is such a lovely man, that he said hello and I had to double back and say hello which made me the prick that was going to ignore him. Damn. Still, it shut my friend and brother up. In a comedy type situation I'd have been fine, but in the real world these things are so much harder to deal with.

Also had a phone interview with the Islington Gazette today. Apparently they interview up and coming local celebrities in the area for their paper every week. They must be running extremely low on people. Despite that I feel I must be moving someway up the ladder. Probably not even a 'z' list, but more the numbers that come after z, somewhere between 0-9. Maybe a 4 list. Either way, I had a full 5 minutes of enjoyment at this before I realised how inconsequential it all is. Managed to plug Fat Tuesdays though.

How sh*t is the film the Queen? Very sh*t. However the Bourne Ultimatum is not. I should be a reviewer.

Bestival on Friday! Hooray for great music, the comedy tent gig, dressing up as a pirate and no proper washing or toilet facilities!

I have now been back at home in my lovely flat with my lovely girlfriend since very late Wednesday night. I have slept loads, eaten well and generally made sure that I had at least a few days of nothing before I did comedy related madness once again. A lot of fellow Edinburghers and friends have asked if I have the usual post Ed depression but I'm very pleased to say its passed me by this year and for the first time in ages I'm very happy to be chillin' for a bit.

I am now officially a full-time comedian which is very nice. It seems alien to me to not be going to work on monday but I'm also very excited about it.

While most comics would probably be very unimpressed with this, I'm really excited that this is the first time in four years of slogging away on the circuit that I can actually survive on gigging, and various other comedy/acting related things alone. Its bizarre how many non-comedy people don't realise that its tough to make a living from the circuit alone. Before I did comedy I always naively assumed you did comedy and that was that, never before knowing the art of working up the circuit etc. Although I also used to believe that all comedians improvised every night, and never had a set script. How innocent and stupid I was. This was quickly beaten out of me in about two days when someone pointed out a comic who had been doing the same set for three years. While the latter may be less idealistic, its a damn sight easier for us on the circuit. Although I need to change some of my material soon before I bore myself to death.

Been booking up my diary which has been nicely easier than normal (although any promoters reading this - extra gigs are always nice! Nudge nudge, wink wink) and I've got some lovely stuff lined up, including Bestival next weekend, which I'm really looking forward to. Not so much my gigging, but the fact the Beastie Boys are headlining the Saturday, and the 'world's biggest fancy dress party' is pirate themed, so I'm excited all round. Someone recently said pirates are now too populist, which hurt. I can only hope that they said that after being a huge fan of the Normans or a group so unpopular that they were just trying to make themselves feel better. No one will ever dress up as the Ottoman Guard at Bestival and they will have to deal with that rejection.

I appear to have started a small scuffle on my blog about my post to do with Stewart Lee's show last week. I am amazed that dickheads such as the man who interrupted the show and his friends/followers are stubborn and stupid enough to believe that his actions made the show funnier. Its people like that that make me sad that comedians and artists hard work is wasted on their stupid tiny brains. I can only hope that at some point just before he dies, that man realises he is a complete cock. We can but strive for an open minded comedy literate crowd at every gig. Here's hoping.
For those who cant read the comments (I cant on some people's computers I discovered) here's what happened on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLiz_CbR8Po

Decide for yourself how much of a twat that man is.

Right must do some work. I have to update our sketch show script as the very nice man from the TV sketch show company who was at our show on the day of the evil laughing man, has agreed to read a script. He too agrees we were not to blame for the worst laugh of all time. Huzzah!

More blogging soonish!