Born to be Mild

So I did my joke about a clipboard facilitating a speedy passage along Princes Street at the Heresy Comedy Club last night.
Nothing.
Not a sausage.
Unprecedented.
That immediately sends a comedy flare up that you should just abandon the script and fool around as much as possible, which
is what I tried to do, with varying degrees of success.
I made some banter with some IT guys about Cobol.
It wasn't very funny.
Who'd have thunk it?
It's a good training exercise.
Mind you, the chuggers on Princes Street seem to have abandoned their trademark clipboards, and are less easily identifiable.
The clipboard has obviously become a loathed symbol of their ilk, and has been replaced by a little badge that you don't notice
until it's too late.
"Excuse me sir!"
Aaarrghh...!
I watched Channel 4 News depressingly document the continuing, seemingly unstoppable, deforestation of the Amazon.
I'd like the whole of Scotland to be covered in trees again just like the good, old days of the "Great Caledonian Forest" (we've only got about 1% of the forest we used to have).
So, couldn't we reforest the whole Highlands, and by doing so get a massive indefinite EEC subsidy for our carbon offsetting, then the population could forever live off the fat of the land, and we'd all live happily ever after.
And by doing so we could help fix the global warming thing.
Just a thought.
I know...but I'm trying to come up with a quick thought every day to keep my brain active.
Right. Xmas Shopping. Go go go.

Resting

The problem being "between jobs" at this time of year is the shit weather.
Sometimes I think, I might as well be sheltering in someone else's office using their central heating.
If it was June or July, this enforced leisure period would be much more enjoyable.
But dems da breaks.
Jeff O'Boyle was compering Red Raw at The Stand on Monday.
He informed the audience that there would be a "prize draw".
There is always a prize draw, and the existing convention is that on hearing this news, the audience make an excitable
"woooooooooo!" sound.
Interestingly, I was the only person in the club that night who made an excitable (and very loud) "woooooooooo!' sound.
It was very funny.
You had to be there.
I've always thought of myself as having a relaxed, informal Bohemian style when it comes to dress sense and appearance.
This is a look I've assiduously cultivated through the years.
However, my self-image took a bit of a knock on Monday when I was compared to a "tramp" by two separate individuals of my aquaintance.
I assume the remarks were borne primarily out of jealously, as the accusers themselves are highly unlikely to find themselves in the shortlist for "Best Dressed Person 2009".
Nevertheless, I don't want to be complacent, and am going to buy some new clothes this weekend.
I've now gone 7 weeks without a cigarette, and feel good.
My lungs are cock-a-hoop, but my liver is a bit pissed off at the additional workload that has come its way as a consequence of my decision to bid farewell to Mr Nicotine.
I got through the "Beechers Brook" of the no fags regime ok (ie doing a Thurs/Fri/Sat run at The Stand without succumbing to the temptation of the ritual pre and post-gig cigs).
However, this is just a warm up for the "Festive Period" ; very much the Helmand Province tour for the ex-smoking fraternity.
I was trying to get parked near Causewayside in Edinburgh yesterday without much success.
Then suddenly I came across a street with loads and loads of free "pay and display" spaces.
Something didn't seem right.
Anyway, I parked and approached the meter to buy my 30 minutes of parking time (more than enough, but sensibly buying a little extra in case I got delayed).
So anyway, it turns out you have to buy AT LEAST 3 hours of parking time...for £3.
No wonder the street was empty.
Whose idea was that?
I reluctantly paid the £3 then found out that the sports shop that I was told was a good place to buy trainers, doesn't exist any more.
I just want a bog standard pair of trainers, without lights on them, or big padded heels, or stupid colours, that have astro turf studs on them...but apparently this is impossible.
It's an injustice, it is.

Disappointing

I started to watch France v Ireland last night and had an inkling that the Irish were more than capable of pulling off a shock result.
They've got a fantastic togetherness about them, which Scotland occasionally have, but often pathetically don't, (eg last Saturday).
In the end, that controversial goal was hard to take.
I desperately didn't want to witness a "glorious failure" in the Scotland tradition, but I think Ireland's experience eclipsed even Scotland's formidable record in this area.
It's so disappointing that in a match of this stature, the wrong call was made on a huge decision.
There's now an overwhelming case for video technology to be made available to the 4th official, and perhaps use the "2 appeals allowed" system currently in force in tennis.
There is a fair amount of hypocrisy doing the rounds though.
I remember Joe Jordan's handball against Wales which bizarrely resulted in Scotland getting a penalty and scoring the decisive goal that took us to the Argentina World Cup in 1978.
I can't remember a lot of agonising going on in Scotland over the unfairness of the decision against the Welsh, (who were by far the better team on the night).
Although, if time travel became available, I'm sure a few Scots might want to go back and kidnap the referee before the Scotland v Wales match, and hope that a less myopic replacement would give a different decision.
In the end, it might save Scotland from making that harrowing trip to Argentina, and "Ally's Tartan Army" would never have been written, and Andy Cameron would never have appeared on Top of the Pops.
I know you shouldn't meddle with the Space-Time Continuum, but there should surely be some exceptions to this general rule?
Mind you, Archie Gemmil's goal against the Dutch was good...
Hmm...
I'm still not sure what Joe Jordan was trying to do.
I assume he wasn't trying to get a penalty.
I've never seen a decision like that one before or since.
I'll be taking advantage of the fine weather to go for a relaxing drive through to Glasgow tonight, as I'm doing the weekend at The Stand there.
Headlining is one of my all-time comedy heroes, Simon Munnery.

Thursday Thoughts

My sketch got a great reaction at "Melting Pot".
I was very happy about this, feeling weirdly nervous about the whole thing as my sketch was introduced.
So I now feel suitably motivated to write some more.
I have plenty of free time to do it...there is no excuse.
I've been watching a bit of "International Bowls" on BBC2 this week.
One of the prominent sponsors on the advertising hoardings is "Co-operative Funeral Services".
This was the first time I have seen a funeral business sponsor a televised sport.
I know that sponsorship is thin on the ground at the moment in light of the prevailing economic climate, but have
the Bowls people really thought this through?
It doesn't exactly make bowls seem like an aspirational lifestyle choice.
The subliminal message seems to be "why not have a game of bowls? oh and btw you're going to die soon ...".
Where do you draw the line though?
Would they also accept sponsorship from "Incontinence Pants R Us"?
It might be an idea to stipulate that the competing players dress up as "Grim Reapers" to reinforce the brand sponsorship?
I think that funeral advertising would work better on Motorway signs, bottles of whisky, packets of cigarettes, the summits of mountains and comedy club green rooms.
At least these activities have a more obvious link with the death thing.
The problem is that people don't really like being reminded that there is a sport called bowls, and that we will all watch it accidentally one day.
There's a universal squeamishness about this subject.
But there's no way you can avoid it.

Never Knowingly Underwater

That's the working title for my debut solo show at the Glasgow Comedy Festival in March next year.
It makes me laugh, but that is no guarantee of anything.
Other news.
I've extended my unbeaten run of golf challenges against Bob Hind to 3 matches.
I thought you might be interested in that impressive statistic.
We've started playing a regular game at Braid Hills of a Monday morning.
It's a great start to the week, and the views over Edinburgh were amazing in the bright autumnal sunshine.
You can never really get blase about stuff like that.

I've written a few bits and pieces and am getting one of my sketches performed at "Melting Pot" at The Stand tomorrow night.
I'm slightly apprehensive about what "death by proxy" might feel like, if it bombs.

And through the letterbox has just arrived, "The Rhythm Method".
Yes, it's the memoirs of erstwhile "Revillos" drummer, Rocky Rhythm, aka Nicky Forbes.
I was an obsessive Rezillos/Revillos fan, and got to know the band and their entourage fairly well, way back in the day.
I am looking forward to reading some warts and all retelling of the anecdotes of these halcyon days.

Nearly 4 weeks of no cigarettes.
I am now feeling slightly healthier, I think.
I'm going to try and sign up for a Smoking Cessation Group.
I think I could probably manage ok on my own, but I'm interested in getting involved and seeing how it's run.

Comedy Gospel

"Comedy criticism is basically what a cunt thought of something they didn’t understand"
Frankie Boyle.

Amen.

So anyway...

I haven't smoked for 3 weeks...
Do I feel any different?
No...
Oh well, at least I've saved some cash.
I've been spending a lot of time trying to write various things. It's hard, really hard.
I have a lot of stuff, but have no idea whether any of it is funny or not.
Someone passed me a video of a typical day in a Factory Egg Farm type place.
Hideous.
The sight of a continuous conveyor belt of "commercially valueless" live male chicks getting dropped into a grinding machine has put me right off eggs.
It's the way no concession is made whatsoever that these are living creatures that really sticks in the craw.
I don't have a problem eating animals that are reared humanely, then stunned and slaughtered.
And yes, amn't I great?
It's ironic in that a lot of "vegetarians" will happily eat eggs.
And, oh shit, eggs get used in cakes don't they?
And omelettes...
Jeezo...
Anyway, on that hilarious note, I had a fun gig at the "Queens Retreat" in South Queensferry this week.
This was my venue of choice for underage drinking when I lived in SQ.
Underaged beer is the best tasting beer you will ever taste...Nectar of the gods.
(obviously I'm not going to extend this metaphor)
They must have been very relaxed about things.
I didn't even look 18 when I was 18.
Funnily enough, the decor in the bar is pretty much exactly the same as I'd remembered it.
Well if it ain't broke, don't fix it...that's what I say.
JoJo Sutherland runs a really great comedy night there, with a great regular crowd who are well up for the comedy thing.
I left my clipboard in the bar though.
Was this a subconscious decision to free myself from its clutches?
I'm looking forward to seeing Miles Jupp get bollocked by Peter Capaldi in "In The Thick of It" on Saturday.
I can just imagine the chemistry being really funny there.
I read Frankie Boyle's autobiography.
Very funny.
The complete absence of hyperbole is impressive.
He just routinely describes the different stages of his successful career in a matter-of-fact way, and throws in a lot of
his trademark acerbic descriptions.
(it makes my self-congratulatory prose on doing a good 5 minutes at Red Raw seem horribly embarassing. Perhaps it's better just to concentrate on writing jokes and let others say whether it's any good or not)
His affectionate tribute to The Stand's Chris Cooper as "..a frighteningly degraded-looking 26. He looked like a 26 -year-old man from the Middle Ages and spoke in a low, rasping, sexualised whisper." caused me to nearly fall off my seat laughing.
I know Chris will have been equally amused.
At the same time I was reading Michael Palin's diaries.
This was with his permission though, as he's published them in a book.
You could hardly get two more different author perspectives, but they were both absolutely compelling reads.
I am now making soup.
I am loving the not-having-a-proper-job-thing.

Stretching credulity

So what do you think the connection shared by these celebrities?
Yes, you're absolutely right!
They are indeed "celebrities" whom people have said that I "remind them of".
I swear to god this is true...
I sense that the alleged "Marlon Brando" similarity will generate the biggest communal guffaw....
This was said to me by a girl I met in Peru.
In fairness, she was no obviously no stranger to recreational drugs, and I feel this may have slightly skewed her judgement.
I also neglected to establish whether she was referring to the smouldering, dangerous sexuality of the young Brando, or
whether she meant the elderly Brando in "The Godfather" who has a cardiac arrest in his garden, pretending to be a monster to his grandson, with a bit of orange peel in his mouth.
I'll never know.
I'm assuming it's the former.
The others are Frank Skinner, James Woods, Steptoe, Richard E. Grant & Geoffrey Rush.
Having finished my IT contract, I now have a lot more time on my hands.
Could you have guessed this?
If I had to pick I'd take the Christopher Lambert one, and to be honest, I can't really see the Steptoe likeness at all.
I think that was just said as a poorly conceived joke.
I'm not delusional, so don't start questioning my sanity...
It's a relief to have finished my contract, and I'll never be able to say that I miss the social aspect of the job.
This is mainly because, there never was any social aspect to the job.
Not a lot of fun at all.
Other than that, there was a big get-together in the Oxford Bar last week.
My friend David reminded me yet again that I once brought too much curry on a hillwalking trip.
Every time he recounts this anecdote, it just gets funnier and funnier and funnier.
Little did I know that my fateful decision to bring a little too much curry on a hillwalking trip would provide years and years of unending amusement.
And apparently, I went to sleep straight after the walk too!
Comedy...it's a funny old game...!
I am on tomorrow night at the "Queens Retreat" in South Queensferry, if you want to talk to me about why I decided to bring
a little too much curry on a hillwalking trip.
It's good to feel chipper again though.
I was ill for virtually the whole of October.
Illness is, first and foremost, boring as hell.
I reckon I had swine flu, then followed it up with some exotic cold/throat infection which I picked up on the flight back from Spain.

A bit knackered...

t’s been a busy week.
I’ve been gigging in Aberdeen and Glasgow (both great gigs), then did a spot at Jongleurs in Edinburgh last night.
It went ok, but it wasn’t spectacular.
It’s a pretty tough room to play ; a long rectangle with the stage in the middle.
The opening 20 act, who I think is hilarious, was not getting much of a reaction at all.
I bemused them initially, but finished pretty strongly.
I’d never set foot in this club before, so it was something of a culture shock.
The staff are great though and can’t do enough for you ; free drinks and food and all that.
I’d like to do it again though, as all of the comics agreed that last night’s audience was severe hard work.
I was thinking of trying some joke about how I was the new European welterweight boxing champion, having
just beaten the reigning Spanish champion the previous evening.
Just before the bell went, I got my trainer to sneak behind the champ at his corner, and stick two long spikes with feathers on them into the back ofhis neck.
I then got a friend of mine to ride a horse into the ring and poke him on the back several times with a big sharp lance thing.
He was quite startled by this, and I capitalised on his distraction and strode across and biffed him,
knocking him out.
I still say it was a fair fight.
Probably just as well, I didn’t try that last night.
The fact that someone put another “Downfall” spoof on youtube, this time with an Edinburgh Trams theme, has massively increased the hit rate of our TSOTT video. (It appears on the same frame when you view the “Downfall” one).
I wouldn’t call it a viral phenomenum quite yet, but we have now accrued more views than the “official” trams video which we initially used for our spoofery.
I actually suggested to my erstwhile TSOTT colleagues that we should now maybe capitalise on the brand awareness and write a sketch show purely about the Trams fiasco!
It would act as a form of redemption in view of all the pelters we took for our lack of trams content.
Sadly, I was told to “fuck off” in so many words, and that they never wanted to have anything ever to do with trams again.
Bastards!
This is a sad loss, isn’t it?
What?
Oh fuck off, that’s a terrible attitude!
No, it's ok...I fully understand.
I saw Billy Connolly three times last week at the Usher Hall in Edinburgh.
That may seem a bit mental to some people, but I don’t know how many more tours he’ll be doing.
He’s 66 now, you know.
Anyway, I’d say 60-70% of the material each night was new.
He did about 2 hours 10 mins each night without a break ; of pure stand-up.
It’s pretty extraordinary stuff.
It felt odd to have just stumbled on some tickets on the Usher Hall’s web site the night before ; then to find
myself sitting in the front row, when all the concerts had apparently been “sold out” for months.
Strange.
I watched a bit of the SCOTY Gong show, after my “Fourplay” gig in Glasgow.
I was expecting a bearpit but it was disappointingly civilised.
So there you go!

IT Pin-up boy

So anyway, I hated the idea of getting a great big photo on myself on the back page of my work's in-house corporate magazine thing.
However, I convinced myself that it was going to be good publicity for "The Silence of the Trams" show, and agreed to go ahead with it.
Unfortunately, publication was delayed, and the magazine came out A WEEK AFTER the show had finished.
Marvelous...
So in the end, we got no publicity benefit from this whatsoever, and I have to put up with my big, stupid face looking at me from hundreds of copies of the magazine scattered throughout the office.
I've decided to punch the next person in the face who passes me in the office and says "tell me a joke, funny man!".
My cover's been blown, and life will never be the same again in my present workplace.
It's not the best photo I've ever seen of me either.
I'm sporting a ridiculous, self-satisfied smirk.
The only way that a decent photo can be taken of me involves a total ignorance on my part that someone is pointing a camera at me.
Something terrible happens as soon as I pose for a photo.
I used to deliberately do ridiculous toothy grins for school photos to sabotage the shot, and it appears that I never managed to re-adjust my camera image to look natural again.
It's also worth pointing out that the magazine itself is fairly tedious.
In it you can find out interesting facts about the Financial Accounting Section, and read a quick interview with the deputy-manager of the department.
Usually, they've got ambitions to play a round of golf with Tiger Woods, and say that their ideal dinner companions would be Linda Lusardi ("because she's lovely!") and Henry VIII ("because he'd have lot's of interesting stories!").
And apparently "the staff of a company are its most important asset!"
This makes me feel valued, and almost makes it up for having my photo everywhere.
Kanye West may well feel like a complete twat after his impromptu awards speech, but it's trivial compared to my embarassment.
It's tough on Kanye though.
There's nothing worse than trying to be noble to impress a lady, and you just end up embarassing her.
I've got a rich experience of such gestures.
I remember trying to be cool on my new moped in front of an object of my desire, but managed to hit the kerb and fall off the aforementioned vehicle right in front of her.
But even that wasn't as bad as this magazine thing.

September

Looks like this is turning into a monthly blog.
Pathetic.
I'm still slightly frazzled in the aftermath of the Fringe.
Even more pathetic.
So anyway, "The Silence of the Trams" ; the verdict?
Well, the number of tickets we sold was way, way beyond our most ambitious hopes.
We got a mention in Tommy Sheppard's post-Fringe press statement.
We had 3 reviews ; one was decent and 2 were dreadful.
Some people dismiss reviews as "just one person's opinion".
I think that's true in certain cases, but if the writer is knowledgeable and has a respect in the comedy business, then it's
delusional to completely discard what they have to say about you.
I've completely discarded what they had to say about us.
Our reviewer from Festmag, Sarah D'Arcy, attended on one of our best nights.
She sat in the front row, continuously writing copious notes on an A4 notebook , and laughed heartily throughout the show ; then gave us a right kicking in the review.
The reviewer in The Skinny, Rebecca Gordon, also came on a really good night, and then proceeded to hammer us.
Both of them seemed to be outraged that the show wasn't entirely about trams.
Imagine that...a Fringe show with a funny title, that doesn't correspond precisely with the whole content of the show.
I've never seen that done before!...Unprecedented...!
(Although the Evening News stitched us up by intimating that the show was purely about trams, but who takes seriously anything that is written in the Evening News?)
The skinny reviewer is also a self-styled "film reviewer" but "has never seen Citizen Kane" and recently watched "Love Actually" for "about the millionth time" ; according to her Blog.
No more questions, your honour.
I'm not bitter though...not at all...no, really!
I had a load of friends come along, and cringed inside slightly as I knew they'd heard much of the material many times before.
I feel their pain.
The problem is that the majority of the audience hadn't seen us before, so you want to use your strongest, bankable stuff.
But having churned it out for a month, I'm committed to binning most the old favourites and becoming a born-again comedian.
On the plus side it was great fun and a fantastic honour to do a show as part of the Stand Fringe programme.
There's hundreds of comedians who would kill to get a Fringe spot with them, so we appreciate how lucky we were to get invited.
I should have gone to see more Fringe stuff, but working during the day killed me.
I saw "Camille O'Sullivan" and was completely blown away by her.
She did a load of my favourite songs (Bowie, Jaques Brel,Tom Waits), and managed to make an incredible emotional connection with the audience, the likes of which I hadn't previously witnessed in my puff.
Unfortunately, Scottish comedy's Gordon Alexander wasn't as impressed as me, and his demeanor during the show was akin to him watching Grimsby Town lose a relegation dog-fight, six-pointer at home to Hull City.
Jo Caulfield made me laugh by describing how some Japanese people had walked out of her show after 5 minutes.
They went to the box-office and complained ;
"We were expecting a "performance", but it was just a woman talking on the stage".
So there you go...
I was looking through some of my Dad's old books last night, and came across a biography of the RAF's famous wartime pilot, Sir Douglas Bader,"Flying Colours".
He must have bought this in a charity shop, as someone has made written notes on some of the pages, and it is not my dad's handwriting.
My favourite "note" is on page 204.
It states "Bader was still hated in the RAF in the sixties. He was a big-headed, snobbish, little bastard".
This made me cackle with laughter.
I must try to get out more.
Other notes I liked were ;
"The middle/upper class get the gongs and knighthoods. The erks get fuckall"
"Did Spike Milligan write this book?"
Maybe this was an angry ex-RAF man who made these comments and gave the book to a charity shop so that his views would become more widely circulated.

Sunday

Disappointingly, there was one empty seat at last night's TSOTT show...
There it was at the back,staring at us contemptuously...
Our run of sell-outs had to come to an end sometime.
The other TSOTT boys were initially refusing to go on... giving it the big Diva stuff...
"We only perform to FULL HOUSES..." they shrieked through hysterical tears.
Thankfully, I managed to persuade them that this was the wrong attitude, and that it was churlish to blame this audience for the "one empty seat" fiasco.

We had a problem connecting the laptop to the digital projector, and as a result I had to stand in front of the audience holding up the laptop to play the Trams video.
It was all very comical, and I really enjoyed watching the audience reaction to it...they loved it.
I had by a long way my best gig of the run....
Afterwards, it was straight through to Glasgow and a spot at the Glasgow Stand.
It was probably the best ever gig I have had there, putting the cap on a
great day.

I ended up giving fellow comics Paddy Lennox and Jason John Whitehead a lift back to Edinburgh.
As we left the Stand there was a full-on monsoon in progress.
I hate doing the M8 in torrential rain late at night.
Never a pleasant driving experience.
The comedy gods had obviously decided that my day had just gone too well, and that I needed some adversity.
This came initially with the discovery that that the East-bound slip road onto the M8 at Charing Cross was coned off.
I'm not that familiar with driving in Glasgow, but located an alternative M8 slip road, and it too was coned off.
Then I got lost. (didn't have the sat nav with me...didn't think I needed it!)
I drove around somewhere in Glasgow for about 45 minutes trying to find my bearings.
It's fair to say that, the torrential rain wasn't helping matters.
Eventually,found a way onto the M8 at got home at about 1.15am.
knackered.
I was so wired from the horrible torrential rain M8 driving experience that I couldn't get to sleep and was lying awake at 4.00am.
I am now feeling very dozy...
It's an early night tonight, that's for sure.

I haven't eaten anything but sushi for the last 4 days.
It's the ideal Fringe fuel.
It keeps you going and feeling sharp without any bloatedness.
I think I could live off it all the time.
My wallet might disagree though.
And traditionally at the Fringe, the pounds have started slipping off, as one meal a day seems to suffice.
(it all goes wrong in September though, when I start eating like a bear emerging from hibernation)

And they're off....

We had our first night “proper” of the TSOTT run last night.
Another sell-out.
Another sauna.
A few jokey heat references this time to make light of the desperate discomfort.
I enjoyed the gig a lot more than the previous night, feeling a lot looser and relaxed.
As of last year the esteemed publication “Three Weeks” sent a reviewer to see our show on the FIRST NIGHT of the run.
I don’t really feel any great anxiety about reviews like I used to.
I’ve had some great ones this year, and also some complete stinkers.
Kipling was right...
Although, obviously I’d prefer if the reviews were all great, of course….
I'm not STUPID.

It’s funny how the stress levels are so low (with the occasional exception, eg Gordon having to get a taxi from the venue to his flat and back ; 25 minutes from showtime, to get a laptop) to previous Fringes.
It’s now a fairly seamless routine, to get in, give the running order to Erik the Tech, play the Trams Video, activate the virtual compere, do your act, present the prize draw then go home.
Last year we seemed to spend hours looking for missing cds, props, organising guest spots, etc etc
It all seems so organised now. Bliss.
And, it has to be said it’s an incredible honour and privilege to be part of the Stand Fringe programme.
We appreciate we’re really lucky to be given this opportunity, and are desperate to make the show as successful as possible.
Ideally, I would like to be stretching myself a bit more in terms of doing longer sets.
We are all capable of doing longer sets, but because of the restrictions of a 4 man show in an hour, it’s always going to have to be a fairly tight set.
I’m constantly tweaking and trying out new little bits every day though, so it’s great to have a long run of gigs
to be able to do this.
When Tommy Sheppard did his traditional speech at The Stand Fringe Press Launch, he was very critical of the inflexibility of the Council and the massive disruption that the current state of the Tram works were causing to the hosting of the Fringe in Edinburgh.
At this point we glanced at each other thinking that this could well lead to a link to plug our show…
But anyway, it wasn’t, and afterwards we laughed at our misplaced, self-importance.
We’re “Plankton And Proud!”:-)
The ticket sales seems to be going really well anyway, so mustn’t grumble!

I toyed with the idea of going to see The Stranglers at the Picture House last night, but felt too weary in the end.
Reading an Evening News article on said band earlier in the day, I was somewhat shocked to discover that the drummer
Jet Black is now “in his seventies”.
Jesus!
It was one of these moments when the passage of time really hit me.
Fair play to him though…!

I ended up having a couple of pints with star of the hit 2005 Edinburgh Fringe spectacular “Park’s Circus” ; Mr Tony Wilkes.
He then missed his train (apparently the late Glasgow trains don’t stop at Haymarket), and crashed at Chateau Parky.

TSOTT begins

We had our first preview for TSOTT at the Traverse theatre on Monday night.
68 paying punters rolled in which was way more than we had anticipated.
Alas, we couldn’t show our intro Tram spoof video due to technological constraints, but the show was generally well-received and it was certainly a worthwhile outing.
It’s clear that the show name was what got the punters in, rather than the individuals involved in it, (even though we are all brilliantly funny…obviously).
I’d also imagine that there was very possibly, a certain degree of disappointment amongst a proportion of the audience,that the show wasn’t entirely devoted to lampooning the saga that the Edinburgh Trams Project has developed into.
The challenge we face is to make the show so funny, that people ultimately won’t mind that the show didn’t quite fit into their pre-conceived idea of what it was all about.
It’s handy that the name attracts people, but we need to get a good word-of-mouth going from these punters to really get the box-office zinging.
I reckon that by the end of August, neither myself, Jeff O’Boyle, Martin McAllister or Gordon Alexander will want to set eyes on one another for at least 6 months, or wish to hear any of each other’s material ever again.
That’s my prediction.
They intensely irritate me already and we haven’t even started the run yet.
It’s not their fault though…they just don’t realise how naturally irritating they are.
Maybe I should mention it to them sometime?
Other news, I have bought an Apple Mac.
I have finally summoned the courage to tell Bill Gates to “step off”.
Is it too late for me to re-train in the way of the Mac?
Who knows…the point is I really hate “Windows” and always have done.
I only justified sticking to a PC because I’m generally using a PC at work.
Now, however, the IT freelance market is on the point of collapse, so it’s maybe time to move on and do something else.
Maybe I’ll write a best-selling guide on switching from one to another “with hilarious consequences”.

That's what friends are for...

So anyway, I did this gig at The Stand a few weeks ago.
It was a Sunday night and I had a 10 minute open spot.
I made up my mind to try out some completely new material.
Shortly after arriving at the club, I was told there were 2 reviewers in.
One of them was the Daily Record.
After a bit of thought, I decided to press on with my original plan, and just go with some new stuff.
There were 6 acts on the bill, so if it went badly I'd most likely be ignored, as most of the review would probably concentrate on the legendary Phil Nichol, who was headlining.
I'd say trying out new material is a bit like asking someone out on a date when you are by no means certain what the response will be.
It's also difficult to do it confidently in front of an audience of strangers.
So I do the gig...it doesn't go particularly well.
Most of the acts were in agreement that it was a very quiet audience, and it was a night where everyone had to work hard for the laughs.
In a way it was probably an ideal night to try out new material, because if it had gone over really well with that audience, then it was obviously comedy dynamite you had on your hands.
Weeks passed, and I forgot about the Daily Record review.
I'd done a bit of googling but there was no sign of it.
My good friend Billy came to the rescue.
His girlfriend had spotted it in the Daily Record, and Billy was helpful enough to read it to me on the phone.
He is a kindly soul.
What became immediately apparent was that the reviewer only talked about 2 acts from the 6 who were on.
This was myself and the headliner Phil Nichol.
Surprisingly, he'd actually written more words about me than Phil.
Anyway, here it is......

"As Frank Carson endlessly pointed out, the way you tell 'em often matters more than the material itself when it comes to being funny.
Carson's advice sprung to mind while watching Jim Park, one of half a dozen acts at the Sunday night package show.
Jim has a neat line in oddball oneliners but cunningly manages to deliver each and every one of them absolutely stillborn. Deadpan just doesn't do him justice.
Presented with more vim,verve and structure, or possibly by someone else, his surreal gags could slay an audience.
Instead, he left this one looking confused and slightly embarassed for him.
Cruelly, the more Jim died on stage, the funnier I found his act, to the point where I began to wonder if he was deliberately sabotaging his own set.
I laughed until I cried but I suspect it was for all the wrong reasons."

When you get a "rave" review like that, the first thing your comedy training tells you to do is look for a quotable quote...
"I laughed until I cried" Daily Record, is the one that stands out.
(I have misquoted it slightly on my web page, but taken from the Daily Record, there's an amusing irony in that)
There's also "a neat line in oddball oneliners" "surreal gags...slay an audience"
So that's all positive.
I can't really regret trying out a load of new stuff with reviewers in.
I think if I'd gone for the tried and tested and had a solid gig, I wouldn't have been mentioned.
Elaine Malcolmson and Jeff O'Boyle had top gigs I thought, but didn't warrant a mention by Mr Jonathan Trew.
He'd obviously wanted a sacrificial lamb to use in his "Frank Carson" themed piece, and I assumed that role.
So, yes, it's a bit unfair, but he still has a point.
I was talking to a UK comedy mogul recently, and he said he really liked my stuff, but that I needed a greater stylisation in the delivery if I was to climb further up the comedy ladder.
We have a preview of "The Silence of the Trams" at the Traverse Theatre on Mon 27th July.
Feel free to come along and watch me "deliberately sabotage" the show... :-)

Thoughts

Well it looks like, for the first time ever, I’m on course to get through a series of “Big Brother” without watching ANY of it…
I am very proud.
It is one of my finest achievements.
By not watching any of it, I am sending out a powerful message to Channel 4 that as a product, “Big Brother” is finished.
This has to be the last series.
I watched Andy Murray impersonating Tim Henman last night…it was quite convincing.
Tennis can be entertaining, but there’s far too much faffing about.
If I was in charge, I’d make the following rule amendments ;
You’ve got only one service…and if it hits the net cord and lands in play, THEN JUST PLAY ON…!
(all this “First Service”, “Second Service”, “Let” is a big waste of time…)
From now on you get to sit down at the end of a SET not every TWO bleeding GAMES.
Come on…! You’re athletes…not Chelsea Fucking Pensioners.
Furthermore, you’re only allowed to dab a towel on your face once every twenty minutes.
If you break strings in your racket you just have to carry on with it.
Look after your equipment!
If they’d have introduced these rules before last night’s game, it would have finished two hours earlier, and we might have achieved more at out TSOTT strategy meeting.
This week it’s become clear that Edinburgh has decided to stop being known as the “Athens of the North” , and is now competing for the title of “The San Francisco of the East”.
San Francisco is famous for Trams as well…
This could form the basis for our satirical Tram show.
or maybe not.

FF Row

There was an article on “The Silence of the Trams” in the Evening News on Saturday.
I look on it as an empirical test of the theory “There is no such thing as bad publicity”.
On the positive side, it’s almost a full page in the newspaper, and in terms of Fringe publicity, very valuable.
On the debit side, I fear we come across as a bunch of tossers…but maybe we are a bunch of tossers.
The article implies that the show is entirely devoted to Trams.
We never said this, but at the same time, I’m not stupid and realise that they were always going to emphasize
the Tram angle as they know that it’s a hot, local topic.
We’ll have a few tram references of course, but I just hope people aren’t disappointed that it’s not an hour-long satirical revue on Edinburgh Trams.
It’ll probably be a good idea to make fun of the lack of tram references.
I sent 300 “TSOTT” promotional emails last night as I went through all the historic entries in my yahoo address book.
I’d no idea who many of them were, and I suspect there may be a bit of confusion from some of the recipients as to who I am.
I’d joked before doing this, that some of my old contacts may not actually be around any more.
Unfortunately this turned out to be tragically true.
My email to old snowboarding buddy Paul McCrae bounced from his Westminster Council email address.
I thought I’d do a quick Google to see if I could find an alternate contact address for him.
I was then stunned to find a “Just Giving” page set up “in memory of”.
I stayed at a snowboard chalet with Paul and his girlfriend Fiona a few years ago, and principally remember spending the whole of that week continuously laughing.
My snowboarding was largely rubbish, but the banter was spectacular.
He was an incredibly warm, full-on funny guy, and I find it very hard to take in that he’s not around any more.

On a lighter note, I spent a recent weekend golfing in Northern Ireland.
Again the actual “sport” aspect of the holiday was fairly dreadful in terms of my individual performance ; however, there were a few amusing off-course moments.
I’ve never seen a hotel more anxious to get the money for accommodation paid as quickly as possible.
In a way I was impressed, as they obviously regarded our party of “golfers” as capable of larging it up and causing wanton destruction to the hotel, when in fact, we neither have the energy nor the inclination for that kind of stuff any more.
Interestingly, the founder of the hotel had obviously done a fair amount of animal slaughter in Africa judging by the abundance of animal heads on the walls, (as well as a stuffed tiger in a glass cage).
I was interested to spot 2 antelopes arses on the wall as well (with a drink dispenser emerging from a predictable source).
This isn’t something you see every day.
Another talking point occurred on the Saturday night.
It was a fairly large hotel with about 8 different bars, as well as a couple of club-type bars which attracted top local youth in their hundreds.
At one point, along with about 50 other people, I found myself in the “smoking area” ; a roofless ante room to the main club bar.
I was talking there to fellow golfer Calum.
He stopped in mid-sentence with a vaguely startled expression on his face.
I looked around and saw a young couple sitting on a bench snogging.
Nothing unusual about that per se….
However, as my eyes descended, I noticed that the gentleman’s forearm had disappeared under the lady’s skirt.
The arm movement was akin to a lead violinist playing “The William Tell Overture”.
There’s not really any way you can dress this up…
This was a public act of energetic fingering...
A bouncer intervened and informed “Romeo” that his actions were “inappropriate”.
Stunned by this spectacle, we left…then tried to explain our gobsmacked expressions to the rest of the party.
This isn’t what Jane Austen had in mind, surely?

Anyone still there?

I've been neglecting the poor old Blog...
I can't apologise enough to you both...
It's lazy, lazy, lazy.
Anyway, I felt a chill today as I read the sad news that someone had a fatal fall on Clachaig Gully at the weekend.
The location of this accident is on (what I am now aware is) the dangerous, inadvisable descent from the frankly, terrifying Aonoch Eagath ridge walk at Glencoe.
There is a much safer way down, but stupidly neither I nor my companions on that day decided to take it.
I didn't even realise that the Clachaig Gully route down was dangerous anyway.
The problem is that it leads straight down to the Clachaig Inn, and on intial inspection appears a fairly straightforward descent to the pub and the enticing prospect of a delicious cold beer.
It had been a blistering hot day, we'd run out of water half way across the ridge (clever) ;I was dehydrated and my knees were tired and aching.
The path down is badly eroded with large sections of scree.
I fell over loads of times on the way down, as my feet repeatedly gave way in the scree.
I didn't think much of it at the time, but what I didn't realise was that, slightly disguised by high grass, was a several hundred foot drop which was literally inches from where I was frequently losing balance.
What an idiot.
Never go up mountains without a map.
On a brighter note, we ran a TSOTT preview as part of the "Leith Festival".
It was a sell-out and we ended up having to turn away about 40 people.
(We put an extra show on later on)
It was a great night, great crowd. Quite remarkable!
This is really encouraging and hopefully bodes well for the marketability of our Fringe run.
On a less brighter note I had a near-death experience at a comedy club in Glasgow on Friday at a place where I'd had a stormer on my last visit.
This brought to an end a great run of really rocking gigs.
So one duff gig after ten great ones should be put into some kind of perspective, shouldn't it?
Of course not, that would be too logical. I'm pissed off about it. Curses.
The main reason that I'm starting to write this again is to try and get some creative energy going to write some new material.
I tried a few things last week with variable results.

Ding ding! All aboard...

If you have ever walked around all day with a pit bull terrier’s jaws locked onto your calf muscle, than you have an inkling of what it is like to have presented funnyman Gordon Alexander with a tempting opportunity to take the mickey out of you in a sustained attack.
Gordon’s attention had been captured by my “QI” warm-up spots posting.
He spent most of yesterday, casting doubt on the veracity of my tragic tale of missed opportunity and heartbreak.
We were forced together, as yesterday was the photoshoot for our upcoming show “The Silence of the Trams” ; now forever referred to as “TSOTT”.
I took the opportunity to dress up as a “tram conductor”, complete with a false moustache and a camp hat.
There are people who may think that the “QI” anecdote was a crude episode of self-promotion…a desperate, cloying attempt to take something positive from a day of disappointment by hoping that the disclosure, that I was within a million miles of being selected for a job of this nature, might inflate my comedy profile, and cause the conservative, small-minded Scottish promoters who consistently pass me over for gigs, to think again and re-evaluate my comedy status, (I’m joking…I’m joking…).
Nothing could be further from the truth.
It’s warts and all on this blog, and, of course, everyone knows that disasters make much better reading than success stories.
I have just experienced two dropping incidents in two days.
Last night I dropped a pint glass during Billy Kirkwood’s impressive set at The Stand.
The glass, thankfully, didn’t smash, but everyone turned and stared at me disapprovingly, which I found very unsettling.
Then today at work I dropped a carton of tea, causing mayhem. Losing my grip? (on reality?)
I didn’t get where I am today by dropping a pint of lager and a cup of tea, on consecutive days.
We got a little mention in the Evening News…
http://edinburghnews.scotsman.com/opinion/Liam-Rudden39s-Fringe-Firsts.5227716.jp
I particularly liked the “finest young comedians” bit.

Almost quite interesting....

I got an email yesterday from the Hackney Empire people.
It was confirming a couple of gigs (one of them doing an extended set back at the Hackney Empire “Best of Hackney New Act of the Year” show on July 18th ; I’m looking forward to that!).
They also went on to ask if I’d be interested in doing warm-up spots for the studio audience of the BBC show “QI”.
Apparently, the “QI” people had been at the Hackney final and were “very impressed”, and had asked about my availability.
I said I was interested, after picking myself up off the floor.
I then made the classic mistake of telling a few people about the “QI” thing, and then got another email later that day to say that unfortunately they’d already filled the spots.
I wilfully broke the law concerning talking about something before it was a done deal.
Idiot.
The initial email had been in my inbox for a few hours before I had the chance to read it, so perhaps I missed the boat timewise.
Gutted.
Still, it was flattering to be considered for such a position, and hopefully I’ll get another opportunity.
We’ve recently been spending some time sorting out all the Park memorabilia which has been stored away in my sister’s flat.
Being involved in this process stirs up a lot of emotions.
There were a lot of laughs, but also a great many poignant moments.
There was some hilarity when an old diary belonging to my Gran was discovered.
One entry concerned my sister and I and read ; “Jim and Janie came to visit me. It was nice to see Janie”.
Now, my interpretation of this was that my Gran mentioned “it was nice to see Janie” because she wasn’t as regular a visitor as I was,
and that her happiness at my presence didn’t need to be explicitly remarked upon, as I was pretty much the favourite Grandchild who was constantly doted on, (well this is my clear recollection anyway).
A visit from Janie was a rarer event, and this is obviously what Gran is alluding to.
She was too busy going to parties and hanging out with freaks.
What worried me was thinking, that if I was to become a famous comedian/national-treasure-type figure, some BBC commissioning editor
might decide, in the future, to commission yet another mean-spirited BBC bio-pic on a British comedian.
They’d be researching my life, and on finding this diary, would wrongly assume that my Gran couldn’t stand the sight of me, and would
no doubt feature this in the film as one of the many indicators of the private tragedy behind funnyman Jim Park’s chirpy demeanor.
Obviously, I’ll have to make sure I write a tedious autobiography to counter such possible misconceptions.
(suggested titles? “No Parking!”, “Just Jim!”, hmmm…very poor)
But there were also sadder things.
There was a stack of “Get Well” cards that the kids at my Mum’s school had made for her when she was ill.
The cards had obviously meant a lot to my mum.
We were trying to be ruthless with a lot of the stuff, but couldn’t bring ourselves to bin things like this ; even though they were painful to read.
We also found an old cassette tape with a Park party going on in the background…lots of laughter, singing songs round the piano.
I heard myself playing a medley of tunes on the piano at the party.
There was “Sleepy Shores” (my piece of resistance) as well as (very ironically) “The Sash My Father Wore” and “Derry’s Walls”.
I did this mainly to annoy my Dad who was raised a catholic, and couldn’t stand Rangers.
I’ll always remember his face when my Grandpa gave me a Rangers LP for my 8th birthday with all the usual delightful, sectarian bilge on it.
Although, at the time, I thought it was great and played the record incessantly.
Then we read this by successful Edinburgh singer/songwriter Kim Edgar.
We were all really touched by how she regarded my mum as such an inspirational figure.

Walking

I did a couple of days walking the West Highland Way last week.
It was a charity event organised by The Stand to benefit “Barnardos”.
The weather was glorious, and the walk down the whole length of Loch Lomond from Inverarnan to Drymen was spectacularly beautiful.
Well that's all very well, but where were the funnies?
I'd say, the Inversnaid Hotel "lunch experience" deserves a mention.
It’s situated about half-way down the east side of the Loch and immediately brings to mind the building in “The Shining”.
3 of us arrived and made our way to the bar to order lunch.
I was told to remember that my order was “order number 1”.
I was a little surprised that a numbering system was being used, mainly due to the fact we were the only people who on the premises.
We sat outside and awaited our order.
About twenty minutes later a waitress appeared carried two dishes.
Is this for “number 1” I said helpfully.
“What?”
“I was told to remember that we were order number 1!”
“What?
“It’s our order number…number 1”
“You’re number 1? I don’t know what you mean…”
“The barman told me to remember our food order was number 1”
This went on for quite a while…
Eventually, it was firmly established that the food was for us…
However there were only 2 dishes…we were short of one plate of fish and chips…
“I’ll get another one” she said.
Twenty minutes later there was still no sign of my fish and chips.
I decided to go and find out what was happening.
I am an alpha male.
I saw the waitress in question chatting merrily to the receptionist.
“Hello. I just wandered when I was getting my fish and chips?”
“Oh! I’m sorry! I completely forgot! I’ll order it now! I’m sorry…”
I was too stunned to react angrily.
Now these things will happen occasionally in any restaurant.
Admittedly, it is unusual to happen in a restaurant when there is only one table being occupied by customers.
That takes a superior level of incompetence to carry off successfully.
It must be fairly manic in there when they’ve got two, or maybe even three, tables to deal with at a time.
After a couple of minutes reflection, I did feel like smashing the door to the kitchen with an axe, sticking my
head through the hole and shouting “Here’s Jimmy!”, but would that have speeded up the preparation of my fish and chips?
I don’t know…perhaps?
I also found it amusing that many of the people we passed coming in the opposite direction described the walk they’d just done
in terms comparable to a final push for the summit of K2.
Although it is fair to say though that there was the odd exposed 6ft drop, and once we had to use our hands to scramble over a
small boulder.
At this point my life did flash before me.
But overall it was a right old laugh, and I’d like to do the whole thing at some point, and have a dessert at the Inversnaid Hotel.

Yorkshire Tour

I had a one date Yorkshire Comedy Tour last week in Beverley.
The gig itself was great ; although not so great was the 6 hours it took me to drive there as I got caught up in
the Easter traffic. I’ve got a very low boredom threshold, and long journeys do my head in.
It would probably have helped if I’d brought some decent cds to listen to on the way down, rather than the collection
of garbage currently residing in my glove compartment, (I like the way we still quaintly refer to this storage area as the “glove compartment”
in spite of the fact that very few drivers (I suspect) are currently still in the habit of donning “driving gloves”.)
In addition, most of my cds get stuck on certain tracks, and when this happens in the midst of yet another traffic jam…well, it all gets a bit too much for me.
I listened to “The Best of Bananarama” twice.
Desperate.
The gig was a “Buzz Comedy” gig run by the legendary “Agraman”.
He’s a true maverick of the comedy business who delights in the pun.
Most comedy clubs start with a fanfare of loud music, followed by an enthusiastic compere whipping the crowd up into a frenzy, by asking members of the audience where they come from and what job they do.
Agraman is different.
He just appears on stage without any intro, and gradually batters the audience into submission with a long series of terrible puns, and
an innate charm. I really liked his approach, and so did the audience.
They’re obviously very familiar with his style and took it in their stride.
The last time I’d gigged in this neck of the wood was when I’d only done a handful of gigs, and had a spot in Scarborough.
At that stage in my career, I was quite freaked out to discover that there was an audience of 400 at the club.
I talked at 100mph throughout my set, and was told by many people after the gig that they had absolutely no idea what I was talking about as they ouldn’t understand I word I’d said,(they do definitely talk a bit slower in Yorkshire than they do in Scotland).
This time I deliberately slowed down the delivery, and it all went really well.
Rather than immediately embark on the epic journey home after the gig, I decided to get drunk and stay at a B&B in Beverley ; a very pretty town I thought.
It was at this point that I decided to give up smoking (again).
There was no “Marlboro Lights” to be had, so I ended up buying a pack of “Lambert & Butler” out of the machine (£6.20).
I smoked 2, but didn’t enjoy them at all, and ended up throwing the rest away.
£3.10 a fag…
Ridiculous, I thought…that’s it, I’ve had enough of this stupid habit…
It was the latest in a long line of “nicotine epiphany moments”.
Oh well, have now gone 11 days now without smoking with relative ease….(yawn!...I know…I know…)
On the bill with me were Liane Ross, Marc Lucero and Kevin Dewsbury, and extremely funny they all were too.
I noticed that Liane Ross was also dazzlingly attractive.
It’s fair to say that Marc and Kevin were also dazzlingly attractive ; albeit in a slightly less conventional interpretation of “dazzlingly attractive”.
At the end of the show everyone drove off into the night, but I stayed around to have a couple of pints.
Unfortunately, I got locked in a less-than-enthralling discussion with a Beverley-based, ex-pat Scotsman.
His main topic of conversation was the Glasgow Underground.
He maintained, at considerable length, that it was a far superior underground system to the London Underground because in Glasgow ALL of
the track is underground.
London “pathetically” has several stretches of it’s erroneously titled “underground system” which are ABOVE the ground.
We discussed this for a good (I use the term loosely) half-an-hour.
What made Glasgow even better was the fact that they even had to make the trains underground, as there was no other way to get them there.
Rather than starting to self-harm, I made my excuses and left…cleverly getting lost in Beverley (which is a tiny place ; I am an idiot), as I tried to find my B&B

Hello! Hello! We are the silly boys!

Barry Ferguson and Allan McGregor had already annoyed me before “Fingergate” all kicked off last week.
I’d settled down to watch the Holland v Scotland match, with limited expectations..
As “Flower of Scotland” droned away, the camera panned down the line of Scottish players, in the traditional
fashion.
The majority were making some effort to sing along, but right at the end were Ferguson and McGregor, tight-lipped and both displaying
a deeply-negative body language.
With hindsight, this image was the opening scene of a peculiarly Scottish Shakespearian-esque tragedy.
These images are shown on the big screens in the ground, and are an opportunity to connect with the Scottish support , letting them know
that the team are fired up and ready to burst into action.
This was not the subliminal message imparted by Ferguson & McGregor.
They came across as a couple of surly, dim-witted neds being asked to play against their will.
Now, to be honest, I can’t stand “Flower of Scotland”.
For starters, tunes in “waltz time” just don’t work as anthems.
Furthermore, the lyrics are mawkish, browbeaten nonsense.
Yes, we did send Edward homeward to think again, but after thinking for a bit, he came back and whupped our asses.
And, of course I’m sure that the majority of the ancestors of the middle-class, investment bankers in the Tartan Army were in all probability fighting for the Government army at Culloden.
There are so many other things to celebrate positively about Scotland in song.
I think “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep” by “Middle of the Road” would have more gravitas as an anthem than “Flower of Scotland”,
For example, there’s a wealth of Burns poetry positively celebrating Scotland and mankind (and womankind) in universally appreciated sentiment.
Get some people to come up with some new tunes for them, and let’s get it on.
TV Show to select the winning tune? “You’re Bard!” ?
As a text I really like “A Man’s A Man For A’ That”, but the melody is a bit rubbish, I think.
I hope “Flower of Scotland” gets the boot soon.
Listening to the supporters singing it like a “London’s Burning” round, on International sporting occasions, because they can’t get the timing right (2/4 always works better than ¾ for anthems, ok?), makes me feel like sawing my own head off.
However, in spite of all this, if I was representing my country, I would sing “Flower of Scotland” at the top of my voice, as if I was auditioning
for a Broadway musical.
It’s a no-brainer. Let the opposition know you mean business, THEN lose heavily…
It was annoying to read in the next day’s press that Holland “outclassed” Scotland.
That’s baloney…a distinctly average Dutch team were gifted some soft goals, by an insipid Scottish team led by a ned.
I have to say, I was slightly surprised by the ensuing 8 hour drinking binge.
I thought we’d moved on a bit from the crazed footballer drinking syndrome….but apparently not.
I suppose there still remains a cultural attitude in Scotland that if a bar is open it should be used, regardless of time,(check out the pre-holiday binge drinking going on at 6am at Scottish airports for an example of this phenomenum).
It’s basically the same attitude the over-70s have to toilets.
It’s the stupid factor which really stands out in this instance.
I love the fact that it doesn’t occur to them that remaining sitting in a bar after an all-night drinking sessions, as members of the public appear for lunch,
might not be such a great idea.
And of course after their hilarious “offensive gesture” japes at the Iceland game, they declared open season on themselves.
You’d think anyone in their situation, who regularly have to deal with the media, would realise that as soon as the press published photos of their puerile pranks, they’d have to get out there double-quick with big, big apologies and contrition to every media outlet available.
That’s what the great Max Clifford would have done.
But no, they did nothing, and they got hit with a particularly heavy punishment.
Rangers deserve credit for acting decisively, but you can’t ignore the fact that given Rangers’ disastrous financial position, they’d love to be shot of these two under-performing numpties and their huge (by Scottish standards) wages.
They are expendable, both for Scotland and Rangers.
Their idiotic behaviour unfortunately coincided with a groundswell of opinion that someone should finally take a stand against moronic, out-of-touch, overpaid footballer behaviour.
If I was them, I’d blame the “credit crunch”.
“We’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it any longer!….” as someone once said.

Relatively armless

3 weeks ago, I spent an enjoyable Sunday afternoon thrashing about on a drumkit with some musical associates.
This was all fine and dandy, but by the next morning my right shoulder had seized up completely.
I probably should have immediately gone to see a physio, but kept thinking that it was just a minor strain and would soon clear up.
The pain was ok during the day, but at night it was impossible for me to find a comfortable position to sleep (in spite of being loaded up with industrial painkillers).
As a result, I hardly had any sleep for a week…
Lack of sleep is not a lot of fun.
It makes you grumpy (I know..un-BELIEVABLE), tired (obviously), unable to pay attention (even more than usual).
It’s not good.
You get very little sympathy either.
An incredibly short timescale elapses before your friends and aquaintances declare your moaning about the constant pain you’re experiencing to be deeply tedious.
I’ll now always be much,more sympathetic in future to tedious idiots who moan incessantly about their varied aches and pains.
I will, I will…
They are good, gentle people and I was wrong to dismiss them as twats.
Anyway, I was then off to France for a few day’s boarding.
There was sunshine, blue skies and lots of snow, (including one big powder day).
As usual my boarding was at its best over the first couple of days, then gradually began to deteriorate as the fatigue set in.
My unusual “no sleep for a week” fitness preparation didn’t really work out.
I had meant to get a lot fitter for this holiday, but sadly this wasn’t possible.
As ever, I loved it though, and it remains extremely invigorating to be hurtling down slopes in the Alps on a beautiful sunny day.
On my last day, the light went a bit flat, and I succumbed to a few heavy falls…all of them involving landing heavily on my right shoulder…ouch!
I then started experiencing a continual numbness in my fingers, indicating that I had trapped a nerve.
Such is the current strength in my right arm that a mug of tea wobbles about while I drink from it.
For the foreseeable future, I can’t sit beside elderly people in cafes in case my tea drinking technique is misconstrued as a cruel lampooning
of them.
The Chiropractor didn’t seem to help that much, so I made an appointment at a Physiotherapist.
This does seem to have improved things, but the session itself was 40 minutes of sheer torture, pushing me to the absolute limit of my pain tolerance.
Ah “deep tissue massage”, how I love thee so...
As I flew back into Edinburgh from France in a zombie trance-like state, I was cursing the knowledge that I immediately had to travel through to
Glasgow to do a gig, and also the thoughts of other gigs in Glasgow on the following days, made me feel even more weary.
However, the gigs at McPhabbs (“Ding Dong Comedy”) and Bacchus (“Four Play”) were cracking gigs for me.
I have found in the past that sometimes when you feel absolutely zonked and spaced out, it can often lead to really good gigs in the end.
I was also due to perform at Jim Hobbit’s show but had to get bumped as the show was running way over time and I had to head for the hills.
Oh, and I should get the plugging started and say that our show this Fringe is called “Silence of The Trams”, and it will be on at “The Stand 4” from August
7-30 at 6.05pm…
I’ll remind you all nearer the time.

Not that I'm one to complain, but...

So anyway, I poured some “organic” milk into my cup of tea, and glanced down at the “best before” date…
It said “March 4th”, and the actual date was “11th March”….
I cautiously sniffed the top of the carton, but a nasty pong was conspicuous only by its absence.
“Hang on a minute”, I thought…”organic milk shouldn’t last that long…”.
This leads me to believe that the whole “organic milk” industry is complete bollocks.
There surely must be preservative chemicals in the milk for it to last that long.
In the olden days I remember milk used to last a couple of days max.
When I was at school, by the afternoon the old free milk would often be “on the turn”, and was best avoided.
My “organic” milk was now 10 days old, and should really be stinking out the joint…
If this is the case with organic milk, I wonder how much else of this whole organic business is a complete con…
I’ve also been having a wretched time trying to book a snowboarding holiday in France.
It should be a piece of piss doing this on the Internet, bad sadly this is not the case.
Too many annoying companies and businesses have second-guessed every possible “Google” search you might carry out trying to sort out the details of such a holiday.
As a consequence, it’s infuriatingly difficult to find precisely the information that you need, as every search result is awash with sites of no interest at all to me.
It’s trying to discover relatively simple things, like trying to work out what the transfer options are from airports to the different resorts.
If you didn’t know better, you might assume that the only option available would be an expensive private hire cab, as these
companies have managed to smother all the search results completely.
There are maybe ways you can tinker with google to filter off all this shit, but unfortunately it’s beyond my ken.
There were times where I was on the point of giving up and abandoning the idea of even taking a stupid, bloody snowboarding holiday.
And don’t get me started on booking flights.
It’s now an obstacle course of trying to avoid accidentally paying too much for baggage handling, insurance, car hires, “special” check-in
privileges…eg pay a tenner and get on the plane first (marvellous…well worth the money)
The sites are designed to catch out people making bookings in a hurry.
It’s ridiculously easy to unwittingly include an add-on you don’t require, and once you’ve booked it, you’ll get charged an admin fee and will have a long extended 0871 call to pay for, should you try to revise your booking details.
I made a vow never to use Ryanair again after I’d recently booked a flight to Dublin, and found at the end of the procedure that the “booking fee” for using a “Visa debit” card was £9.50.
In the future I’d rather pay more to another airline than go with them.
It’s pure deception, and I’m surprised they’re allowed to get away with it.
How on earth can you justify £9.50 as a handling charge for a debit card?
The flight I booked from Edinburgh with www.jet2.com was advertised at £69.99.
By the time they’d added on taxes, snowboard carriage fee, card handling fee, a meal on board (I wasn’t going to, but weirdly I always enjoy airline food…I know..I know…), it came to £143.50.
I was mildly irritated at the discrepancy between advertised and actual fare.
Is this still legal?
I did a charity gig this week, and unwittingly found myself on the bill as the “Headline act”.
I was introduced as”…and now…our headline act, “The Stand’s” Jim Parks (sic)….”
I’m not quite sure how I became an official ambassador for “The Stand”, and I can only apologise for any damage that I have caused to their
reputation as a result of this unforeseen association.
I had a pretty good gig, but must admit to being slightly spooked by the “headline” tag…it’s a very different feeling to that comfy womb-like place in the middle of the running order.

The Write Stuff

I’ve got some new clips on Rooftop comedy.
I don’t think they are the strongest elements of my set, and it is likely that the ensuing publicity will dictate that I never work again.
But on the bright side, it’s all been a marvellous “journey” hasn’t it?
I’ve also got my Hackney set on youtube.
I think that most of my set is now in the public domain on various sites.
This is a good reason to get writing and revamp the whole set.
I’m trying to stick to a new regime of writing for an hour every day.
I figure this is better than spending hours on end at one sitting, banging my head off the table trying to come up with some new, dynamite funnies.
The disheartening fact is that 99% of the stuff I write is complete rubbish and totally unusable.
(Some people might hold the opinion that I am badly underestimating this figure)
However, you just have to keep plugging away to mine that 1%...there is no alternative.
Rather than increase the price of alcohol, I would introduce legislation whereby all Scottish children, upon attaining the age of 13, must drink the entire contents of a large bottle of Advocaat.
This certainly completely ruined my taste for alcohol throughout my succeeding adolescent years in which you traditionally tend to perform your most anti-social acts.
Most of us can handle drink without going around punching people and jumping up and down on car roofs, so surely this practice would be more efficient, and would target would-be troublemakers while they are still young and impressionable.
I didn’t so much have a hangover per se , more a 3-day vomit-fest, wondering what on earth had hit me.

Thatch's dotage

I very much enjoyed the play “Margaret” on the telly the other night.
It concerned itself prinicipally with the fall from grace of Margaret Thatcher.
I find it difficult to fathom that this occurred more than 18 years ago.
Lyndsay Duncan was excellent in the leading role and inhabited the
character of Thatcher very accurately.
I have to confess though to being in a highly confused state during and after the play, mainly down to the fact that this particular characterisation of “The Iron Lady” was unarguably giving me the horn.
This is beyond “wrong”, and I am honestly thinking of receiving counselling to allow me to come to terms with this trauma.
This blurring of fiction and reality in this way is highly dangerous.
It’s probably fair to say that I found Denis Healey to be sexier than the real Margaret Thatcher, (it was the eyebrows, I think).
John Sessions was great as “Geoffrey Howe”…he WAS Geoffrey Howe!
There was an interesting portrayal of John Major, apparently base on the character of “Blofeld” in the James Bond films.
Also, less-than-convincing was the Michael Heseltine character who looked (and talked) like he was half-way through a werewolf transformation scene.
Other good news is that myself and the “No Comedy For Old Men” boys have got our show accepted as part of “The Stand’s” 2009 Fringe programme.
This is fantastic news.
It’s a big step up from last year’s show in a pub at the bottom of Leith Walk, (enjoyable though it all was).
I reckon we’ll be changing the name of the show though, as “No Comedy For Old Men” is somewhat out-of-date

Got My Mojo Back

Well, I was granted redemption and had a rocking gig at The State Bar in Glasgow on Saturday night; finally getting this cursed monkey off my back.
The journey to the gig had an inauspicious start.
Driving out of Edinburgh, I decided to recite my act, as I’d been having trouble lately remembering the correct sequence, having
recently switched some of the set around.
This was all going fine, but unfortunately my mind wandered from the job in hand, and I found myself on the Edinburgh Bypass
heading towards Berwick-on-Tweed.
I’d driven straight past the M8 turn-off. This was unprecedented, (that means it’s never happened before).
Anyway, I had to drive a good few miles in the opposite direction before I was able to turn around and once more head in the direction
of Glasgow.
From having plenty of time, I was now on a fairly tight schedule.
I got a bit bogged down in Glasgow city centre, and it was now 5 minutes till showtime, I’d still to find a parking place, and I was due on first.
I hate this sort of scenario, and tend to arrive early and swan about for a while before the show.
I got parked then sprinted towards the venue…
It was 8.45pm, the advertised start time…
When I arrived, I was the first person there…apparently the show wasn’t now starting till 9.30pm…Marvellous!
45 minutes of completely unnecessary stress.
I really enjoyed the show though.
It was a great crowd, and a pleasure to play to.
I’d spent the previous evening watching with fascination as Mojo the Chihuahua enthusiastically played with Ziggy the 12 week old kitten at my friend’s house,(they come from two different families)
It was a great example of communal living by natural enemies.
I think Ziggy and Mojo should be hired by the “United Nations” and perform in all the World’s trouble spots in front of the various political leaders involved in all long-running, intractable conflicts.
Having just signed up to Facebook, I extended my continuing years-out-of-date approach to embracing fads by trying out the Wii product range.
I triumphed at golf, but was soundly whipped at tennis, bowls and boxing.
I also aggravated my sore shoulder as a result of the manic, flailing about of punching during the boxing Wii.
Coincidentally, I almost had a real-life boxing match yesterday with a cyclist in Edinburgh.
Dressed all in black, and with no lights, I didn’t see him speeding towards me as I crossed Maitland Street, (it was semi-darkness)
“Dickhead” he shouted as he had to brake and swerve past me.
“You’re the dickhead! Where’s your lights?” I shouted at him at the top of my voice (slightly startling an elderly lady who was walking past me)
About 50 yards further on, I watched him stop the bike, dismount and start heading purposefully towards me.
He looked well over 6ft and quite well-built.
I decided to use the psychology of walking towards him to demonstrate that I wasn’t feart.
It’s a technique I saw used by a man who used to live alongside grizzly bears in Canada, (it worked for a while but he was eventually eaten alive)
We then went face to face…
I said “I didn’t see you..you’ve no lights”
“It’s not dark” he said.
“So why has every car passing got their lights on I said?” (it was very much a “Rumpole of the Bailey” moment)
Then there was a pause as we just stared at each other.
“Why don’t you kiss my arse!” he said aggressively.
At this I just laughed and said “very good!” very good!” and walked away.
I was half-expecting an attack, but it never came.
Whenever I find myself in a situation like this (quite often), I ponder on whether I should really learn some martial arts stuff for self-defence.
The thing is, I reckon you’ll get into more trouble if you have these skills because you’d be less likely to defuse the situation, motivated by self-preservation.
Maybe, I should just take more care crossing the road?

Strum Enchanted Evening?

Well last night’s gig was always going to be tricky.
I thought I did ok-ish, but it was hard work.
The show at the Voodoo Rooms is predominantly an open-mic musical event, featuring a succession of acoustic singer-songwriters performing 3 songs each.
The compere cheerily introduces the acts, but the overall tone of the evening is quite earnest.
To parachute stand-up comedy in the middle of a show like this is something of a challenge ; a challenge which I was happy to accept, as it’s definitely worthwhile to get out of the comedy club “comfort zone” and test your act on an audience who have not been warmed up by a comedy compere, or perhaps have not even anticipated that there was a scheduled comedy element on the bill.
I was highly impressed by the quality of the musicians. There was some really excellent stuff, and regardless of how my act went, I thoroughly enjoyed the evening..
I did feel I possibly lost a few of the audience even before I got on stage though.
A young male act deadpanly introduced an instrumental piece by informing the audience that he’d written it especially for his girlfriend and was originally intending playing it on a local radio station on Valentine’s Day and dedicating it to her.
He then went on to lament that his girlfriend had unexpectedly ended their relationship earlier this week.
There were a few suppressed titters at this tragic revelation, but I involuntarily loudly guffawed, and attracted several withering glances.
Being an alleged comedian, I was anticipating a punchline, and when it didn’t appear my big laugh reverberated around the room, as my brain computed “jeezo…! he’s serious!”.
There were pockets of the audience giggling away merrily during my act, but there were also quite a lot of blank, non-comprehending expressions.
It probably would have worked better if I’d tried to write some material specifically about the musical open-mic phenomenum.
As a form, it seems to have really exploded, and there must be a lot of humour to extract from it.
I did feel awkward in that some of the preceding acts had described their aspirations for a “raised level of consciousness” to save mankind, with many other worthy sentiments of peace, love and understanding.
I’m not saying I disagree with these ideals, just that it felt a bit odd in context, to be bemoaning my Grandfather’s blocked toilet.
I did mention that I felt I’d inadvertently emptied a large bucket of shit into the “stream of consciousness” which had pervaded the evening.
That got quite a big laugh.
The puns got a lot of groans.
This is always a sign of a troublesome gig for me, in that the audience are reacting solely to the admittedly, often awful punchlines, rather than, ,for example, finding the concept of someone walking around all day with a pot of pasta attached to their foot, intrinsically amusing.

CSb RIP

I think most people are probably bored reading about anything with “credit crunch” references in it, (I know I am).
However, I have to admit I’m pretty shocked at what is going on in central Edinburgh.
As I take a lunchtime stroll around Tollcross, I notice with each passing day more and more businesses collapsing.
The only firm that seems to be doing quite well at the moment is the one which manufactures the “To Let” signs.
They must be selling like the proverbial cakes of the hot variety.
Many of the restaurants in this area no longer even bother to open at lunchtime, and those that do are virtually empty.
The “Festival Alehouse” and “Scruffy Murphys” bars have closed, (admittedly no great loss, but they seemed reasonably busy compared with many other bars).
The musical instrument shop next to the King’s Theatre has now closed (can’t remember its name).
If things carry on at this rate, the only businesses still open will be the big Coffee chains, and a couple of Poundstretchers.
Although maybe a few more charity shops will start up? (just what Edinburgh needs).
More bad news emerged this morning when I discovered that my beloved snowboarding haven “CSb Chalet Snowboard” has gone out of business.
This is a total disaster as there is nothing else like it on the snowboarding market.
I may have lost millions on misplaced share deals recently, but this is ultimately more painful.
Csb ran a dedicated snowboarding chalet near the Avoriaz resort.
What made it unique was that the people who ran the chalet were also all top boarders, who would act as guides and take you all over the resort, including to a lot of off-piste areas, where their local knowledge was invaluable.
Everybody at the chalet boarded together, ate and drank together ; and although you’d get the odd mentalist, 99.9% of the residents were great people.
I’ve been there 5 times, and I’m gutted to hear of its demise.
I’ve had some fantastic times there over the years, and it’s just not the same anywhere else.
What is particularly annoying is that in Canada last year, I finally ditched my old board, got a Burton T6 on Ebay and totally transformed my snowboarding abilities, and was really looking forward to doing another CSb holiday to consolidate my gains.
Pah!
A couple of years ago, myself and a couple of aquaintances were toying with the idea of taking over the lease of the “Holyrood Tavern” .
In spite of all my financial disasters of late, the fact that this never came to fruition represents a great escape.
In the current economic climate, re-launching the Holyrood would have been a financial catastrophe beyond imagination.
Phew!

Pow!

“Hurtin’ my back
On the way to the gym…”
Of course, that could be a couple of lines from “Isn’t It Ironic” by Alanis Morrisette, if it was actually about irony…
But it isn’t, it’s what happened to me yesterday.
I thought I would start the week positively, in a blaze of smug glory, by going to the gym at work.
I also had to carry my laptop in to work as it’s been acting up and I wanted to take it to the repair shop at lunchtime.
So, while walking up the street and carrying this lopsided load, something tweaked in my back and the gym visit had to be cancelled on disability grounds.
And now I’m hobbling about in pain.
Those of you in your early 70s will remember the BBC series “Colditz”.
On Sunday night, I found myself watching a whole episode on Youtube, (I am living the dream).
The episode I was watching is generally regarded as the most memorable one, and has been repeated many times over the years.
It’s called “Tweedledum” and is the story of one of the POWs who feigns insanity in an attempt to be repatriated.
It features a brilliant performance by Michael Bryant as “Wing Commander Marsh”, the central character.
I enjoyed watching it again, but was somewhat dumbfounded that the very end of the episode was missing.
It’s fair to say that the end is quite important.
It involves “Colonel Preston” (the senior British officer at Colditz) reading a letter he has just received from Marsh’s wife.
The upshot is that by spending so long appearing to have cracked, he has had a genuine mental breakdown and is now permanently
hospitalised in England, with no hope of recovery.
It’s quite a powerful ending.
However, today’s generation of Youtube viewers will think that “Tweedledum” completely fooled the Germans with his cunning plan, and lived happily ever after back home in dear old Blighty.
(It’s probably what would have happened had Hollywood made a version of the tale)
It can be quite misleading missing the end of films and stuff.
Imagine you’d walked out of “The Sting” just as Paul Newman and Robert Redford were shot?
You’d think it was a rather tragic and abrupt end, to what had been quite a jolly film up till that point.
Or you might have left “Snow White” before the end, and felt pained to realise that she was going to spend eternity sleeping in a glass case…very sad!
Robert Wagner was in “Colditz”, although he only ever has about one line an episode to say…(I wonder how much he got paid?)
I laughed more than I have just about ever laughed at anything last night watching Irish comic Paul Currie at The Stand.
He did a lip-sync to the “Hart to Hart” theme (starring Robert Wagner ; what a flawless link…) with an embarrassed-looking couple forced to join him on stage.
The theme is funny in itself, but when he mimed “when they got together….it was moidah!!!!” , and then froze for a couple of minutes while the rest of the theme played out…well, I nearly had a fit.
Beautiful stuff…
My “Chairman Mao” watch has attracted a lot of admiring interest.
Unfortunately, it loses approximately 10 minutes in every hour.
There should be a joke there somewhere?
Gordon Alexander made one last night, but I have managed to forget it.
Something about “a cultural step back in time”.

well hello there China!

My sister has just returned from a month long holiday in sunny China.
She has brought me back a great watch which has an image of Chairman Mao waving his hand on the face.
It is the best watch ever. Hilarious.
She did a 2 day tour of Beijing and complimented her tour guide on China's overall organisation of the Olympics.
She also mentioned that the Paralympics were impressively staged as well.
At this the tour guide said "I didn't like the Paralympics"
Puzzled, my sister asked "Why?"
The guide replied "I don't think it is right to make people with one leg to race each other...it is cruel!"
Hmmm...now that is a puzzling, yet highly interesting take on things!
My niece Kitty (2) now routinely asks my brother ; "Have you sold your house yet?"
(it has been on the market for quite a long time)
This is very funny too.

Punctured bicycle on a hilltop desolate

So anyway, last night at the Heresy Comedy Club was pretty much up there on the “Jim Park disastrous, crash-and-burn gigs roll of dishonour”.
It was always going to be difficult.
I was on first. (It’s like assuming the role of the Star Trek crew member you don’t recognise, going off on a reconnaissance mission).
The bulk of the audience comprised of some kind of works night out thing, where the men were, without exception,acting like the most annoying, surly, ignorant adolescent twats.
It was clear from the start that they wanted the show to be entirely about them, and that they weren’t interested in listening to material of any sort.
There followed an extended, hideous demonstration of showing-off and one-upmanship between them.
To a certain extent I could compare my experience with that of Chesley Burnett "Sully" Sullenberger III.
When a couple of banker jokes failed in the opening minutes of my act, you could make an analogy with Chesley’s plane smashing into a flock of Canadian Geese.
It was at this point that we both realised we were in trouble.
The other comedians on the bill (Rob Kane, Elaine Malcolmson and Mark Nelson), did a much better job than me of stepping outside their material (athough, more or less forced to), and taking on the heckling idiots.
I tried this once at my disastrous State Bar gig, trading insults merrily for 25 minutes, but I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not really my bag.
So I gamely ploughed on with my material.
If myself and Chesley Burnett "Sully" Sullenberger III. had swapped places ; rather than land the plane safely on the Hudson River, I would have steered the plane
straight into the foyer of the Rockefeller Center with catastrophic consequences.
As well as the adolescent idiots, a psychotic-looking woman in the front row seemed furious about my Islamic Terrorist “You’ve Been Framed” TV special joke ; repeatedly shouting “I KNOW people there…! I KNOW people there..!” (continuing long after I’d finished that bit).
Experience informs you when a gig is beyond rescue, so I cut the set short and beat a hasty retreat.
Chesley was hailed as a great American hero.
I wasn’t.
If I'd taken out a sub-machine and sprayed the front rows with bullets, I would have been entirely justified.
The tabloids would have a field day with the man who was a "lifesaver" last week becoming a mass murder the following week.
It would make a great film too.
My next engagement is at a “spoken word” event in which I am the only comedian, and will be performing a 15 minute set.
Before last night, with a high confidence rating, I had no worries at all about taking on something like this.
However, now the doubts have set in again.
Carey Marx did a line last night about getting into a train carriage full of Chinese peopl that had me howling with laughter.
First time I've seen him...sublime stuff.


It’s a right old laugh isn’t it?

You must be choking! (genius)

There was high drama in the office this week, as I stepped in to prevent a colleague at the neighbouring desk choking to death.
I was working away diligently, as is my norm, when I noticed his hand banging the top of his desk as he was hunched over in his chair.
My first thought was that he was bent-double laughing and was just doing the banging on the table for “theatrical emphasis” purposes.
I then caught a glimpse of his face and immediately recognised that this was a serious situation. His face was crimson and it was obvious he was completely unable to breathe.
I firmly thumped his back a couple of times, and thankfully that cleared the blockage.
If that hadn’t worked I was going to have to have a go at the classic “Heimlich manoeuvre”, which I’d never attempted before, and was unsure if I’d be able to produce the desired result.
It was surreal in the sense that while this crisis was unfolding, everyone else in the open plan office were tapping away on their computers,
blissfully unaware of the unfolding drama going on at the back of the room.
It’s made me think that taking a first aid course is something that everyone should do, because you can all of a sudden find yourself in a situationwhere you have to make an immediate intervention, and it would certainly help if you had a rough idea about what exactly to do.
So there you go…making people laugh and saving lives…surely that is worth an MBE?
I’m too humble to nominate myself for such honours or write to the producers of Esther Rantzen’s “Hearts of Gold”, but if anyone else wanted to, I wouldn’t stand in their way.
And if I got really famous as a result, I promise you that I wouldn’t pathetically use the limelight to boost my comedy career, but would concentrate all my energy on focussing attention on the carers and lifesavers and other “Hearts of Gold” type people, in a kind of “Comedy Relief” way.
After all, I just did what anyone would have done if they found themselves in a similar situation.
I’m not a hero ; just an ordinary bloke. I was just doing my job as a fellow human, and it would be for other people to decide if it merited wider recognition and reward.
The experience of doing the Hackney Final and getting decent reviews seems to have boosted my comedy profile.
I can exclusively reveal that I will now be making a special guest appearance on the “Jim Hobbit” Glasgow Comedy Festival show, as well as getting a weekend of gigs in Dublin next month.

Jim stops smoking again shock!

I feel I should award belated kudos to my old friends Egg and Mitch who travelled to London from Shropshire and Scotland respectively, just
to see me perform at the Hackney Empire.
This represents a classic example of outstanding devotion, above and beyond the call of duty.
I was impressed and deeply moved.
Mitch runs the Edinburgh Film Studios.
I would implore you all to go there immediately, and arrange to make a film.
Cinema was very popular during the Great Depression of the 1930s, so it could be a great opportunity to indulge your creative whims
and direct a “Credit Crunch” , feelgood Blockbuster for 2009.
I got a couple of reviews in The Stage and on Chortle.
They are both generally positive and have some really good quotable quotes.
I find the “squashed face” description a bit odd though.
I’ve been called many things, but “squashed face” is a new one…
The review was written by a Julian Chambers, whereas last year’s (at times extremely scathing) Hackney review was written by one Julia Chamberlain.
I suspect they are the same person?
Intriguing…
But hey, I’m really happy with the reviews…and hopefully I can use them to open a few doors.
I’m working with a few Indian guys at work at the moment.
They’re good guys and I have a good laugh with them.
I find it very amusing that they all call me “Park”.
(I’m listed as “PARK, James” on the directory)
I haven’t pointed out to them that they are calling me by my surname.
It just feels quite funny to be called that.
I don’t think I’ve been routinely referred to as “Park” since I was at High School.
Could I be getting nostalgic for my dreadful time as a pupil at Queensferry High School?
From what I gather, it’s a good school now, but in my time it was a rotten, depressing environment.
So anyway, do teachers still use the surname to deal with pupils, or have we arrived at a more touchy-feely era in which
first names are invoked?
I don’t know.
I’ve had to stop smoking again.
This becomes necessary as I have arrived at what I term as the “stupid phase” of my smoking habit.
For a while I can just have the odd cigarette now and again ; often having 2-3 day smoke free intervals.
Unfortunately, I have been smoking just about every day for the past month (the Hackney Empire is definitely a contributory factor here).
My cue to stop is when I start smoking cigarettes when I don’t really want one.
It’s a mad impulse…
In spite of having no urge, I’ll smoke one, then stub it out half-way through the cigarette, and go “Ugh! I didn’t enjoy that at all…”
I have done this a lot in the last 2 weeks and as a result, it is now time for another ceasesmoke.
So “peace in the Middle East” or “Jim quits smoking for good”…
Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen….
I did a bit in my set last night at The Stand about my fictional Great Uncle Duncan.
Having completed what I now refer to as the "potato section" of my set, I mentioned that Uncle Duncan once said "The best laughs are with potatoes", shortly before sticking a fork into the side of his head.
Soon afterwards we had to put him in residential care.
This went really well...
It was a sold-out "Burns Special" at The Stand last night, making it the third cracking gig I've had in the last week.
Confidence is high at the moment.
I'm overdue a disaster...

Hmmmm....Nice...!!!

So Hackney has come and gone….
It was the definite highpoint of my comedic career…
What a buzz to play in front of a sold-out Hackney Empire…1500 people…ker-pow…!!!
On this occasion I’d like to say “Fuck self-deprecation..!”
I had a storming gig…I couldn’t have wished in my wildest dreams for it to go any better…it was an absolute joy to play that stage…
My main anxiety before the gig was that I wouldn’t do myself justice, and regret not making the most of probably the biggest gig of my life.
Being so relieved it had gone well, any concern over the subjective musings of a group of judges seemed gloriously irrelevant.
I promise you. I’m not delusional…why only last Thursday I did much of my set to silence at the esteem’d “Heresy” comedy club in Edinburgh.
It was like doing a bible reading at school assembly.
I’ve no interest in hiding disasters.
I know they’re much more interesting to read about than the successful gigs though. I’m not stupid…
But it all got filmed, so I’ll stick a copy of it on here and then you, yes you, can decide if I’m being ludicrously, over-generous with my nauseatingly subjective self-review.
I was delighted that Fergus won…I‘m a big fan of his work as part of the “Colin and Fergus” double-act, and I loved his offbeat solo set on
Saturday night. Class.
Compere Arthur Smith was also on fine form.
He strode into a fairly tense Green Room before the show, and informed everyone that the previous year’s winner had now given up performing (this is true), so that winning this thing wasn’t necessarily recommended for your “fucking career!”, and did his trademark throaty chuckle.
He instantly transformed the atmosphere and had everyone giggled uncontrollably for the next few minutes as he held court.
Weirdly, I felt hardly any nerves as I strode onto the stage and did my set.
I felt more nervous doing the heat upstairs in a pub in Stoke Newington.
I just found the whole place such a comfortable, friendly environment that the nerves just went, and all that remained was a determination to
savour the experience, as these sort of things don’t come around too often.
And playing that stage was a celestial orgasm...buzz-tastic.
Of course being an emotional kind of guy, after the show I was choked at how celebratory my friends were who’d come along to see me.
They were miles more nervous than me about the whole thing ; utterly terrified of witnessing me having having a disaster.
I’m lucky to have the friends I have…they rock! (this is obviously turning into my Gwyneth Paltrow/Halle Berry moment)
And it was great to see my old samba muckers Hannah and Jen also making a surprise celebrity appearance.
Looking back, I really enjoyed the immediate aftermath of qualifying for the final.
Participating in the stand-up comedy experience involves taking a regulatory amount of kicks in the bollocks from time to time, so it’s nice to occasionally get a little bit of recognition that you’re doing something right.
I was enjoying this phase up until the beginning of last week ; then all of a sudden the final was looming large on the horizon.
I spent most of last week constantly pondering on what material to select for the 5 minute set.
It’s agonising, as you contemplate after the event bemoaning that you ended up making some catastrophically bad choices.
Then you have a bit of a worry on where you’ll end up on the bill…probably better to be in the middle of the first half I thought… There are so many acts to get through
that you don’t want to be too far down the bill and perform to a frazzled audience (I ended up being on 3rd in the 2nd half…not great, but could have been worse)…
You worry in case someone’s material is too similar to yours (particularly if they are on first) …Then you worry that if the person on before you is TOO funny then the audience will need a rest and you’ll catch them in a lull…or if the person before you has a lingering death, it may take time to get the room warmed up again…
There’s a whole range of anxiety inducing stuff to ponder over…
I think I’ll make that the end of my competition days…the performing is great…the surrounding stress is not so great.
But back at work now and have made a right pig's ear of something...I'm not getting as good a reaction from my work audience at all...
Back to reality.

Happy New Year!

found this old review of me on the interweb…
I don’t think it was one of my finest hours, but I reckon I could use the “best act of the evening” quote though…
Interestingly, I do seem to be getting criticised for having a go at scripted comedians, then proceeding to read off a clipboard throughout my act…
I imagine that if one4review were doing a review of “Dad’s Army” ,in a similar vein, they would criticise Corporal Jones, for repeatedly telling his colleagues “Don’t panic! don’t panic!”, while acting in a highly agitated manner which gives the viewer the distinct impression that he himself is panicking, in direct contravention of the advice he is seen to be vociferously issuing.
I can’t remember doing impersonations at any point. Intriguing!
I do like the reviewers though. They are comedy fans, and I wouldn’t want to discourage them.
I was down in Manchester doing a gig at the Comedy Balloon this week, and staying with my illustrious, older brother.
I’ve always been a little disappointed in that, despite living in Manchester for more than 20 years, he still does not refer to me as “our kid”.
Unfortunately, it was a damp, freezing horrible night, Man Utd were live on the telly, and the acts outnumbered the audience.
It was a funny evening though, and I was still grateful of the chance to get in some training before the Hackney event.
And £1.89 for a pint of bitter!
It’s fair to say I’m enjoying gigging in England much more than Scotland at the moment.
I think I’m fortunate in the sense that my material has no particular Scottish identity, and has a universal quality about it.
I’m not saying “universally hilarious” though ; I’d be the first to admit that some parts of my set are “universally mediocre”.
But I’m working on it…
I must confess I have been tuning in occasionally to “Celebrity Big Brother”, and actually enjoying it.
When Terry Christian presented “The Word”, he was the most loathed man on television, as far as I was concerned.
But now I really like him ; he’s totally re-invented himself into a cool, funny guy, as well as coming up with the most quotable quote of this series ;
“Big egos and low self-esteem, that’s why we’re in the business…”
That is so true…not universally, but there’s a lot of it about…
I’ve also been greatly enjoying “Dead Set”.
I’m generally quite partial to zombie stuff anyway, but with a crackling Charlie Brooker script and some fantastic, innovative film editing also in the mix, it’s sublime viewing.
I'm currently watching "World Darts".
You could argue that aesthetically, it's ridiculous watching fat, middle-aged men parading about on stage to a bombastic rock soundtrack.
I disagree.
I like it.

They've found Tom!

I felt like a bit of an escapist experience this week, so ended up going to see "The Great Escape" at the cinema.
It was grand to see it on the big screen again. It took me back to my experience of seeing it at the cinema as a little boy, and being totally blown away by it.
Watching the tunnelling stuff in a large darkened room really boosts the claustrophobic effect.
Since I virtually know the screenplay off by heart, I paid more attention to what was going on in the background of a lot of the scenes.
There is so much more to follow in the cinematic image as opposed to the compressed TV format.
For example, in the "4th of July party" scene, where all the POWs are getting trashed on locally distilled hooch, there is some hilariously bad acting by the extras.
They've obviously been told to "appear drunk" , but are doing this in a very unconvincing way by swinging their cups from side to side in a piratey fashion, with smaller groups linking their arms, and swaying about like an old music hall act.
There's also a "Hitler youth" kid who appears in the background of a number of scenes, as a form of Nazi window dressing.
James Coburn's Australian "accent" is still just as funny after all these years.
and Danny ("Tunnel King") played by Charles Bronson, still wears the most disgusting pair of brown corduoroy trousers to escape in, (presumably he was concerned about how his nerves would hold up in the tunnel?)

There are some bits of the film that seem more than a little unlikely, (apart from Steve McQueen's fence-jumping-motorbiking...obviously)
For instance, after the escape a few of the POWs head to the train station to catch the next train out of there.
Isn't this maybe chancing things?
Wouldn't the Germans have suspected this, and checked everyone arriving at the station?
I'd have stayed in the woods, but that might have made the film less interesting?
Also, it's difficult to imagine the circumstances in which a non-German speaking American pilot and a blind, English ornithologist, could penetrate the undoubtedly high security around a German air base, and nick off with one of their planes.
But this is nit picking...it is still the classic adventure yarn.
Happy New Year!

Merry Christmas!

Ok, watch this, it's very funny, ("funny" being a prized commodity in light of the relentless shite I've been watching on television for the last couple of days).
There was a landmark moment on "Match of the Day" last week.
Highlights of Hull City v Sunderland were being shown.
They both favoured stripey tops and dark shorts.
Yes, very interesting, but if you turned down the colour on the TV to "black and white" level they were virtually indistinguishable.
Has the day now arrived whereby no-one in Britain has a designated black-and-white telly?
Maybe the credit crunch will instigate a comeback? It's a cheaper license isn't it?
I kept my "Strictly Come Dancing" fan of a brother informed of the progress of the final as he dined in a Birmingham restaurant.
I eventually informed him that all the couples were level at the end, and they had been asked to do a "Charleston" with no prior rehearsal to decide the overall champion.
Much to my amusement he believed my cruel deception.
The positive element of this escapade is that rolling on the floor, kicking your legs in the air is a very effective aerobic exercise.
The amazingly talented Mark Lawrenson has been prattling on for weeks about how Robbie Keane can't fit into Liverpool's "system" and has no long term future at the club.
He seemed to play really well yesterday, scoring two goals in the 3-0 victory over Bolton.
I was curious to hear the great football philosopher's comments on this phenomenum after the game.
He didn't mention it.
Money for old rope...money for old rope...
My "Hackney" endeavors weren't mentioned at all over Christmas Dinner by my family.
They're a tough audience to impress...
I've been criticised in the last couple of days for being too eager to drop a reference on it into a conversation at a relatively early stage, as well as being slagged off for being too coy overall about it.
So that's it...no more mentions from me...!
I watched the second half of Rangers losing to Celtic today after a bit of a yomp round Holyrood Park.
A few years ago I would have been gutted at witnessing the debacle of the Gers losing at home to an eminently beatable Celtic side.
Today, I din't really feel anything, and found myself getting progressively bored watching it.
Bored? Watching an Old Firm game?
What is happening to me?

Cor Blimey!

So anyway, I've been insanely busy at work for the last couple of weeks. By the time I get home I'm mentally frazzled and find the complicated plot structure of "Pingu The Penguin" a little too difficult to follow, so I just crash out.
I then rounded off the week with a lacklustre gig at The Stand in Glasgow.
I started and finished well, but there was a rather elongated mid-set slump.
I was chatting to some audience members at a break, and a few of them said that they thought I was funny and really liked me, but that they were too familiar with my material, having seen me several times doing a similar set.
I've always worried that this might be the case, particularly on Sunday nights in Glasgow where Michael Redmond has a cult following of regular attendees.
It was good to hear people say that though...
I thanked them and promised that on my next Sunday night there I would do a set of entirely new material, hopefully...
On a brighter note, I heard yesterday that I'm through to the final of the "Hackney New Act of the Year" competition on 17th January 2009.
I knew I'd had a really good gig in the heat, but experience has taught me to prepare for disappointment and treat anything else as a bonus.
The thought of possibly winning something like that doesn't enter my head...no chance...(well I would say that, wouldn't I?)
However, being introduced by one of my great comedy heroes, Arthur Smith, at the legendary Hackney Empire in front of 1500 people...Well, I'll have some of that!
That will be such a blast...!
Obviously, I hope I don't catastrophically die on my arse...but I've no fear about it. I'm just looking forward to having a bit of an adventure...
Apparently, the crowd can be quite feisty, and I can't rule out the possibility of hearing a resounding chorus of "Fack Off... You Cant!" ,sung to the tune of "Amazing Grace", echoing round the cavernous theatre as I depart from the stage.
But hopefully this won't happen.

I wish it could be Xmas every day! (I don't really...)

So anyway, I found a film of this fat twat doing stand-up comedy...
There's definitely some kind of potential there though, doncha think? chortle chortle
Actually, I'm a bit disappointed with this clip.
For some reason the sound is very muffled, and gives the impression that the clip was recorded using some prehistoric condenser microphone.
It was a very lively night, and the clip doesn't really reflect that...(I would say that though, wouldn't I?)
I've been under the cosh somewhat in my daytime job, working long hours and getting mentally frazzled.
This has played havoc with my Xmas social commitments, and has resulted in me having to make several cancellations.
It's somewhat irritating to see people coming back from big boozy lunches, laughing and joking as I sit hunched behind my computer with an expression frozen in angst.
(quite similar to the facial expression that Paul Ince is currently favouring)
Mind you, my liver is having an unexpected holiday, as this time of the year is normally its "crazy time".
I decided to go the gym today but it was closed for redecoration.
I was hoping that the ventriloquist dummy was going to win "X-Factor" last night, but unfortunately he was the first to be eliminated.
However, the fact that a ventriloquist dummy was able to get all the way to the final must give all the nation's ventriloquist dummies incredible confidence and hope for the future.
There was a strange segment in the programme in which they paraded a selection of the most bizarro auditionees to come out and do an ensemble version of "Thank You For The Music".
It all felt very wrong...
There were obviously some singers who knew they were mental and crap and rejoiced in it.
However, there were also some who (judging from the auditions) actually believed they had star potential in spite of massive evidence to the contrary, and argued vehemently against their elimination.
It was quite sad to see them swallow their pride and appear in a "Parade of Shite" for our "entertainment".
The problem is, singing out of tune isn't really funny, it's just extremely painful to listen to.
I don't usually watch X-Factor though, ok?
I was just having a tea break from work.

And another thing....

I neglected to mention that the much esteem'd Electric Mouse comedy club was started up again last week at Espionage in Victoria Street.
Graeme Harkins did a sterling job compering, with Tommy Mackay, Me, The Hobbit, Martin McAllister and Gordon Alexander making up the bill.
We had a reasonable crowd in and they seemed pretty happy with the product, so we'll be doing another in January.
I was down in London this week, and did a "Hackney Empire New Act of the Year" show.
I'm pretty anti-competition, but this was a really enjoyable gig, and it was good to catch up with old muckers of the comedy world.
It didn't really feel like your typical, common-or-garden comedy competition show.
It's basically a heat, amongst several, from which they select a number of finallists to appear next year at the famed "Hackney Empire" of old London town.
There's no winners announced on the night as they just pick a selection after seeing all the heats ; therefore you avoid crushing disappoinment and can remain happily delusional for a while.
I had a really good gig but wondered later if I'd maybe crammed too much material into my spot, (I reverted to a babbling 100mph delivery...just like the old days...I really enjoyed it!)
The flight back to Edinburgh on the next day was horrendous.
There was really bad turbulence for the whole journey, and I couldn't wait to get off the cigar tube of death.
I am something of a nervous flyer, but can usually cope with it ok. However this pushed me to the limit, and I was on the point of running up and down the aisle screaming "We're all going to die!!!"
Thankfully, I didn't have an aisle seat, and this kept me restrained.
In the worst of the turbulence, I did feel a need to begin talking to the man beside me.
I think this is a primal urge, in that we feel the need to make some sort of contact, rather than die with a group of strangers you know nothing about.
Unfortunately, he turned out to be one of the most boring people I've ever met in my life.
In some ways this was a good thing, as he made the turbulence look good in comparison.
But hey...I made it!
I'll get the bus next time I think...
Talking of competitions, I had this idea for a new comedy competition.
It's called "Universally Funny Comedian Of The Year".
There will be a series of heats in different solar systems of the Universe, with a Grand Final next year on Earth (well it's my idea, so my planet should be allowed to host the inaugural final!)
(I'd thought of a good opening line for an act..."Well, I'm surprised there's no heat on the sun for this competiton! Aye thang u!)
To qualify you have to have lived in the Universe for the last 12 months, or be married to someone who's lived in the Universe for the last 12 months...
and that's about it...there's big money prizes and a vague promise of some gigs in deep space.
It's a winner, I think...!

Feeling a bit fragile today....

Last night was the official post-Fringe wrap night out of the "No Comedy For Old Men" troupe.
A curry was followed by a Stand visit, then onwards to a party in Bruntsfield.
The evening commenced at 6pm, and ended when I got home at 5.15am
Unfortunately, drinking for 11 continuous hours has had the surprising effect of making me feel like absolute shit today.
Who would have thought it?
People should be warned about this...these adverts in posh casinos with people dancing about drinking "Cinzano Bianco" aren't telling the whole story.
It was a right old laugh of a night out though...very entertaining.
Last weekend at The Stand went really well, although the Saturday night was a fairly mediocre night for me.
2 out of 3 is pretty respectable though for the first time doing that spot.
The other bad news is that after 3 months and 3 days of smug righteousness, I slipped off the nicotine wagon, and succumbed to the lure of the coffin nail.
It's a comedy club thing...it's always at a comedy club that this happens...
Oh well, never mind...I'll stop again at New Year as is traditional.
I suppose the fact I haven't smoked for 3 months is still vaguely beneficial to my health.
I don't find giving up stressful, and don't use any aids like patches or chewing gum or owt like that.
It was beginning to get dark as I emerged from my pit today.
I hate when this happens...
A whole day has been lost...life is too short for that sort of shit.
Right, I'm off to the pub.

Ouch!

I took a bit of a tumble down the stairs outside my house last week and ended up smashing my ribs off the stone steps.
I was initially relieved that I hadn't broken any limbs or cracked my head, but found it difficult to get out of bed on the following day.
I was accompanied by a visiting Spanish dignitary, and she said it was "The funniest thing I have seen in my life ever!".
This sustained me in my time of crisis.
Now I've had quite a few injuries...I've broken my wrist, broken one of my metatarsal bones (long before it was fashionable), torn various knee ligaments and broken my scaphoid a couple of times...
However, if you took all these events and accumulated all the pain involved, it would still come nowhere near the level of pain I experienced when I sneezed the day after my fall.
I nearly passed out, and dropped to the floor in absolute agony.
I'd have confessed to anything at this point, if threatened with another sneeze.
I shudder to think what would have happened if I'd injured myself in summer and had one of my standard hay fever sneezing fits.
I think it would have killed me...I would have had to stay in a bubble until Autumn.
With the help of industrial quantities of codeine I've managed to cope with the pain, but it's been nasty.
On a lighter note, I'm spending the weekend doing the opening spot at The Stand, and am very happy with the way it is going.
It's the first time I've done this spot over a weekend, so I have to be pleased that so far I've had 2 solid gigs.
Jason Cook is also on the bill, and I've been mesmerised by his brilliance as a performer.
He's one of these acts that you watch as a comedian and think "what is the point?", in terms of your own act.
I've undoubtedly had a couple of really good gigs, but watching Jason take the roof off really puts things into perspective.
To employ a musical metaphor, it was like I was playing a kazoo solo for 15 minutes on stage, before making way for John Coltrane to play some tasty jazz sax.
He's such a totally natural performer, it's sickening.
It's a really good line-up though all round, and everyone has been doing well...
Still one night to go though...hope I'm not tempting fate by prematurely proclaiming the weekend a success. Ha Ha.

Father Jack

I intended not to drink yesterday, and had earmarked the day to kick-start an ambitious 7 day abstinence from the evil that is alcohol.
Unfortunately there were problems.
I’m entertaining tomorrow night and decided to make a stew with guinness to feed my celebrity friends.
I only needed one can of guinness, but was shocked to discover that my local Sainsburys mini-store only sold cans of guinness in 4-packs.
I panicked and ended up buying 4 cans.
Of course, having used one can for cooking purposes, I decided that the fridge was getting dangerously cluttered and it would be sensible to drink the remaining 3 cans and allow the fridge to function more efficiently and emit less CFCs.
I’ve heard it said that people who have an alcohol problem will effectively be in denial for a long time before accepting their condition, and will typically use an enormous range of pathetic excuses to justify their drinking practices.
As far as I’m concerned, that’s a load of old nonsense.
In fairness, I deserved a drink after participating in a football match in which I fearlessly saved a thunderbolt shot with my testicles.
Disappointingly, we still lost heavily…
Today is the Glenrothes by-election.
It must be very disappointing for Glenrothes that the election is happening so soon after the US election, and has been more or less completely ignored by the media.
This is a shame, as a by-election gives a town a unique opportunity to promote itself to a UK audience through the regular TV coverage leading up to the day of the poll.
A lot of tourism potential has been missed.
If you are a fan of the St James Centre in Edinburgh, then think of a hundred similar versions of it all in one town, and there’s Glenrothes for you.
It is an architectural gem of the highest order.
An ornate delight of concreting excellence.
They have pubs and everything!
Not that I’d be particularly interested in that because, to be honest with you, as far as alcohol goes, I can take it or leave it.

So Long Dubya!

Having decided to join the gym at work, I dragged myself in at lunchtime to get an idea of my current level of fitness.
I was not impressed.
I was a lot fitter when I was smoking.
I think the problem is that having given up smoking (nearly 3 months now), I have been drinking more alcohol..
I’ve not been getting drunk or anything like that, so don’t give me any of your tsk tsk stuff.
However, I’ve got into the habit of having some alcohol every day, and it definitely has the effect of making you progressively more and more sluggish.
I never used to do this.
I noticed that my main man Melvyn Bragg never drinks alcohol during the first week of the month, in order to demonstrate to himself that he is in control of his habit.
So, if it’s good enough for Melvyn then it’s good enough for me.
He also acknowledges that occasionally he likes to drink a lot of alcohol.
I think this is fine unless you are one of these people who turn into a psycho after a certain amount of alcohol..
I just talk louder, make stupid jokes and then fall asleep.
Although, apparently I do have a predilection for talking/shouting in my sleep after a generous serving of alcohol.
Surprisingly, hardly anything has been written about this Ross/Brand “Manuelgate” episode, so here’s my fascinating thoughts on the issue….
I have never found Jonathan Ross funny at all.
I accept that a lot of other people think he is hilarious.
I respect their right to think this, but they are completely wrong.
Russell Brand is capable of genius both as a writer and a stand-up, but he wasn’t being very funny in this instance.
I hate the Daily Mail with a vengeance, but they had a point this time.
I’ve always found the £18 million Ross contract flabbergasting, and would much rather the money had been spent on an alternative range of smaller BBC projects.
This has nothing to do with “censorship”…
There’s lots of comment expressing worry that this will compromise the BBC’s “cutting edge” comedy. Ha Ha!
I very rarely enjoy any comedy on the BBC, and find the majority of their current and recent output to be garbage…
I’ve had my fill of the endless “panel games”, and recent sitcoms such as “Two Pints”, “Grownups” etc etc leave me totally bemused by their unrelenting awfulness.
And talking of Manuel, I once showed an episode of “Fawlty Towers” to a Mexican friend of mine and she thought it was ”the most racist television programme” she had ever seen.
What does this add to the debate?
I’ve no idea…
And it’s President Obama! woo hoo!
He’s not going to be a particularly radical president, mainly because the economy is in such a mess, he has very little room to manoeuvre.
However, it’s great to see that the number of people using their vote in America has rocketed.
The Republicans might struggle to win another election, as they’ve always been the main benefactors of the traditionally poor turnout.

Vogue vogue vogue...

One of the benefits of working temporarily in a zany insurance office is that I get a chance to see what the current fashion trends are amongst urban professionals.
I'm thrilled to observe that the knitted tank top is making a big, big comeback.
It's also clear that some men are using the opportunity presented by a less rigid formal dress code (ie the tie is no longer compulsory), to wear their golf gear to the office.
Slacks, sleeveless golf shirts and Pringle sweaters are very much de rigeur.
It's a great privilege to be exposed to this high fashion sensibility on a daily basis, and I'm hoping that some of it will eventually rub off on me, and I will at last achieve my lifelong ambition of being a global style icon.
Other than fashion news, I decided to try the canteen today, and immediately regretted it ; although not as much as my colleague Nigel did, when presented with his salmon steak which looked like it had been cooked in the late 1960s and heated up for him today.
Looks like myself and fellow comedy man Graeme will be running a fortnightly comedy club at the Espionage in Edinburgh starting at the end of November.
We're planning on running it on a Friday night, early evening, and using the Fringe show format, ie an approximately 80 minute show with no interval.
The idea is that people have a chance to split the evening between comedy and being out on the lash/dancing.
Anyway, it will be an interesting experiment.
In exciting Home Improvement news, I'm getting the windows draught-proofed this week.
I reckon by 2039 this work will have paid for itself in the resultant energy savings.

9 To 5

One good thing is that I don't have to take the morning train, as it's only a 12 minute walk from my home to the office.
It's fair to say that my return to the wacky world of IT contracting is proving every bit as enjoyable as I had anticipated.
Pension Schemes' online transactions rock I tell you..., and anyone who disagrees is a right cunt!
I had a bit of a chuckle as I went and purchased a cup of tea at the cafe bit.
I think I've done about 8 separate contracts here over the last 10 years, and this guy has always served me my cuppa.
In spite of buying probably a four figure number of cups off him, he still refuses to acknowledge me with any pleasantry or greeting, or engage in the most perfunctory of idle banter.
He knows I always have a tea but he never second guesses my choice in a way that a friendly bartender might.
There is almost something gently re-assuring about his studied indifference to his customers.
No, it's not just me. I have discussed this with others who share the same experience.
If he ever says "So you're back! How are you doing? Tea?", the shock would probably kill me.
Had a hugely enjoyable gig at The Stand on Sunday, and it was grand witnessing Andrew O'Neill's glorious, nonsensical rambling for the first time. Quality.
There was also a young guy Stephen Callaghan doing a 5 minute spot, who I'd never seen before and thought was bleeding hilarious.
This lightened my mood, as I contemplated the next day shock of employment.
The first day was ok, but I perhaps ill-advisedly went out to watch "Red Raw" in the evening, and ended up slurping down 6 pints of Amstell lager whilst sharing witty badinage with the ample comedy radar blips of Gordon Alexander and Antony Murray.
All very entertaining, but left me feeling like shit on Tuesday morning.
Must try harder.
Watched the final episode of "Sunshine" with Steve Coogan.
To be honest it's all a bit twee, but it still left me choked at the end, shamelessly manipulating my vulnerable old emotions.
Yes, I am such a big fucking sap these days, you wouldn't believe.
I still can't be bothered with football..
I watched a bit of Man U v Celtic but got bored and switched over.
20 years ago that fixture would have been hyped for weeks in advance, and it would have been deemed unthinkable to miss it.
Tonight's match was completely devoid of edge and excitement.
I got a contract in the post today for a gig down south that I got by speculatively sending out my comedy cv and gig audio to a few promoters.
A simple event, but one that made me feel like a "proper" comedian.
And yes...I know, I know just how wanky that sounds...but does my face look bothered?
No it jolly well does not...so there!
Don't judge me...

Woo Hoo! It's Winter Time....!

After a couple of problematic gigs followed by the cancellation in Glasgow, I had a cracker at the Heresy Club at the Jekyll & Hyde.
That bar has been something of a happy hunting ground for me of late.
Other thoughts.
The voices of "River Cottage" presenter Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and "Channel 4 News" presenter Jon Snow are virtually indistinguishable.
I have cancelled my Cable Sports subscription.
I have finally realised that I have fallen out of love with football, (Kris Boyd's post-Scotland v Norway, stupid, scowling face and reading Chick Young's ludicrous BBC Blog helped me arrive at this decision), and would rather use time spent watching it doing something else.
I'm not paying these twats wages any more.
I'm bored with the obsession with "Champions League millions".
I'm pissed off that there is no great improvement in Scottish footballers' technique, in comparison with other nations.
I watched the last US Presidential Debate this week.
It was slightly more interesting than the preceding debates, in that they finally had a bit of a pop at each other.
It was all still faintly anodyne stuff though, and most of the debate "action" has been as interesting as watching 2 men conducting independent powerpoint presentations.
I think you have to go back to 1988 to when there was a real big moment in one of these debates.
This was a classic moment when Lloyd Bentsen caught Dan Quayle with a big sucker punch.
It's particularly noticeable that the audience were a lot more involved in those days.
The audience in the modern version are obviously told not to react vocally to anything that is said during the course of the debate.
I quite like this one as well...
Ronald Reagan's face is a picture as his "There you go again..." line is thrown back at him with interest.
All very entertaining, but in the end George Bush (the first) and Reagan still won the elections in question, so maybe they don't matter that much anyway.

Take Me To The Bridge

My Ryder Cup betting triumph has been somewhat overshadowed by the disastrous effect of the credit crunch on me poor old shares.
I don't want to dwell on this other than state it is just as well that I live in a basement flat.
By way of a new hobby,I have begun the practice of burning cash in a brazier in my back garden.
This is quicker and easier than buying shares, with the additional benefit that I don't have to pay dealing charges.
It's a win/win situation.
Things have come to such a sorry pass that I have been forced back into IT Contract slavery, and begin to serve another 3 month sentence on the 20th October.
It's a sair fecht.
Last Saturday presented an opportunity to return to the scene of this disastrous gig.
It remains my most catastrophic gig ever,and probably merits a top 10 position in the pantheon of "worst gigs experienced in the history of stand-up comedy".
But here was a chance of redemption...14 months after the event.
Comedy impresario, "Honest" Rick Molland drove myself and 2 other acts through to Glasgow for the evening.
By coincidence he had been the MC at my disastrous gig.
He took great delight in regaling the tale of my previous downfall to the other acts.
Oh how we laughed!
It's fair to say that a certain amount of exagerration has crept into the telling of the tale, but this is very much in the great storytelling tradition, and it would be churlish of me to object to it.
I expect that by this time next year, the legend will have it that an estimated total of 400 people walked out the gig as I ranted and raved , of which 23 later committed ritual suicide in Sauchiehall Street, so traumatised were they by my display.
But this time it was going to be different.
I was gig fit, and was ready to spring on stage like a lean, mean boxer and punch someone in the front row in the face, metaphorically, with my jokes.
In the end, 3 people showed up, and the gig was cancelled...
What made the night worthwhile was that we were afforded two views, from an east and west perspective, of the the new pedestrian bridge which has been placed at Harthill on the M8.
It has cost 5 million quid and was placed there by "the largest mobile crane in the world".
So to be among the first 10 000 or so people to have seen the bridge from the M8 made it a very special evening, in spite of our disappointment at the cancellation of the gig.

27/09/04 Golf IS cool

And lo, it came to pass that the USA did in fact win the Ryder Cup...
kerrching....kerrching!
It actually was a lot closer than the final score suggests, and could have gone either way, but anyway...a nice payday for me.
It's a real shame that the Ryder Cup is on "Sky", as it needs to get seen by a bigger audience.
It's the most gripping sports event of all, I think.
I'd compare the last day of the Ryder Cup to watching 5 hours of back-to-back penalty shootouts.
It's such a PR own goal by the Golf administrators to not sell the rights to a terrestrial channel...
Anyway, I suspect my "cool rating" is plummeting faster than a portfolio of Banking shares, as a result of my weird, evangelical ode to the great game of golf.
The golf bet was just a one-off and I am not resuming my football betting regime.
Having just watched Arsenal lose at home to Hull City served as a reminder of the dangers of football betting.
That is definitely the grandaddy of all coupon bustin' results, I'd say.
I just sent a text to an Arsenal supporting friend, who was at the game, asking if he knew who the comedian was who had the pet emu.
Ha Ha...amn't I the funny one...! what?
I jogged/walked to the top of Arthur's seat yesterday...
It was a cracking day, and I was joined at the top by a group of American tourists who cooed at what a fantastic view it was and what a "truly beautiful city" Edinburgh was.
After a few minutes a group of teenagers, with recogniseable local accents appeared.
One piped up loudly "Ya Cnut ya...! Imagine sledging doon that...!!!" as he surveyed the view from the summit.
I felt very proud.
On the way down, I met three witches...
They said something like "Teddy should win....but that Rab Brown, riding a black stallion still might pose a threat".
I've no idea what they were on about, but maybe it will become clear later?
I woke up in the middle of the night and started jotting things down which seemed funny at the time, but in the cold light of day I'm not sure...but I'll give them a bash at a gig on Tuesday...
...well here's what I wrote...
I was in Canada and I was talking to a Grizzly Bear.
I said "Have you ever killed a salmon with your bare hands?"
He said "Yes"...in a sarcastic tone.

Do you know when you're trying to take off a wellington boot, and you're easing your foot out, and sometimes you leave the sock behind in the boot, when you finally pull it out?
That's a bit like when you take your jumper off and your t-shirt comes off at the same time, isn't it?
That's my observational humour bit.

And, I've got 2 hurricanes chatting to each other.
"Did you see me? did you see me? I took the roof off!"

I also have started a new treatment aimed at obese women with self-esteem issues.
I'm calling my approach, "Hippotherapy".

I saw a cracking film last night.
It was a German film called "The Wave".
It's about a teacher at a High School in Germany who has a week to teach his class about the political doctrine "Autocracy".
He decides to fully immerse his pupils in the subject, and for the week they create a "movement" and explore the ideology of the greater good of the "group" subjugating that of the individual.
Of course, things get a little out of hand.
There were a few moments when credulity was stretched, but overall a compelling movie.
It's like a reverse of "Dead Poets Society".
I have to say that it did at times make the conversion to a fascist mentality enormously appealing and fun, even though, of course, I would oppose this happening.
Obviously.

16/09/08 Awesome

I recommend you go to see "Man On Wire".
What a brilliant, absolutely compelling tale.
I still can't believe he had the balls to do that.
There was something very eerie about his total self-belief and nervelessness.
I suspect I'm not the first person to say so, but it was great to be presented with
an amazingly memorable, uplifting image in the context of the twin towers, rather than forever associating them with the gruesome footage of planes smashing into the the buildings.
I also saw "The Mighty Boosh" live.
Very funny, but a little bit too much playing at being rock stars with their Boosh Band.
The bits I find funniest are the front-of-curtain banter sections with the 2 of them just riffing with each other and the audience.
When I watched "Morecambe & Wise" as a kid, it was always the similar thing they did at the start of the show which was my favourite bit.
I was never a fan of the big musical numbers or patchy sketches.
I have now gone a month without smoking, as the latest campaign to free myself from the evil addiction gathers momentum.
That's the good news...the bad news is I have to lose some weight again.
As usual I'd lost a fair amount during the Fringe, but coupled with not smoking, I've approached September and food with the attitude of a bear emerging from hibernation, scoffing anything that moves.
Last night I sat down on a stool and it buckled and broke.
This was maybe about to happen regardless of who sat on it, but I can't be sure and I can't afford the expense of hiring a structural engineer to analyse the stool to determine if there had been a certain amount of pre-existing, inherent weakness in the stool.

13/09/2008 My Lovely Ryder Cup

I took the plunge today and bet on the USA to lift the Ryder Cup.
I feel downright dirty and wrong, but succumbed to my base instincts.
I was unable to resist their current underdog status at the bookies.
I can't help feeling that the plot of this year's event is similar to the Father Ted epsisode in which Dougal & Ted are entered by Ireland into the Eurovision Song Contest as a ploy, to ensure that Ireland have no chance of winning, and therefore don't have to fork out to host yet another event, for the following year.
There is surely a parallel in the decision to appoint Nick Faldo as the Europe captain.
He is a loner with no concept of "team", and as well as being the most successful ever UK golfer, he also the least popular ever with his fellow pros.
He's bound to make some ill-advised remarks which will pump up the Americans, and I just can't see him as the great motivator.
The event itself needs an American win to re-invigorate it, as Europe has started to dominate.
Faldo could be the man to deliver this.
I think this is what the European Golf administrators are planning.

I did my first opening 15 on one of the "weekend" nights at The Stand this week.
I was really happy with the way it went.
It certainly wasn't barnstorming, but after a slow start the middle and end went really well.
I don't recall ever sweating as much as that onstage though.
I'm not sure what the cause was, but I was gushing big time.
Perhaps it was the large anount of wine I'd knocked back the previous evening at a gala dinner thing. Who knows?
I got a lot of positive feedback from random audience members after the event, although on the debit side, a friend of a friend heard someone in the bogs describe me as "shit".
So, no room for complacency then.
Of course, the "shit" comment outweighed all the other positive comments in my post-gig mood, but that's the way it is.
We just want to be loved by everyone I suppose.
Very pathetic and very needy....

10/09/2008 Scary

There was an amusing moment during Sarah Palin's speech at the Republican Convention last week, when she proclaimed that one of the consequences of an Obama presidency would be "an increase in death taxes".
At this point the camera cut to an elderly delegate in the audience (looking concerned).
It was immediately clear that the TV production crew viewed her as the audience member most likely to be affected in the short term by this alleged impact of Democratic fiscal policy.
You also see this kind of thing at the Oscars ceremony.
Every year there is a poignant section in which images of movie people, who have passed on during the current year, are flashed onto the screen.
At the end of this montage, the camera flashes round the auditorium, blatantly pinpointing those in the audience who might make it into next year's remembrance section.
I had a troublesome gig at The Stand last week in which some drunken twat shouted out all through my set.
I couldn't make sense of what he was trying to say, so just ploughed on...but not a very enjoyable show.
But on a more positive note, I went round my golf course in level par.
As a moment of sporting triumph, this knocks our successful Olympic athletes into a cocked hat.
I've never done this at Dalmeny before.
It's unprecedented.
I can tell you're impressed.
Never mind...

31/08/08 Up North

I've been away in sunny Crovie for a couple of days visiting my pals Sim and Bob, their daughters Harper and Alice and their greyhound dug Honey.
It was a hugely enjoyable contrast to the madness what is the Fringe, and I now feel suitably refreshed.
The banter was exceptional, the weather was great and I had the best seafood I've ever eaten in my life (fresh oysters and scallops).
I did have a slight disappointment in that I only beat Bob 5 & 4 at golf, after being 7 up after 10 holes, but hopefully I'll soon come to terms with this disappointment and move on.
It was great to see Honey tearing up and down a deserted beach at full speed..a truly awesome force of nature to witness at first hand.
To give some perspective, a greyhound has been recorded running 100m in 4.97 sec, (Usain Bolt's new world record is 9.62 seconds).
So if the two were in a race, rather than just a quick chest thump and a wave at the finish, the greyhound would probably have time to stop and have a quick shit, and still win the race comfortably.
I got talking with Alice (5) on the memory of a previous much-loved dog of theirs who'd passed on a couple of years ago.
Alice was aware that the dog had been taken to the vet to be "put to sleep", however she surprised me by confiding that the vet had "cut Jack in half".
I'm not quite sure how she had come to believe this, but it was a revelation that caused more than a few giggles as I drove back home to Edinburgh.
In general, it was much more relaxing and straightforward spending a lot of time talking to Harper (8) and Alice, rather than the previous month's experience of chatting to comedians about the Fringe, their shows, their audience numbers, their reviews, their material etc
It's a minefield and it's very easy to slip up and inadvertently upset someone with an unwise choice of words.
(and I'm just as bad and over-sensitive as anyone else, I hasten to add)
It's like spending a month playing one of these games you get at Gala Days where you have to guide a metal loop around some bendy wire, trying not to touch the wire and set off the alarm.
Hard work.
Had another 3 gigs last week which fell into the "solid but unspectacular" category.
Last night, I was playing my congas with my neighbour's band at a Sports Club prizegiving evening.
I enjoy the playing, but always find this event a little odd, as no-one seems to acknowledge we're actually there...(an occasional single clap at the end of a song, and that's it)
There was a little late flurry of dancing this time, and in fairness the food was good, and free pints will always be welcomed as far as I am concerned.
At the end of the set, the female saxophonist remarked on how much she had enjoyed my conga playing, and said that I had a "great sense of rhythm".
I have to admit, that I did have an "absolute stormer" in terms of conga playing...(it's great to write your own reviews, isn't it? It really takes the stress out of being reviewed, and I recommend it heartily to all comedians/musicians/whatever)
She went on to say that the previous drummer she'd played with here 2 years ago was "rubbish...and all over the place!".
I took great amusement in informing her that this drummer was me as well...(I think I may have overdone it on the "free pints" last time)
It's good to get honest reviews...

26/08/08 It's All Over

So the circus has headed out of town for another year...
Last Saturday, I was quite relieved to have finished off the 17 day run of NCFOM and put my feet up for the rest of the Fringe.
However, I ended up doing 12 extra gigs last week, including a run of afternoon Electric Mouse shows at the "Jekyll & Hyde" that I'd rate as amongst the most satisfying gigs I've ever done.
I just seemed to find an extra comedy gear from somewhere, and a few of them I'd even hesitantly describe as "absolute stormers".
I'm itching to get back into a comedy club and keep the momentum going, because obviously I'm scared of forgetting whatever it is I am doing now that is getting a much bigger reaction than at the start of the Fringe.
I thought Rhod Gilbert should have won the big award thing, and thought it pathetic and patronising that the "Spirit of the Fringe Award" was given to "all the comedians on the Fringe".
There are loads of Fringe stalwarts who could have been deservedly recognised by this award, but they blew it and went for a stupid gimmick dreamt up by some pissed PR jackass.
I suspect Rhod was maybe the victim of politics ; being unwittingly associated with the idiotic branding calamity that was "The Edinburgh Comedy Festival".
I suspect it won't re-appear next year.
I do really like David O'Doherty, but I just thought that Mr Gilbert was out on his own this year.
But anyway, as I've said before, I hate competitions.
Other things I learned this year...
Free late gigs are to be avoided.
A completely pissed audience with no financial investment in a show isn't worth the hassle.
One of the rituals of such event is a succession of tired, jaded comedians politely asking the compere if they can "get on early"...
The compere then puts on the classic car mechanic expression when you ask how much they reckon the repair will cost....
So you do a gig to a few pissed up members of the public, and a few pissed off comedians, who realise they have to hang about longer than they wanted.
It's ideal!
And to Edinburgh drivers....cheer up you miserable bastards!
Do you really need to be taking your car anyway ,wherever you are going?
Driving during the Fringe is bad enough, but with the ubiquitous tram roadworks added to the equation, you ain't going anywhere particularly quickly, so just relax and stop being such aggressive twats.

19/08/08 I'd like to thank....

Well, that sure was swell....
I'm glad the run is over as I can now gad about seeing loads of other shows, but it'd be fair to say that's the best I've ever enjoyed being involved in a Fringe show...
It was big crowds all the way, and a happy bunch of co-performers with whom it was a pleasure to put on a show.
I'd also like to make a special big thanks to Dave Reilly for taking the time and effort to record our intro tape.
He is truly a man of the people....
And a big thank 'ee kindly to all our special guest spots!
And thanks to the Meridian Bar Staff who were all extremely supportive of the show.
(It isn't always like this...and yes, "Roman Eagle Lodge", I am talking about you...)
We had a greatlast show on Saturday.
Some people couldn't get into the venue as it was absolutely full.
It's always nice when you have friends along for the show to witness this.
It looks fairly impressive.
This situation could only have been improved upon if an A-List comedian turned up, was unable to get in, resulting in me having to tell him to piss off...
Somewhat like the old joke in which a man gets Frank Sinatra to approach him in a bar to impress a lady he's with, and ends up saying "Fuck off Frank, I'm busy...".
I've particularly enjoyed the pisstake introductions for each other which we introduced throughout the run of the show.
Audiences seem to really enjoy the acts taking big swipes at each other in an affectionate way.
Also, the NCFOM team have been approached about running a regular comedy night at The Meridian, which would be good.
Oh, and I've stopped smoking again...
I was watching the Olympics Steeplechase race last night...
It's something of an oddity isn't it?
I mean, what is the point of the "water jump"...
It must have been a real pain for the people who built nice, new athletic tracks to comply with the requirements of having a hole in the track filled with water.
What?
Why?
Who are the Steeplechase runners...
Are they people who aren't fast enough to just run, but have more of a chance if there's "jumping over things" element?
(obviously the answer is yes)

08/08/08 Hey Edinburgh!

Only kidding.
I am still having a fun time (yes, really!)
Predictably, after our frankly, amazing crowds for the first few shows, it has been a bit quieter over the last few days.
The monsoon conditions haven't helped.
Anyway, we have fairly solid bookings for the next few days so should be back to playing to big, happy crowds rather than to slightly bewildered looking, smaller ones.
Yesterday was by far my worst gig, as the small audience just stared at me for 15 minutes.
There was a bad omen before the gig which led me to suspect this might be a bad gig.
I was on the number 12 bus heading down Leith Walk.
Towards the end of my journey a man came upstairs and sat in front of me.
It immediately became apparent that he'd shat himself at some point within the preceding few days.
As I got out my seat to alight at the next stop, I started gagging and it took superhuman powers of control on my part to stop me projectile vomiting down the stairs of the bus on my way off it.
It really was the worst smell I have ever experienced in my life.
It wasn't an ideal pre-gig preparation by any stretch of the imagination.
Other notes to self.
Shut up.
ie don't laughingly say to a a crowd of comedians "I wonder how many crap comedians will be referring to the "Credit Crunch" as a type of biscuit during the Fringe...!"
(I could tell from some of the expressions on the comedians' faces that they themselves had such "Credit Crunch" material)
Probably better to keep such prejudices to myself.
I chuckled when I heard that one of our guest spots referred to the "3 Weeks" reviewers as "very enthusiastic".
There's definitely a subtext going on in that quote.
I don't think we've had any more reviewers in since the "3 Weeks" one, but I'm quite happy with that.
It'd be nice to get one today or tomorrow, as we are going to be very busy again.

04/08/08 Fringe Update

Well, it's been a pretty hectic few days as the Fringe has swung into action.
"No Comedy For Old Men" has been ticking along nicely.
We had a reviewer from "3 Weeks" in for our first night which could have been a disaster, but turned into a great start with a surprisingly big crowd.
(review posted at bottom of blog)
Friday was a little quieter with about 20 in, but then we had 60 plus on Saturday.
On the basis of my previous experience of doing Fringe shows, these numbers are pretty sensational.
I had worried about the remoteness of the venue, but it seems that perhaps the remoteness is working in our favour as there are not many other venues in our particular area.
I enjoyed watching Wilson Dixon and Arnold Brown knock 'em dead at The Stand launch party on Thursday.
The biggest laughs of the Fringe so far for me were watching Richard Herring's "Wanking Off Paedophiles" story.
I was in serious pain from laughing, and came perilously close to falling off my seat at one point in the proceedings.
I'm also delighted to see his "Headmaster's Son" show get 5 stars on Chortle.
Ok, I'm a fan, but he definitely deserves more recognition in terms of the consistently brilliant shows he brings up to the Fringe year after year.
I was worried for him this year as he foolishly decided to go head-to-head with our show in the 7-8pm slot.
I hope it hasn't cost him too much at the box-office.
I also played my drum in the Festival Cavalcade Procession with the Edinburgh Samba School.
It was the first time I'd done it for a while, and it was very enjoyable to be back in the groove...
We seemed to upset many of the army stewards for moving too slowly along Princes Street...maybe we're all just getting a bit older...
The feel of the event has changed though...the Samba School was always an eclectic mixture of individuals...hard-core, alternative tree-huggers rubbing shoulders with those with more conventional lifestyles....A little of that diversity seems to have gone...but hey it was great fun!
Pissed, on Saturday night, I mentioned to a couple of fellow samba players that I was speaking to "Arthur Smith" the night before.
This prompted a raising of virtual handbags under chins and a chorus of "woooooos", as I was roundly accused of being a shameless name-dropper.
It's a funny one...the only reason I mentioned it was that Arthur Smith is a legend, and one of my true comedy heroes, and it was a thrill to speak to him.
I'm certainly not trying to impress anyone by saying that I spoke to him. I was merely being honest that it was a special moment for me to meet one of my idols...but anyway, as I said to Stewart Lee later on in the same evening, "People are cunts.." :-)
I'd also recommend "Teddy Bares" at The Stand...a delightfully dark and witty journey from one of Scotland's top comics.


No Comedy For Old Men - Free
Laughing Horse Free Festival - Gordon Alexander, Jeff O'Boyle, Jim Park and Martin McAllister
Cheered on by enthusiastic locals and some Celts outside the venue for good measure (yes, there is performer/audience interaction - that's how I know!) this is clearly the comedy event to go to if you want to mingle with the natives. The predictable themes of Bush, asylum seekers and sex are all covered but the toilet paper raffle ending is one hundred percent unique, as is a hilarious account by O'Boyle on Irish in-breeding (I'm Cornish, I understand).This may not be the cleverest or the funniest show on the Fringe but it sums up what the festival is all about: friends who love to have a laugh together, cold pint of beer, good atmosphere... and all for the bargain price of nothing!
Laughing Horse @ Meridian, 31 Jul - 16 Aug, 7.05pm (8.05pm), free, fpp 82.
tw rating 3/5
[bw]

26/07/08 Not working for the man

My contract finished yesterday...yee ha!
It feels good to chill out and be a free man again, although I really should be spending all my spare time getting into a state of readiness for the upcoming Fringe.
A few folk in the comedy business have recently told me that I have improved a lot.
This is a good thing.
I've had quite a lot of gigs recently, most of which have gone well.
I did a full weekend for the first time in Glasgow last week ; the Thursday and Friday were great, but the Saturday night was a bit of a struggle.
Overall though, quite chipper about the old comedy thing.
I think I started getting better after I got a couple of duff reviews on this
comedy web site.
I remember at the time that my nose was fairly out of joint about the reviews; mainly because, by any objective analysis, I'd gone down really well (which was alluded to in the review).
Anyway,with hindsight, it was probably the best thing that's happened to my act, as it made me take a long, hard look at what I was doing, and led me to play around with the format a bit.
I'm not saying I'm amazing and wonderful though...just got a bit better, ok?
I was having a funny conversation yesterday with a work colleague regarding our experience with "tight gits" in our respective social circles.
I do know people who will always, always, always be last to get a round in any pub situation, and who are delighted if, due to licensing time restrictions, they are unable to get their full quota of rounds in at the bar.
I was trumped though by an outstanding tale of tightness.
My colleague was contacted by telephone by a friend and asked if he would mind looking after a bag of frozen peas of his by storing it in his freezer.
Why?
So that he could switch off his freezer and save the electricity, as he was going away on holiday for a week.
Now you could argue that he was being green.
But I'd say that was merely a by-product of the principal motive, which was undoubtedly tightness of the highest order.
That was a very funny tale.
Last year I wrote this about the death of a couple of friends of mine ; Harry Horse and his wife Mandy.
I was shocked to read some grim details emerge of the actual circumstances of their deaths in the media.
Later that day I had a gig on, and it felt very strange to witness one of the comedians go into a routine about Harry Horse and the circumstances of his death.
I didn't enjoy hearing a comedy routine about something so personal, but I did rationalise that I can't have it both ways.
If you're going to have the odd dark piece of material in your set, you have to take it on the chin when you hear material on a subject that you are a bit sensitive about.
It was a pretty good joke though, I observed objectively.

09/07/08 Crazy Horses

I was a bit apprehensive about last Thursday at The Stand as a deputation from my work were attending.
Luckily the gig went really well, so I avoided the awfulness of people at work on the following day sympathetically telling me "How brave" I was.
Don't ever say that to a comedian.
It is taken as a euphemism for "You are shite, but you deserve slight credit for your misguided pluck"
I had actually brought a gun with me in case anyone tried this, but thankfully it remained in my desk for the duration, and I forfeited my opportunity to be the main story on "Scotland Today".
I'd say the work crew were split 50/50 between those that liked it and those that didn't, (I'm taking a "no comment" as a negative).
That's quite respectable I think.
The main talking point of the evening though was the mass walkout of a group of 20 American Mormons during Keir McAllister's opening set.
The fact that they were occupying the front 2 rows made things even more dramatic.
I think it was the C word which most upset them, as well as Keir's description of Mormonism as being a "crazy, fucked-up religion".
Now this was all undoubtedly hilarious, and I laughed as much as anyone, but I can't help feeling just a little sorry for them as they seemed like a cheery bunch initially.
A bit naive to sit right at the front though...and I can only assume that they weren't familiar with the rough and tumble of a comedy club, and the range of subject matters likely to arise.
I'll never know what they would have thought of my set, but there you go.
Talking of the C word, Alan Bennet's brilliant book "Untold Stories" has had me cackling with laughter this week.
In one passage he refers to the film "The Madness of King George III", in connection with the death of the Earl of Pembroke.
He'd written to Bennett about the character in the film, Lady Pembroke.
She was "a lady of mature years to whom in his derangement George III takes a fancy".
Apparently the King became incensed at how Lady Pembroke was treated by her husband, and questioned him about it.
He replied: "Sire, if you had a wife whose cunt was as cold as a greyhound's nostril, you would have done the same."
Very funny, and it's difficult to think of any other word which would work as well in that line.
Had a fairly crap gig last night in Glasgow.
The compere didn't have a great night, and the whole evening was incredibly low-energy.
It was strange...the venue was sold out yet it felt really quiet.
Not that I'm making excuses or anything.
Disappointingly, a good few of my highly-respected Scottish comic peers were in attendance to witness my lacklustre performance.
Cunts.
Come to one of my good nights, why don't you?
This week I was also startled to see an ex-girlfriend's brother conducting the the "Brighton Gay Male Choir" on the "Richard and Judy show".
Good stuff...
And now I feel morally obliged to watch the "Last Choir Standing" series on BBC1 (they are in it).

04/07/08 Viva Espana!

"It's magic if you come from Madrid, it's beautiful if you come from Barcelona, it's a vindication if you come from Valencia or Villarreal and it's lovely if you come from Liverpool."
Well, that was John Motson’s prepared line which he made in the event of Spain winning Euro 2008.
Not quite “They think it’s all over… It is now!” is it?
I don’t think it will still be quoted wistfully in 40 years time.
In fact most people will have forgotten about it by this time next week.
The “lovely Liverpool” line will probably be remembered ; but not in a good way.
In response I’d say “It’s shite if you come from Sidcup, it’s bollocks if you come from Bolton and it’s fucked if you come from Farnborough.
There you go…that’s just as clever as his one, and I’m not even a professional commentator.
Other than that, his ridiculous, theatrical pronounciation of “Schwein-steiger!” did have me giggling, as well as the Barry White style delivery of the German coach’s name “Loew” which he pronounced “L-o-v-e”…
As finals go, last night’s match was pretty good.
A lot of quality football on show, with both sides prepared to have a go at each other.
It’s a shame it was disfigured as a spectacle by the woeful commentary of Messrs Motson & Lawrenson.
Motty should have gone a while ago.
He has clearly lost a lot of sharpness, and seems permanently confused.
His reactions seem about a half a second behind everyone elses’..
Lawrenson’s style owes much to Stuart Hall’s “penguin” commentary on “It’s A Knockout”, and does nothing to enhance viewers’ understanding of the game.
His continual scoffing at “The Germans”, as he disdainfully referred to them throughout the match, was tedious and cringeworthy.
I never want to hear his whining voice again.
The two Alans, Messrs Hansen and Shearer were equally annoying.
“I couldn’t believe that Aragones took off Torres!” piped up Hansen.
This has been a constant tactic of the Spanish coach Aragones throughout the tournament, ie play Torres for the first 70 minutes to give the opposing defence the runaround, as he hangs on the defenders shoulders, constantly making runs ; then put on Villa in place of him, he being more of a penalty-box finisher who will likely thrive against a tiring defence.
It’s lazy, lazy punditry and I’d love to see how much these buffoons cream off the BBC for their efforts.
The only pundits who emerged with any credit were Martin O’Neill and Gordon Strachan.
Ray Stubbs’ and Marcel Desailly’s regular “Abbott & Costello” tribute act was vaguely entertaining, but offered nothing in the way of insight into anything in particular.

29/06/08 Bumble Bee Sighting Shock

We were supposed to be heading North this weekend but the weather forecast scared us off.
Instead on Saturday went for a walk round Holyrood Park to maintain the campaign to be a lean, mean fighting-machine in time for the Festival.
The first incident of note was seeing two young Japanese women using their mobile phones to excitedly film a bumblebee which was shuttling about from flower to flower, as is their wont.
I was immediately concerned about the lasting effect on the bumblebee of this level of interest.
He might assume that life is always like this, and may go on to suffer crushing disappointment in the future once the cameras have gone.
I remember having a storming first gig at "Red Raw", then being disappointed that I wasn't commissioned for a comedy series on Channel 4 on the following day.
I still haven't quite got over the desolation.
Once at the top, I was amused to see a hen party making its way slowly towards the summit.
They were all fairly on the large side, and the demeanor of many of them suggested that a defibrillator might be required at very short notice.
But, fair play to them, they all (eventually) made it to the top.
It made me feel quite smug about my own level of fitness.
I can confidently state that I am slightly fitter than the average morbidly-obese Hen Party member from Bolton.
It doesn't automatically qualify me for the Olympics, but it's a start.
Walking home, I passed a hairdresser in the Grassmarket called "The 3 Stooges".
I wouldn't have thought the coiffures of the Stooges were the best seeling point for a hairdresser, but maybe the "bowl cut"and the "premature balding out-of-control look" are due a fashion relaunch.
Traditionally, Haymarket is shit for shops and restaurants.
Things seemed to have changed though...
"Chop Chop" on Morrison Street is the best (and cheapest) Chinese restaurant I've ever been to (proper authentic stuff), and "Sushiya" on Dalry Road is the best sushi place in Edinburgh by a mile.
I've still got the world's worst Fish and Chip shop on my doorstep, but looks like we're moving in the right direction.
I want Spain to win tonight, but can't handle the "little Englander" anti-German sniping of Motty and Lawro...
at least a German victory would shut them up...but Spain are the better footballing side and should edge it.

21/06/08 Quiet Night Out

I've just been watching "Football Focus".
Here we go...
Right, the presenter is situated in some kind of virtual Art Gallery.
It's a preview of tonight's Euro 2008 Quarter-Final between Holland and Russia...
Oh no..please god, no...they're not..?? Well, yes they are, you guessed it...repeated reference to the Netherlands as "Dutch Masters".
Geddit?
Aaaarrrggghhhh!
Why don't you show some imagination you lazy, cliche-ridden cunts..!
(ah! ....that's better...)
There's Mark Laurenson looking more and more like a Tudor thatched cottage every day.
Time to switch off the telly and do something more interesting instead.
I had a kicking gig at The Stand in Glasgow last night, and then watched Jason Rouse hilariously split the room.
It all went off at one point.
There was a bit of shouty stuff from a table of female teachers of a mature age.
The show carried on, but at one point one of the women stood up and walked onto the stage to remonstrate with Mr Rouse vis-a-vis his rather incendiary material.
A couple of staff rushed on the stage to escort her off, and the show continued.
It was one of these slow motion moments when you're not sure what is going to happen next.
It kind of encapsulates what I love about live stand-up comedy...this capacity for random unpredictability.
Quality...
As much as I loved his performance, I still end up watching about half of it through my fingers as my hands are clasped over my face.
Looking round at the audience, I'd say this style of watching him is very much de rigeur.
Part of me does feel slightly guilty about laughing.
I sometimes worry that being in comedy eventually makes you immune to being shocked or offended about anything.
I'm not sure if it is necesssarily a good thing to be desensitised in this way.
On the other hand, even if some of the material is horribly offensive, I can still admire the delivery, which is consistently excellent.
Although, I suppose I could say the same thing about other comedians that don't get away with it, so to speak.

15/06/08 Mixed News

I had a good gig at The Stand last week, so the comedy mojo is making a steady recovery.
Unfortunately, my Bus driver application was rejected on the grounds that "plenty of crumpet!" was regarded as an "inappropriate" reason for wanting the job.
This blog may not have happened as I came within a couple of paces of walking over a cliff on a yomp in the Moffat Hills yesterday.
I didn't realise the edge was so close and it was 1500 ft down, which may have hurt a bit.
I'm doing next Friday night at The Stand in Glasgow with Jason Rouse headlining.
He is the wrongest comedian I've seen in a long time, but also hilarious.
I always enjoy watching comedians who split a room.
I decided recently to get revenge on someone who'd bullied me as achild, through the use of voodoo.
I made a little doll of him and stuck loads of needles into it, in the traditional fashion.
The results have been deeply disappointing though.
Not only is he still alive, but he's now stopped smoking and is likely to live even longer than he would have done before my intervention.
And, I've found this whole episode so stressful that I have started smoking again.

08/06/08 So anyway...

After my best ever run of gigs, the last 3 have been absolute clunkers.
I don't even want to describe how bad they were in gory detail...Just take my word for it.
The gigs had been going so well...
It's like I've been previously driven around as part of a huge procession in an open-topped car, cheered on by adoring crowds, when all of a sudden there have been 3 shots at me, resulting in half my head getting blown off.
There were mitigating circumstances on each occasion, but still, a big fuck-off spanner has been lobbed into my confidence machinery.
I've got another gig tonight at The Stand.
Even though I will be desperate to have a good night, you have to be careful not to try too hard. Desperation isn't necessarily all that funny.
There was a curious bit of programming yesterday morning on STV.
I switched on the telly to be confronted with "Holiday On The Buses", a feature film version of the 70s sitcom "On The Buses".
I wondered what the typical Saturday morning viewers (10-14 year olds?) would make of this,cough, "film".
HOTB represents a strange, twilight world in which young, attractive women throw themselves at a fat, middle-aged bus driver("Stan") and his conductor mate ("Jack"), who has a face only a mother could love, (possibly could be mistaken for the Brazilian footballer Ronaldinho's gonzo uncle).
Stan's mother is also on holiday and is a bit of a goer, ending up shagging a character played by Wilfred Brambell, best known as "Old man Steptoe".
(I should point out that the shagging is merely alluded to, and is not graphically represented on screen)
Stan's sister Olive is there with her husband too.
Her husband spends the entire film calling her "a great lump", and routinely turns down her entreaties to have sex.
It's quality stuff, and provides a fascinating insight, for today's generation of young people, to how people lived in the 1970s.
I think the guy who played "Inspector Blakie" won an Oscar for Best Supporting Role.

Euro 2008 kicked off yesterday.
Normally I'm a big fan of "Opening Ceremonies", but it's fair to say this one was pants.
Turgid, unimaginative and with similar production standards to Port Seton Gala Day.
Could do better.
Hansen and Shearer came across a sullen teenagers ; showing very little enthusiasm for the tournament, just because no British teams were there.
Watching this tedious display, I felt happiness that the BBC have lost most of their football rights for next season.
Their setup has become too much of a smug gentlemen's club, and needs to be completely revamped.
Listen you twats...you're living the dream...you're travelling the world,getting to see all this top football, and getting paid loads of money (at our expense) to utter a few bored cliches about it.
The least we should expect as license fee payers is that you show a little enthusiasm in what you're doing.
It's bad for the tournament that the Swiss lost yesterday.
They were robbed.
They've now got a mountain to climb to qualify. (sorry)

04/06/08 No Comedy For Old Men

This is the flyer for the award-entering “No Comedy For Old Men” comedy show which I will be appearing in during this year’s Fringe.
I am on the right and am assuming the Abe Lincoln role.
Purely by coincidence, I’d already intended incorporating extended sections of “The Gettysburg Address” into my routine, (just like Margaret Thatcher. In fact she released a record of herself reciting the said speech. Sadly it did not feature prominently in the higher reaches of the Hit Parade).
As well as stopping smoking for an impressive 150th time (although I did smoke 5 at the holiday weekend…but the overall stats are “5 in 18 days”), I’ve decided to permanently stop posting on Internet Comedy Forums.
I get agitated reading pompous posts of certainty when it comes to comedy matters, but then when I do post a retort…I immediately regret the post, finding myself disagreeing with my own logic (although I can’t be bothered to go in and edit the post or delete it)
I then worry about being thought of as a grumpy old git by the rest of the comedy community in Scotland.
I think it’s better to walk away and find something more productive to do with my spare time, (maybe something eccentric like writing better material…).
I’ve signed on for another 2 months of penal servitude (there’s a joke there somewhere), but will have the whole of August off to gad about at the Festival.
Tonight we are doing a preview show of all the acts appearing during the Fringe at “The Meridian Bar” on Leith walk.
My gut instinct is that the audience will be entirely composed of other acts (of which there are a lot), and that the evening’s merit as a promotional exercise will be debatable.
But never, mind, I don’t want to get negative on your asses, sisters and brothers.
It’ll be useful to check out the venue.
I’m still giddy with excitement at winning the “Eightsome Reel” trophy at the weekend with my esteemed golfing partner Brian “Beaky” Smith.
I now have an impressive claret jug sitting proudly on my mantelpiece.
I’m still slightly knackered though from playing 2 rounds in a day at Machrihanish Golf Course in Argyll, in what felt like 45 degrees temperature.
I played football last night in a manner reminiscent of Sir Douglas Bader (he having put on the wrong set of legs accidentally, after an embarrassing mix-up in the prosthetics ward).
A cunning “big con” was concocted on the 18th green to fool “Parky” and “Beaky” (nicknames were compulsory), that they had in fact been pipped at the post by our nearest rivals, messrs “Tony” and “Calum” (crap nicknames I thought)
We needed “Crabbie” and “Bilbo” (that’s more like it) to beat them, and we knew they were 1 Up as they headed down the 17th.
It turned out they won the 17th and took the match 2 & 1 ; however, a plot was hatched to take the game down the 18th in the pretence it was still “live”.
“Crabbie” and “Bilbo” hid decent drives, but then proceeded to hit a couple of “Charlie Cairoli” influenced approach shots as myself and Beaky looked on in mounting disbelief.
I turned to Beaky and quietly confided to him, “We’re fucked!”
“Tony” had 2 putts from 30 feet to salvage a draw for the match and take the overall trophy.
We worriedly looked on as he removed his tiny putter from his golf bag, which was made from an old smarties tube, and lined up the putt.
He sent the first putt 3 feet past, but, amidst excruciating tension, he sank the second putt to “take the trophy”.
It was only 2 hours later during the presentation ceremony that the stitch-up was revealed.
I was in awe of the execution and flawless acting of all the participants.
I would definitely have burst out giggling at some point in the proceedings.
I was concerned with my gullibility.
I was sure I’d seen them shaking hands on the 17th green (we were playing one hole ahead), but was easily dissuaded of this belief when I mentioned it to them.
But why else would all 4 players spontaneously converge onto a tight group on a green?
To do a little Scottish folk dance?
To have a group snog?
I'd be good on the Derren Brown show...very suggestible (ie a fuckwit)

"No Comedy For Old Men"
31st July - 16th Aug 2008
7pm
Meridian Bar
138 Leith Walk

07/05/08 A Walk On The Wild Side

Delicious home-made curries served with freshly baked chapattis ; scrambled free range eggs mixed with the finest Norwegian smoked salmon and freshly-caught trout; organic ciabatta rolls, cream cheese with delicately sundried tomatoes, washed down with copious quantities of the very finest wines and malt whiskies…this isn’t just any camping, this is…(well, you get the picture?)
In spite of all this classy food malarkey, we were still camping out in the wild, far from the madding crowd and all that kind of thing.
What a fantastic weekend though.
The actual weather forecast was seriously shite, but thankfully completely wrong ; dry and sunny being the order of the day.
The initial canoeing down Loch Veyatie was pure bliss.
I found it all very Zen-like and relaxing gliding down the Loch…
However, carrying the canoes down from the road to the launch site was slightly less enjoyable.
They don’t feel too heavy when you lift them up for the first time, but after the first 100 yards, it starts to get more than a little painful.
We were all on 2-man “Canadian-style” open canoes.
I was at the front and my old mucker John was at the back.
It’s easier being at the front in that all you do is just concentrate on paddling without taking direction into account, although physically it’s harder overall..
The person at the back, as well as normal paddling, constantly has to adjust the line of the canoe using their paddle as an improvised rudder.
Half way down the loch we decided to switch positions.
This was where things went rather awry.
It wasn’t the best timing in terms of changing the positions ; the water had suddenly become a bit choppier, and in the technical jargon of canoeing , I was making a complete cunt of things.
On a couple of occasions I tried to straighten the canoe as we were blown off course, but inadvertently exaggerated the misdirection, (it’s like doing the opposite of what you would do to correct direction, if you were in a rowing boat..I think)
In a couple of nasty moments we were side-on to the waves and very nearly went over.
It could have been very serious because at this point we’d become separated from the rest of the canoes and would have been stuck in the freezing cold water for an indeterminable period of time if we’d gone over.
In fairness to the other canoes, it is difficult to track people behind you because leaning round and looking back makes the canoe rock from side to side, which is not hugely enjoyable in such situations.
The agreed practice in the event of a capsize was to cling to the canoe and wait to be towed in by another canoe, but in this instance we would have just had to swim to the shore.
I reckon we would have been ok, but it was a far from comfortable experience.
Anyway, we made it down to the camp site, set up, then climbed Suilven in the afternoon.
What a fantastic mountain.
There are amazing views, also some exposed, easy scrambling to get the adrenaline going.
I did the summit but decided against doing the dodgier East Ridge mainly because it was blowing a gale and with my newly acquired lighter frame, I would be risking getting blown off , (but not in a good way).
Mitch (who is apparently now heavier than me) and Bob did conquer the dodgy peak, and in doing so cemented their position as the “Tenzing and Hillary” of the 2008 expedition.
The Saturday night was great craic.
A roaring fire, a big curry banquet, a clear night sky (we did actually see some odd UFO-type things shooting across the sky), and some tip-top quality banter.
There were 9 of us, and often in groups that size it’s likely that there will be splits into little factions.
It’s fair to say that this was never the case on our trip, and it really did feel like a unified co-operative team , happily devoid (for the most part) of hissy fits and pointless arguments.
It’s just a group of people who have known each other a long time, who don’t feel the need to puncture any silences with banal chit-chat, and who are just seeking some good-natured fun in a wilderness environment, (even if that sounds like PR for a “Doggers’ Society”).
Whilst the canoe down was fairly straightforward with a following breeze and favourable river current, the home journey was always going to be a lot harder.
To add to our worries , the wind freshened up and we faced a strong headwind all the way back.
When the first canoe set off, it was less than reassuring sight to see the crew paddling madly without moving an inch in the homeward direction.
In the end we had to combine towing the canoes past some of the shallow, fast-moving sections of the river.
This could only be achieved by wading in the freezing water for sustained periods of time, dragging the canoe, , and alternating with a period of paddling.
After a long haul we did finally get back to base…
I was knackered ; probably as much by the mental strain of keeping the canoe the right way up (I was still a little freaked out by the first day canoeing near-miss), as just the physical toll of paddling.
There was a definite sense of achievement at having made the journey.
At a couple of points in the return leg, I was absolutely convinced we were going to have to abandon the canoes and walk back in.
What a weekend though. Superb. It certainly got me out of my comfort zone.
And we even survived driving down the A9 to get home.
(I couldn’t help but mull over the irony of surviving the scarier aspects of the canoeing trip, but then fall victim to an oncoming, suicidal overtake by some boy-racers in a souped-up Ford Escort convertible)

29/04/08 Good Moaning

This is the mountain which I will be conquering this weekend. It’s called Suilven and it looks a bit scary, but I have no fear and will laugh in the face of danger as I scramble along its precipitous ridge.
(assuming that I survive the canoe trip there ok)
Email should be a positive boon in terms of easy, quick, group-communication needed to organise an event of this nature.
However, the reality is somewhat different.
Emails get consistently ignored, text messages are left unanswered, people reply eventually, but then fail to include everyone on the original distribution list in their reply.
Such is the delay sometimes in getting a reply from everyone, that many have forgotten what the original question was by the time the answers trickle in.
Then the whole “ignoring” thing starts to do your head in.
If it’s just one email or text that’s getting ignored, it’s easy to shrug your shoulders and not let it bother you.
However, when this happen a few times, my mood noticeably darkens, and the tempting notion of embarking on a “killing spree” in Haymarket is only curtailed by the unfortunate non-availability of powerful, automatic handguns..
Like it or not, the reality is that we subconsciously grade all our friends and acquaintances to form a pecking order.
If you’re “A list”, all your calls will be more or less immediately returned.
The “B list”are usually replied to within 2-3 days, but occasionally need to call again to get a response.
“B List” people can still be seen as valued friends, but they’re just not quite as important, clever or creative as their “A List” peers, and may miss out occasionally on corporate jollies and gala luncheons.
“C list” are mainly people selling Kitchen Design (“we’re in your area tomorrow!”) or Double-Glazing Salesmen, or possibly old school friends trying to organise a reunion.
I have been shocked to discover that in some instances my perceived “A List” status is nothing more than a myth.
I’ve been idiotically deluding myself.
I have been relegated to “B List” (although not right across the board I hasten to add. Some people out there still think I’m cool and influential…The idiots.).
How did this happen? Where did it all go wrong?
I can’t pretend any longer, and must try to accept this devastating truth.
Maybe I was always a “B List” and misinterpreted various social signals, deeming them commiserate with “A List” status. Like being given the opportunity to wash their cars, like Biff Tannen in “Back to the Future 2”.
I’m not sure whether to treat my “A List” contacts like “B List” contacts in a powerful demonstration of revenge, by subtly delaying responses to direct requests.
This policy could backfire.
I could find myself banished to “C List” status as a consequence for fooling around with an established caste system.
I’m not bitter though, and think I might embrace my everyman status, throw away my laptop and mobile phone, and become a Ghandi type figure in Scotland wandering around the Highlands solving people’s problems in a funny way, then disappearing into the Glen to find my next assignment.
Actually, I think I might try to organise a school reunion…

I was gutted to hear of the death of Humphrey Lyttelton.
He was one of these figures I’d just assumed would go on forever.
In my memory he was always very old, and was destined to be an old codger in perpetuity.
I always loved the opening couple of minutes of “I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue” where Humph makes a few jokes referencing the locality of the broadcast.
I don’t know how much he actually wrote himself, but the delivery was always absolutely flawless, and never ceased to crack me up.

22/04/08 That Sinking Feeling

It was really great to see Joon Broon hoovering up any available front row pints at the esteemed Red Raw Comedy Night. Just like the old days! woo hoo!
It was slightly disappointing that she didn’t get the chance to down a full one in vintage style, but I’m sure there’ll be plentiful future opportunities.
On one of the last times I saw her compering , I ended up kissing her arse on stage… (my first ever appearance on stage at The Stand).
This was engineered by funnyman Dave Reilly fraudulently filling in a “Prize Draw Card” with my name attached, which stated that “I would love to kiss the compere’s arse!”.
And so it came to pass that I was summoned onto the stage to perform the aforementioned act of worship.
Last night one of the acts came on, told a few jokes, then spent the rest of his spot with a chopstick up his nose, a silver ball spinning in his hand and one of these Diablo things swinging around.
Quality.
Derek Johnston had a fantastic gig.
We are fellow practitioners of the “out there” comedy genre, and it’s always great watching him when the audience get it, as they certainly did last night.
I was slightly unnerved to hear today of some Canadian canoeists having to be dramatically rescued after they capsized in a loch in Sutherland due to a freak gust of wind.
I am going canoeing/mountaineering in Sutherland in a couple of weeks, and could have done without dwelling on this incident.
Although maybe it’s a good thing, as we’ve now been made fully aware of the intrinsic risks involved.
I’m not a boats/water fan and much prefer the old terra firma, baby…!
The trouble is that to get to the mountain we have to canoe across a loch.
I’ve had boating difficulties before. Remember this?
There was also a hair-raising boat trip in Colombia.
This involved 4 of us in a tiny little boat in Cape Horn-esque sea conditions, with, of course, no lifejackets.
This terrifying ordeal lasted for 2 hours before we finally made it to land.
In the midst of the terror, amongst other dark thoughts , I remember contemplating what tunes would be played at my funeral.
(maybe “Sailing” by Rod Stewart? or the old classic “Paddlin’ Madeline Home” by Cliff Edwards)
I was at a funeral recently where one of the hymns was the same tune as “One-Nil…to the Arse-enal..One-Nil…to the Arse-enal” (originally “Go West” by the “Pet Shop Boys”).
Why am I writing this? I’ve no idea really….
I’m sure if the weather is fine it will be an idyllic experience, however, the trouble with Scottish weather is that it can change for the worse very quickly.
Here’s a good clip of Richard Herring dealing with a heckler.
It’s a very popular clip amongst the comedy fraternity.
You could compare it to how a group of foxes would enjoy watching a film of members of a Hunt being thrown from their horses.

21/04/08 Going Up!

Hamilton Academicals are back in the Premier League!
We made a pilgrimage through to my Dad’s home town of Hamilton to see them secure the 1st Division championship by beating Clyde 2-0.
I’d also studied at Bell College in Hamilton.
It was here that I obtained a “Post-Graduate Diploma in Systems Analysis and Design”, (it’s fair to say it was slightly less interesting than it sounds, if you can believe that)
We decided to splash out and go for the hospitality package.
Well, it’s not every day that the Accies are within a ball hair of being back in the (relatively) big time.
I was thrilled to find myself sitting at an adjoining table to Scottish football legend Frank MacAvennie.
He may have been an ex-Celtic player, but I still have a certain fondness for Frank and see him as a fantastic role model.
His raucous laugh has a gloriously infectious quality about it.(Ideal for a member of a comedy club audience.)
I was very impressed by how friendly and welcoming the Accies officials were.
I was less impressed with the mushroom soup and the white wine, but that’s a minor quibble.
Saturday was about more important things than pedantic catering analysis.
The game itself was probably one of the most mediocre football matches I’ve ever witnessed (and I’ve witnessed a few), largely due to a fierce, icy wind which was instrumental in preventing a display of the champagne football which Accies fans have grown accustomed to witnessing this season.
We were chilled to the bone.
But this is all academic..
Winning isn’t the most important thing, it’s the only thing, as they say.
There was a bit of disharmony in the stand, as it turned out that season ticket holders had been turfed out their seats to make way for the corporate hospitality “fat cats”,
(in retrospect, sporting a camel coat , wearing a lot of jewellery and smoking a big cigar might have projected the wrong image and subconsciously invited criticism from the New Douglas Park regulars).
I could certainly sympathise with their plight and found it all a bit embarrassing.
It was obviously irresistible for the club to milk as much money as possible out of their big day, and given the perilous finances of Scottish football, it’s understandable.
Thankfully, after some animated “discussion”, we all got a seat and enjoyed Hamilton’s moment of triumph as they lifted the First Division Cup.
And then back into the lounge for further alcohol, and checking out some very impressive looking WAGs who were waiting for the players to appear.
When they came in they were all wearing t-shirts that said “Hamilton Accies ; Division 1 Champions 2007/08”.
I was amazed at how quickly they’d designed and printed the T-shirts as it was only 10 minutes after full-time.
That was incredible. The t-shirt technology has obviously moved on a lot in recent years. I can only assume that they did it using the Interweb or something like that?
It’s interesting to compare this feat with cheque processing.
In 2008 you can design and print a T-shirt in 10 minutes, but it still takes 5 days for a cheque to clear.
Scandalous.
Having played golf in the morning (a charity game involving under-privileged, dysfunctional adults who wouldn’t normally be able to afford the expense of a round of golf), and then after the football attending a ravey late-night party back in Edinburgh, I wasn’t feeling too clever on the Sunday.
I had a 10 minute spot at The Stand on Sunday night.
I’d planned to do the spot then leave immediately and hit the hay.
One other act hadn’t shown up so I got asked to do a longer set.
I was a bit apprehensive, as I felt fairly grim, and an hour before the gig a tooth implant had fallen out during the consumption a packet of Rolos, leading me to speak with something of a farty lisp.
In the end I had a really nice gig and did just under 20 minutes.
I suppose it’s a good opportunity to show you can handle a sudden change in set length and step up to the plate when required.
I stayed to watch Dan Evans…loved his stuff…gloriously silly.

18/04/08 They Think It Might Not Be Quite Over Yet

I feel I have to begin by apologising to fellow supporters of “”Rangers Football Club”.
I tempted fate on Wednesday by deciding to bait Celtic supporters via email BEFORE the Old Firm match had actually taken place.
I refer you to “Exhibit A” ( the actual email I sent on Wednesday afternoon…)

“Is it wee Gordy’s last hurrah tonight?
Will the Celtic “Reliant Robin” have a hope of stopping the Rangers “Juggernaut”
Will “Vainglorious of Whistlebinkies” squander another load of chances?
Will Celtic’s “End of Season” party still go ahead tomorrow night?”

nb “Vainglorious of Whistlebinkies” is actually the Celtic striker “Vennegoor of Hesselink” falling victim to my trademark, hilarious wordplay.
He scored the last-minute winner against Rangers.

Well, would you adam and eve it, I received a reasonably positive review for my gig at The Stand last Thursday here.
I’d have rather had a review on the higher intensity gigs of Friday and Saturday, but I still really enjoyed Thursday, so mustn’t grumble.

Also on Wednesday I had a meeting with fellow comedians Martin McAllister, Jeff O’Boyle and Gordon Alexander.
We are appearing in a show during the Fringe entitled “No Comedy For Old Men” at the Meridian Bar on Leith Walk.
I reckon it’ll be a cracking show. They have 3 very different comedy personas which I think will give the show a satisfying blend.
More information will soon be forthcoming on this worthy enterprise.

At last Friday’s gig, and lubricated by a few beers, I remember pronouncing loudly within earshot of the venue grandees about how much of a privilege it was to play the gig at the weekend, and that I’d gladly pay to do it…so much do I enjoy the experience.
This is all fine and dandy, but it’s maybe not the greatest display of business acumen. .
If Sir Alan Sugar had been observing, I’d have been summarily dismissed as a “Fucking Idiot!” , instantly fired, then driven away in an over-priced Edinburgh black cab, to think again.

15/04/08 Woo Hoo!

Jamie “Frainto” Frain and his team stormed to a sensational victory on STV’s critically acclaimed “Postcode Challenge” last night.
My only disappointment was that the show was so tightly edited, Jamie’s banter was severely restricted .
Other than a throwaway “Carbon Footprint” line (hmmm…there’s a joke there somewhere!), there wasn’t quite enough off-the-cuff comments to satisfy those of us in the TV audience desperate for a few Frainto one-liners.
It was nice to see the team stroll off with 3 grand in the end.
There’s a possibility of winning 25 grand, but the question to get to the 5 grand level was a real stinker, and it was always odds-on that they weren’t going to get beyond that.
Even a cosmopolitan, highly-educated man-about-town like me didn’t know that the German word for “dry”, in the context of wine, is tronken.
So to get 3 out of 5 team members getting that right was always going to be a big ask, as they say.
On the news yesterday there was a report on the ongoing “Terrorist Plot” trial involving the alleged planning of a co-ordinated attack on a number of aircraft.
A few excerpts were shown of “martyrdom videos” allegedly featuring the accused men.
I was extremely shocked by these excerpts.
I couldn’t believe how poor the delivery of each monologue was.
Each production had “inexperienced open spot” written all over it.
It’s no good having interesting material if you don’t sell it properly.
If I were these guys, I would have signed up for a local “Stand-Up Course”, (as opposed to a “Blow-Up Course”..! boom! boom!), and develop some decent media presentational skills
As with “Everest” double-glazing, you only record a martyrdom video once, so you might as well make a decent stab at it.
Thanks to these buffoons, in the past year I have had approximately 5 newly-purchased bottles of water confiscated in airport departure lounges, putting me, at a conservative estimate, more than £4 out of pocket.
Such is the reality of the ongoing “War On Terror”…

13/04/08 'Ee it were grand...!

I really couldn't have wished for a better run of weekend gigs.
But who wants to read such self-aggrandising cock? Let's move on...
I had an odd moment last night when the beep alarm on my watch went off halfway through my set. It took me a while to work out that it was coming from MY watch.
It was funny though.
Just as I was winding up last night, I said "well that's just about the end of my set...", when this woman piped up in the front row and audibly announced "Good...!"
I couldn't really tell whether she was being jokey, or whether she genuinely was relieved I was vacating the stage.
With rapier wit, I guffawed and pronounced..."Fuck OFF!" (in a jokey, non-aggressive way).
After the gig I gave a demonstration of classic "comedian fragile ego syndrome" by wondering at length why she had felt moved to say that.
It was obviously ridiculous to think like that. I'd just had a rocking gig (definitely one of the best ever), and yet I seemed obsessed with why one person didn't like my act, rather than bask in the afterglow of experiencing the vast majority of the audience totally going with everything I put in front of them.
AND I even managed to drink responsibly throughout the weekend, and impressively avoided being found unconscious in my stairwell wearing a traffic cone.
It was a win-win-win situation.
My old mucker Jamie Frain is apparently appearing as "team captain" on STV's highly rated award-winning quiz show "Postcode Challenge" this Monday coming (14th April).
I'm intrigued to see how the boy comes across, as he was always a shy retiring type who shunned the limelight in any situation.
He's certainly not the type who would spend 30 minutes shamelessly mugging to the camera and trotting out a host of wisecracks dating from the Jurassic period.
No sir, Mr Frain would never be found doing that...or would he? Hmmmmm.....
I've just been watching "TV's Funniest Music Moments".
(I'm having a busy day)
There was a gruesome montage of musical moments from "Crackerjack" as a number of hit records of the day were spectacularly murdered beyond recognition by Peter Glaze and his cronies.
It was actually even more shite than I'd remembered it as.

11/04/08 Sore Tow

I’m having a fairly action-packed week.
I’ve got five gigs on at The Stand this week, and they’ve been going pretty darned well.
I did the longer “main support” slot at the Sunday show in Glasgow and in spite of slightly bricking it in advance, had a really good gig and made the time with no problems.
I was in a fairly buoyant mood as I drove back to Edinburgh.
My mood darkened a couple of days later when I found out that my car had been towed away.
I’d accidentally parked on a “City Car Club” space on Sunday night.
It didn’t really look any different in the dark to a “Resident Permit Holder” space, but that is unlikely to save my £135 fee. Ouch!
My mood further darkened on Wednesday when I was awarded a £35 parking ticket on account of my road tax disc falling off my windscreen onto the floor.
God moves in a mysterious way.
What did I do to deserve this?
When I went to pick up my car at the pound I was theatrically polite and courteous.
I just thought I’d like to bemuse them slightly, as I imagine everyone else arrives in a fit of raging temper, which is understandable but ultimately pointless.
I reckon that the people who work there have probably developed a perverted sense of enjoyment at seeing the impotent rage of their customers as they are forced to painfully cough up the requisite £135!!!
I think most normal, sensitive people would find the incessant customer hostility which comes with the job as unbearable.
You could only sustain yourself in a job like this if at some point you began to find the “car owner going mental syndrome” intensely amusing.
At least I didn’t give them that satisfaction.
I am a true hero of the people.
I am almost at 12 ½ stone.
That is pretty impressive considering I’m not really on a diet, and just don’t eat bread and potatoes all that much anymore.
That’s the lightest I’ve been for years.
I think it’s helped that I’ve been under the cosh at work during the day and gadding about in comedy land at night a lot this week.
I don’t feel all that different, but when I walked around carrying the amount of weight I’ve lost, it seems a lot.

01/04/2008 You can fly!

Well I have to admit that BBC Breakfast Show caught me out this morning.
I’d just emerged from my bed and switched on the telly to see some footage of penguins hurriedly waddling along on the ice, gradually building up to a very impressive land speed by penguin standards.
At this point they started madly flapping their wings and took off.
I did say out loud “Wow! That’s amazing”
(I obviously come over all Kate Bush in the mornings)
After a few seconds of watching the penguins soar though the air like swallows, I realised that yes, ha ha…! it’s an April 1st wind up…
It was a pretty good one though…nice bit of CGI work…
The BBC Breakfast Show as well…
Who would have thought it?
I think if it had been later in the day I would have been quicker off the mark...but I would say that, wouldn't I?
I watched the Marty Feldman show last night.
I remembered it used to crack me up when I were a nipper.
Unfortunately it hasn’t dated well, and I sat stoney faced through as much of the show as I could be bothered watching.
Nostalgia just isn’t as good as it used to be.
My latest alcohol abstinence campaign lasted 9 days.
Very poor.
Cheers!

27/03/08 Seconds away...

It was certainly an action packed evening at Black Bo’s Comedy Club last night. It would probably best be described as “like a bad night in Baghdad”.
It was a shame because most of the audience were totally up for the comedy and really enjoying the evening…
However there were a few twats who just wouldn’t shut upall night.
At one point there was something of an uprising as a few of the audience who were wanting to listen to the comedy starting having a pop at the idiots, and it all kicked off.
There did seem a genuine possibility that it all might explode in a flurry of violence, but thankfully this didn’t come to pass.
Things came to a head during Viv Gee’s headline set…It was such a shame really, as most people there were very much enjoying performance and were desperate for her to be allowed to perform without interruption.
At the start of the evening there were a couple of low-level gits (characterised by chatting between themselves at length while the acts were on, and getting up in the middle of sets to go for a fag).
After I admonished one of them gently for talking all through a comic’s set, a couple of high-level gits got involved and got fairly aggressive and threatening with yours truly…
It was slightly unnerving that one of the aggressors had a bottle of HP sauce in his pocket. I sensed that this had the potential to be a highly effective improvised weapon.
It would have been vaguely ironic for me to be beaten to death by a HP sauce carrying thug, as HP Sauce is one of my most favouritest things ever.
They just got progressively got more and more vocal and annoying as Viv’s set went on, and sadly she had to cut it short as it just became farcical trying to compete with the dickheads.
After the show finished, the heated arguments continued…
The comic contingent eventually decided to head to Bannerman’s for a respite pint.
Of course, having a night like this represents an inherent danger in having a free gig in a bar.
It does make you question whether it is worth the grief.
You can still get incidents like this in pay-to-get-in comedy clubs, but it’s a little less likely as the audience have at least all made some financial commitment to the evening.
Ah well, at least my new “linesman” joke got a big laugh.
It’s funny how new words just appear out of the ether.
I don’t think I’ve previously heard the term “mis-spoke” used.
(Hillary Clinton yesterday used this term to describe the seemingly blatant lie that she came under sniper attack when she arrived for a visit in Kosovo 10 years ago ; the video suggested there was nothing going off at all)
Of course, at comedy clubs up and down the land, you know that comics will be paraphrasing their material with stuff like “I’m telling the truth here…I’m definitely not mis-spoking…no siree…!”
The same thing happened when someone once said at an inquiry they they weren’t telling lies, they were merely being “economical with the truth”.
An expression still widely used in a jokey sarcastic way.
And since John Reid said that the Home Office was not “fit for purpose”…that’s become the hip way to say that something is basically a load of old shite.
I prefer calling things a load of old shite to be honest.

26/03/08 Now Hear This...

I had a gig at The Stand on Monday.
I’d say it went down pretty well, but the performance was rubbish.
I’d intended doing a high energy babbling style, trying to cram loads of material into a manic 10 minutes, but then changed my mind for no apparent reason just before I went on.
Also, I fumbled a lot of lines.
This was odd because I’d spent a lot more time than I usually do going over what I was going to say, and made a few edits and stuff.
So that’s what you get for being diligent.
I got a more than a few disapproving tuts at some of the “questionable taste” material as well. That doesn’t usually happen as most audiences regard the material as more idiotic than offensive.
Anyway, a few new things went well, so mustn’t grumble too much.
I’ve always been a big fan of global warming, particularly the predicted rising of sea levels.
I appreciate this will likely lead to an environmental catastrophe, but I still look forward to visiting my friend Iain when it all comes to pass.
Iain is a true anorak, and has successfully climbed every “Munro” in Scotland.
To mark this achievement, he has a large map of Scotland in his kitchen with hundreds of tiny flags pinned in it to represent every Munro he has successfully “bagged”.
I think it would be hilarious if rising sea levels caused a number of Iain’s conquered peaks to lose their Munro classification, (ie they are no longer at least 3000 ft above sea level).
I’d take great delight in removing the appropriate number of flags from the map and casting them to the floor as Iain looks on in stunned silence.
I know what you’re thinking….the satisfaction at witnessing a geeky friend’s upset hardly compensates for the accompanying global devastation…
but that’s just your opinion.
My switch from Betfair to Stock Trading has made a fantastic start.
I bought then sold Lonmin for a good profit (selling just before it dropped like a stone), then transferred everything onto the Royal Bank of Scotland, guessing (correctly at the time of going to print) that the Banks had hit their bottom value last week.
It’s shot up this week so I am sitting on a great big profit.
It was a great manoeuvre, reminiscent of Richard Burton jumping from one cable car to another seconds before the first cable car explodes and plummets to the ground.
It was just like that.
I miss the instant gratification of winning a Betfair bet, but the stocks thing feels like a more adult relationship.
..and yes what you’re thinking is absolutely correct…what a wanker…!!!!

22/03/08 Do They Know It's Easter?

I thought Edinburgh city centre might be quiet today as most people would be be off doing something more holiday-ish than wandering around the shops.
What an idiotic idea that was.
It was about the busiest I've ever seen it.
Walking along Princes Street was reminiscent of the big get-together in Mecca.
Things weren't helped by the highly original "robot dancing" man causing a big obstruction of a large section of the street with his ground breaking body popping.
In spite of all this I had a couple of eavesdropping smirks as I made my way home.

Scene 1 ; middle-aged couple sitting arguing on a park bench in Princes St

Man (loudly) "What part of 'I am NOT fucking senile' do you not understand???"
(at this point the woman turned away and rolled her eyes in exasperation)

That was quite good...

Then...

Scene 2 ; another middle-aged man and woman talking in St James Centre (I get around!)

man: I got married 8 years ago...

woman : That's brilliant!...Congratulations..!!!

man : actually, we split up 6 years ago

woman : oh... sorry to hear that!

Of course maybe this meeting of long lost friends had a happy ending.
Perhaps they always fancied each other, and the lady was secretly crestfallen when he said he'd got married, but her hopes rose again as he revealed he was actually single..

Fascinating stuff...

ok anyway, I hope this guy achieves what he sets out to do...although it sounds horrendous...
I just think that at some point he will regret his decision to carry that banner thing AS WELL...!!!

21/03/08 Regime change

I didn’t think I’d gotten THAT drunk at The Stand party on Wednesday night, but the evidence of the following day seemed to contradict this belief.
After describing last Sunday’s experience as my worst hangover in living memory, Thursday more than eclipsed this accomplishment.
I eventually got out of bed at 6pm, shuffled about for a while, then retreated back into bed at 9pm. Grim.
That’s 2 days of my life I’ve completely wasted in the last 5 days.
It’s on the wagon for me for a while I think.
I’m in the huff with Mr Booze and the sadistic way he’s been bullying me of late.
I’ll see if I can beat my highly unimpressive current record of 18 days alcohol abstinence.
On a brighter note, I’ve managed to avoid Mr Nicotine successfully for the last 2 weeks, and as if that wasn’t impressive enough, have smashed through the 13 stone barrier for the first time in ages (I mean being less than 13 stone ,of course).
Losing weight and stopping smoking at the same time.
How impressive is that?
I should be able to get on the “Richard and Judy Show” with stuff like that.
I’m not really on a diet or anything.
Diets are inherently pointless unless you maintain them indefinitely.
I’ve just bade a tearful farewell to my beloved kettle crisps, tend to avoid bread and potatoes most of the time (likewise chocolate), do a bit more exercise and there’s no eating between meals…
That’s all really….but as a consequence of this half-hearted regime, I’ve lost more than a stone in the last 5 weeks (although that does include the unintentional 10 day Atkin’s diet in Canadia). But I'm eats lots of salad and fruit and shit like that, ken...
btw how good is this?????
(it's the mime for "ladies" that makes me chuckle)

19/03/08 Hurray! Back at Work!

I'm doing another 3 month IT contract...it's not ideal for coming up with interesting blogs.
Although in fairness, I did see a man rollerskating along Princes Street yesterday weaving in and out of congested traffic.
His style was reminiscent of the nonchalant, swaying motion of the speed skaters you see every 4 years during the Winter Olympics.
I suspect he's probably been run over by a lorry by now.
It did look completely suicidal.
My other observation of note occurred during a feature on "Scotland Today" last night on the matter of the lack availability of NHS dentists in certain areas of Scotland.
There was a couple of interviews with people protesting that their life was "hell" as they had no dentist to go to.
Then we had some dentist stock footage, as the reporter summed things up.
The footage started off very humdrum with people just having their teeth inspected on the dentist chair.
Then suddenly, it cut to a man, who was obviously under general anaesthetic having his teeth hurriedly yanked out by a dentist, as if he was competing in a hilarious "It's A Knockout!" style dentist game...battling against the clock!
There's not that many TV moments which lead me to involuntarily shout out...
"Jesus Fucking Christ! What are they showing that for??", but this was definitely one of them.
That was quite interesting.
I've been spending a couple of hours a day demonstrating outside "Ladbrokes" with a "Renounce The Wages Of Sin" placard.
Hopefully, I can persuade others to renounce the evils of gambling and join me on my path of righteousness.

16/03/2008 Ho Hum

Well I had a couple of lapses before the snowboarding in jaunt in Canada, so I can't lay all the blame on the land of Mounties.
However, in the course of the holiday there was once again regular partaking of the evil cigarette by your correspondent.
I've been off them again for a week, so the saga continues.
I have also now permanently closed down my Betfair account.
I'd actually been doing extremely well of late and had been very disciplined with my betting strategy.
This all fell apart last weekend, as I made a string of colossal losses as the form book broke several windows in various sporting events, ie Scotland beat England at rugby (yes, I treacherously backed the Auld Enemy...I can't apologise enough), the FA Cup shocks and Aberdeen and Celtic drawing.
I'd effectively thrown away all my hard earned profits and was now sitting on a loss.
I'd fallen into the classic idiot gambler scenario of betting just because I fancied a bet rather than carefully selecting what represented a good value bet.
Then I did something even more stupid.
I decided to do the "double or quits" bet thing, and wagered an extremely large bet on England beating Ireland at rugby yesterday (I can't tell you how much, but just believe me it was big).
This would retrieve all my losses and leave me slightly in profit over the long term.
I decided though that regardless of what happened, I would quit gambling on Betfair for ever. Too stressful.
As Ireland raced to a 10 point lead after 5 minutes, my sphincter adopted the characteristics of a giga counter switched on in Chernobyl.
Thankfully Ireland didn't add to this score and England won in the end, although for long periods it was a close game, and it was thanks to some stupid mistakes from Ireland that the final scoreline was so convincing.
Anyway, I got away with it, and have now renounced the evils of gambling.
It's just very difficult to make a lot of headway in the long term.
I'm just going to stick to the stock market from now on.
Much less risky!
There was a new review section added to the Scottish Comedy Forum which made interesting reading.
It was then withdrawn because apparently some of the contributors complained that their permission had not been sought in terms of posting their reviews.
I found this a bit odd as the reviews seemed to be excerpts from people's blogs.
I mentioned in a post that this was akin to streakers complaining about people looking at their cocks.
I thought that part of the vainglorious idea of doing a blog was that you want as many people to read it as possible?
(then my post got binned. It's 1984 all over again! :-))
Was at a birthday bash at The Jam House last night.
We had a meal at 6.30pm and then just stayed on and listened to the bands and got drunk.
Due to the early start/late ending of the evening, I now have a colossal hangover.
I'd say about 80-90 % of the punters were female (some readers might find that statistic helpful)
I nicked along to The Stand to see Jo Caulfield heeadline (very funny) before rejoining the party action.
I remember (vaguely) being intrigued by the choice of covers the band played.
We had The Proclaimers/500 Miles ; All Right Now/Free ; Doobie Brothers/Listen To The Music ; Duran Duran/Hungry Like The Wolf amongst others.
A fairly eclectic selection I'd say.

11/03/2008 Kapow!

I loved "There Will Be Blood". What a movie!
Although saying that, if any actor other than Mr Day-Lewis was playing the lead role then it could easily have been a bit of a turkey.
Totally mesmerising performance.
He completely dominates every scene he appears in...there's just this brooding menace going on the whole time in his character. I loved it.
The young priest didn't quite convince as much, and he kept reminding me of Gene Wilder's portrayal of the nervous accountant Leo Bloom in "The Producers", (particularly when he started shouting like a maniac)
My wallet turned up!
I had to pay a 3 quid admin charge as well as 10% of the cash recovered to the Lost Property Dept at Waverley Station.
Everybody's on the make these days....
The main thing is I got my drinks discount card from The Stand back...
That's worth about 10 000 pounds a year to me in savings.
There are few things I enjoy more than being out in the country with a large column of boiling water and steam spouting from the top of my head.
I like to think I'm a bit of an active geezer...

09/03/2008 Sunday Sunday

There's been a bit of a debate in the past couple of weeks in Scottish Comedy land.
Basically, The Stand took a swipe at the "Scottish Comedian of the Year" award in particular, and the concept of comedy competitions in general.
Most people have avoided commenting as they don't want to burn their boats with either promoter involved.
Fair enough, but I suppose Blogs are meant to be used for droning on about such things.
I've been impressed with the professionalism with which the SCOTY award has been run.
However, I do think that the award itself should be prefixed by the organisation which is running it.
The current name does imply a consensus of the Scottish Comedy Industry in its running, and this is clearly not the case.
If either the "Laughing Horse New Act Of The Year" or "Amused Moose Search for a Star" comedy awards suddenly decided to call their competition "English Comedian of the Year" there would be an avalanche of guffaws and pelters.
The main reason I don't enter competitions in general is (WARNING ; highly subjective recollection alert) based on an experience is a southern based comp.
I'd got through to the second round and travelled down to London for it.
I had a stormer, and was really pissed off that I didn't qualify and felt cheated.
But what really annoyed me more than anything was the knowledge that if it was a non-competition gig, I would have headed home delighted with the way things had gone, rather than sulking North to think again.
However, there are so many new acts scurrying around desperately seeking stage time, that it's inevitable people will run competitions.
They are fairly lucrative to the organiser.
You don't pay anyone and you can charge normal comedy club prices in the knowledge that each contestant is likely to bring a few supporters with them.
I think personally you should always have a experienced compere and closing act in setups like this, but it doesn't always happen.
In the early rounds it's effectively an open mic night with an inflated entry charge.
Fascinating stuff, huh?
(just as well nobody ever reads this)
I'm back working for the man again...it's just a 12 week contract...may it pass quickly...
I had 3 gigs this week...one great, one so-so and the other difficult to tell because there were so few people in the audience.
It was good to see Scotland beat England yesterday at the rugby as they've been having such a crap tournament.
However, for the neutral watching Ireland v Wales and Scotland v England, it was pretty grim stuff.
That old clip of the Barbarians try against the All Blacks which always pops up now and again shows a form of Rugby Union completely unrecognisable from the turgid shite on display these days.
They still need to get the rules sorted out I reckon.
I've signed up to go on a "Deliverance" style canoeing/hillwalking trip in May up in Sutherland.
It's good to have things like this planned because it gives you an incentive to get fitter and not be the pathetic runt out of the 10 of us who are going.
I'm probably not going to play the Burt Reynolds character, but I definitely don't want to be Ned Beatty and would be happy to to take the Jon Voigt role.
Just been for a 2 mile run and never stopped once...amn't I the one?

05/03/2008 Back

So anyway, my holiday got off to a spectacular start when I lost my wallet on the day I was leaving. Nice...
I had to cancel all my cards and then went to the trusty Alliance and Leicester to take out a big wad of cash to take away with me.
According to the bank teller, my card hadn't been cancelled. Hmmm...
So they had to phone again to cancel it before they would give me the dosh.
They had to phone the same call centre that I had, and it took about 30 minutes for them to get through and request that the card got cancelled, (I had definitely done this myself earlier on).
You'd think there would be some sort of direct line from the branch to the call centre for stuff like this...but apparently not.
This is mental...
I couldn't get angry with the teller though as she was far too attractive for that.
She made me laugh as well.
"You've Lost That Loving Feeling" was being piped through the bank.
She mentioned that when she split up with her first serious boyfriend, she was devastated and tearful and was later picked up by her dad in his car.
As he drove home, that song came on the radio, prompting her dad to enthusiastically sing along... blissfully unaware of the tragic resonance the lyrics would be having on his daughter.
A classic example of male insensitivity I'd say.
Well the boarding was great...but a bit more snow would have been appreciated.
I like Canadians...very friendly folk...
One criticism though...you need to broaden your adjective use...everything seems to be "awesome"...
Now, if I saw a grizzly bear shagging a moose up a tree...that certainly would be universally agreed as "awesome" (I'm not saying I did see this)....BUT if I produce the correct change for a quarter of a pound of sherbert lemons in a confectionery store (which I did), then that's not really "awesome", although it was enthusiastically described as such by the young male assistant.
However, it was quite awesome to be somewhere which still stubbornly clings on to Imperial Measures, and be able to ask for a quarter of a pound of sherbert lemons rather than this 200g nonsense.
I'm seriously thinking of going veggie.
I must have eaten about 3 cows with a couple of pig side dishes in the 10 days I was out there.
I've probably lost weight as it was something of an unintentional 10 day Atkins diet with a daily exercise routine.
You don't see too many vegetables out there....

22/02/08 I'm in Canada

Hey, am I cool, or am I cool???




Snowboarding is a funny way to spend a holiday.
It's all very exhiliarating and fun, but after a couple of days I find myself perpetually a bit shagged out (with a mild hangover).
I got a board on Ebay before I came out and what a board it is...
It makes my old board look like an antique ironing board.
All of a sudden I can go twice as fast as I used to.
The only downside is that when I fall off it hurts twice as much as it used to.
The slopes are good but we need more snow...please!
The weather is a bit freaky in Banff this week.
Last week it was -30, but this week it is averaging +5. Weird.
With all my thermals on I nearly passed out with heat exhaustion on the first day.
Still...better than working I suppose...

On the Stand-up scene, I found out I'd been reviewed twice here
Interestingly, they were two very good gigs for me...however, he obviously doesn't like me and I get a bit of a kicking.
(although in fairness, he does observe that I was well received by the audience on both occasions)
I do agree with him to a certain extent on sticking a bit too rigidly to my script, and I'd like to get a bit more conversational with the audience, especially at clubs like LemonCustard, (which was a brilliant little comedy evening which I thoroughly enjoyed,quirkily hosted by Dee Custance and Sian Bevan).
I like getting a bit of objective criticism though, and just because you have a really good night in terms of audience reaction doesn't mean that you can't get a slagging.
I know I myself regularly see some comics ripping it up, but don't really rate them as great acts.
But now I must go out to get drunk because that is what decrepit snowboarders do of an evening to ease their painful joints.

07/02/08 Night Out With The Lads

I went to see my old mucker Jamie Frain showcase his new CD at The Phoenix Bar last night, with Dave Reilly ably accompanying him on bass.
Old Frainto remains a very talented musician.
He's got a great voice and can definitely write a mean tune.
My only criticism would be that his lyrics don't quite engage me to the same extent, but that's a minor quibble.
"Trashcan Secrets" is the pick of the bunch.
Later I had a dispute with Dave's wife regarding her husband's TV viewing habits.
She seemed to think that as I was currently not in possession of a job, it was inappropriate of me to make impertinent remarks regarding Dave's packed lifestyle.
It was all happening !
Another old mucker of mine, Mr Nicky Hind , is across visiting from the USA for a few days,and we have been having a right royal laugh.
He went down to Newcastle with me on the next leg of my UK tour.
The gig went really well even though I thought my actual performance was fairly cack.
"Long Live Comedy" is a great little club though, and I'd heartily recommend it!
We tried to find Hadrian's Wall on the way down, but got a bit lost and only found a little bit of it just before it got dark.
It looked just like a mound of earth, but the sign said it was a Roman Temple attached to the wall.
Impressive.
The new SatNav worked a treat on the way down but then wouldn't charge up for the journey home.
It took a while to get out of Newcastle under manual navigation and I took a short tour of several Industrial Estates in Newcastle. Very interesting.
We've spent a lot of time arguing about politics, the system and "working for the man"...I'd say I won.
I also had a pretty severe haircut...a No. 2 all over...
I like it, but am blessed with something of a potato head and am not best suited to the crew cut look...
My friend Lynne said it made me look 10 years younger ...but she was probably a bit pissed..(I certainly was)

03/02/08 On Tour

I had a gig at the "QI Club" in Oxford on Thursday night.
It was a decent enough night for me , although it was a slight anti-climax after the last few gigs. But I still had a pretty good time.
I had an early morning flight to Luton. 7am. ouch!
I spent the evening before watching dramatic reconstructions of plane crashes on the National Geographic cable channel.
Just as we were coming into land at an incredibly windy Luton Airport, the lights above the emergency exit doors flashed on.
This wasn't too re-assuring, but we landed ok in the end.
The truly memorable aspect of the gig occurred when one of the acts on the bill recited a jokey poem about the recently departed Jeremy Beadle.
It was a cheeky, joshy ode to JB, and wasn't really offensive.
However, the inclusion of this piece caused major rumblings in the audience as a debate began between the comedian and the audience over whether it was actually ok to do a piece such as this.
He'd recently organised a big quiz night in the QI Club which several of them attended, and it became clear they were very fond of him.
They kept mentioning that he'd raised 100 million quid for charity, (an undoubtedly impressive figure)...
Anyway, eventually the exasperated comedian said..."ok, so what do you want? a 2 minute silence for him or what?"
Most of the audience nodded approvingly.
So we had an impeccably observed 2 minute silence in memory of Jeremy.
It was probably the most surreal moment I've ever experienced in a comedy club.
The gig continued after the silence, and the rest of the night was fine.
I was sad to hear of the death of Miles Kington as well last week.
He wrote really funny little column in The Independent every day.
A typical line from him was ;
"knowledge consists of knowing that a tomato is a fruit, and wisdom consists of not putting it in a fruit salad"...
beautiful...!

28/01/08 The "West Wing" of its day....

I was a massive fan of the TV show "Crossroads", and was devastated when it ended.
There were great characters involved, superb plotlines and the acting had a raw emotional edge to it which made it unmissable.
I found this classic clip on Youtube.
It features a typically brilliant performance from my favourite character "Arthur Brownlow".
In this clip, it's all gone off in the Brownlow household as Doris Luke's engagement plans look in danger of coming undone.
(the character of "Doris Luke" was played by Kathy Staff who went on to achieve international fame and fortune through her peerless portrayal of "Nora Batty" in the acclaimed Yorkshire documentary "Last of the Summer Wine ; although she's not actually seen in this clip)
I just got back from getting a refund on a timer for my new boiler.
It's never a dull moment.
It has been something of a long-running saga trying to get the money back.
However, a cutting email which I sent to the supplier, cc'ing the head office, did the trick.
As the refund was getting processed, it was obvious that the guy was quietly raging.
He didn't make any eye contact with me and gruffly re-credited my card.
I was beginning to feel a bit awkward about some of the more stinging sarcastic remarks I'd made on the email relating to the customer service I'd previously experienced.
It's always a lot easier to be blunt on email rather than face to face.
Just as I was leaving, he couldn't stop himself and starting having a pop at me about my "cheeky comments".
I got the impression that if I'd started having a go back, he would have had no hesitation in decking me.
He had that look that boxers have when they try to outstare their opponent just before the fight starts.
I took this as a cue to do a bumbling Hugh Grant impersonation...looking down at the floor, and saying I was sorry and that I didn't mean to cause offence...and shuffled out the shop.
I felt that my "hard man" image had been slightly compromised by this episode.
Still, I got my money back!

27/01/08 That was the weekend that was

I got a call last Thursday to do spots on Thursday, Friday and Saturday at The Stand in Edinburgh.
I did a little jig around my flat at the news...I love doing the weekend at The Stand!
Thursday and Saturday were good, solid gigs, but Friday was probably the best reaction I've ever had doing stand-up..I really nailed it....
What sticks in my mind was getting big laughs before I'd even said anything.
It's great having that feeling that you've "got" the audience right from the start, and your comedy sensors inform you that you're going to have a great gig.
The Friday night was my much missed Dad's "unofficial" birthday, and I'd spent a lot of the day thinking about him.
I say "unofficial" birthday, because throughout his life, we always celebrated his birthday on 31st January.
It was late in life when he found out out that although his birth certificate says "31st January", this wasn't true...he was actually born on 25th January.
His father, a miner in Hamilton, had already had 3 daughters, and Jim senior was his first (and only) son...
He was quite partial to a drink apparently, and the celebrations for the birth of his son, went on for a good 3 weeks.
He realised that he'd now illegally delayed the registration of the birth, so basically bullshitted the registrar and changed the birth date to 6 days later.
I love that story...a good bit of improvisation by my Grandpa!
But anyway..ok bully for me...I had some good gigs...but it was just doing a 10 minute set, so I'm not organising no ticker tape parade or nuttin', but it definitely feels that I'm making some progress in the laugh business.
I'm thinking of getting a new telly.
I was down at my brother's gaffe in Manchester over the Festive Season, and he'd bought a ridiculous 46 inch telly.
The problem is that once you spend a few days watching that, you come home and watch your own puny telly and it feels like every programme is "Michael Bentine's Potty Time".
I'm now tempted to buy a 47 inch telly, and see how much I can piss off the aforementioned brother.

21/01/08 Back in the saddle

This is my niece Kitty.
I ran through my stand-up routine for her to see what she thought of it.
She said that whilst she found my act "intrinsically very funny", my set as a whole would benefit from having "a more cohesive narrative structure".
These are fair points.
It's amazing how quickly kids develop these days.
I had my first gig of 2008 at The Stand in Glasgow on Sunday.
Being my first gig for a few weeks, I was actually hoping that it would be a reasonably quiet night.
I figured that a Sunday in late January, with credit card bills to pay, and the weather a bit rubbish etc etc it would likely fall foul of the post-Xmas collective hangover syndrome.
I was completely wrong on this and was somewhat surprised to find the venue absolutely packed.
It seems that Sunday is the new Saturday in Glasgow.
The "Performance Anxiety Indicator" rose further when I discovered I was on first.
However, in the end, the gig went great.
But do you want to hear that?
No...of course not...you'd prefer a tale of failure and disaster wouldn't you?
Well, sorry to disappoint you all!
hah! Go find another schmuck to exercise your evil schadenfreude tendencies.
Pathetically, I still haven't been able to get beyond the single cigarette I smoked 2 weeks ago.
I've taken the decision now that I'm just going to give up.
I really can't be bothered with the stress of trying to start smoking again.
I know...I know...you don't have to tell me how weak and feeble-willed I am, but stuff it...I'll just have to live with it.
To add further embarassment (as if I needed to), I've lost half a stone since New Year.
I've started wearing tight fitting t-shirts again in a pathetic attempt to emphasize my retreating flab, but this isn't going to work indefinitely; particularly if I keep up all this pointless exercise which I've sadly become addicted to.
btw "No Country For Old Men" is an excellent film.
In my dotage, fewer and fewer films hold my attention and interest throughout...but this one definitely does.
Although saying that, the woman sitting behind me loudly complained to her husband at the end of the film...
"Well that was a load of CRAP!"
(you can't please everybody though, can you?)

12/01/08 Flashing Light

So anyway, this week George Bush visited Israel for the first time in his presidency.
He spoke optimistically on the prospects of securing a lasting peace in the region.
Hmmm...
I suspect this represents a rather desperate attempt to finish his 8 year stint on a high and be fondly remembered as the American President who finally managed to broker an Arab/Israeli peace agreement, rather than overseeing the disastrous campaign in Iraq.
He really didn't sound like he believed what he was saying himself.
To use a stand-up comedy analogy, George has been struggling badly with his set...he's been flashed to indicate his time is almost up, and is now scrambling to find a killer joke to quit the stage on a high, hoping that the audience will forget all the preceding unfunny dross.
(they often do)
Bill Clinton tried (unsuccessfully) as well...
"International Peacemaker" provides a better legacy that the "Spunk/Dress/Female Intern" combo.
Talking of which, I was a bit embarassed last night.
I'd read in the "Edinburgh Evening News" that there was an active "Swingers Club" in Tollcross, and decided to go along and check it out.
I actually thought it was an evening dedicated to golf instruction, and was shocked to discover that it in fact involved like-minded sexually liberated people meeting up to indulge in no-strings sexy antics.
Funnily enough, in spite of my mistake, the evening did remind me of golf.
Just as in golf tournaments there was always one annoying person who would shout out "Get in the hole!" at every possible opportunity and really annoy everyone else.
I saw "Bladerunner" at the cinema this week.
It was the first time I'd seen this film in 20 years...
It was something of a "Stoner Favourite" in my 1980s communal flat.
I'd say it stands the test of time pretty well, and considering it was made in the pre-CGI era, it remains an incredible cinematic vision.
...and 2019 doesn't seem all that far away now does it?
To use a stand-up comedy analogy, it's about a comedian whose job it is to kill other fake comedians who use other people's material.
Although in fairness to the replicant comedians, they do actually think they wrote the material, but don't realise that the jokes come from memory implants and are not original thought.

09/01/08 Country Tales

I'm still struggling with the bug.
I've been stuck on the couch feeling crap and watching endless telly.
I've seen a whole series of programmes this week on food and farming and slaughter practices and the reality of farming and debates on ethics and all that sort of stuff.
A lot of it has been difficult to watch, but I forced myself.
I think everybody should be made aware of certain realities of where our food comes from.
One of the shows was called "Lie of the Land" and it featured the life of a dairy farmer.
He was a likeable sort and it made interesting viewing.
In one scene he supervised a purge on rats with some terriers.
The rats got chased into the open and then the terriers went into a frenzy and fatally munched them.
This reminded me of an episode in my childhood.
My Dad had a job as a headmaster at an "Approved School" (that's "Young Offenders' Institiution" these days).
He was friendly with the caretaker who bred terriers ; and one of the benefits of having the terriers was that it kept the rat population of the premises in check.
I remember him demonstrating how he trained the terriers to go for the rats.
When a terrier pup was 12 weeks old, it was deemed ready for "rat training".
He caught about 20 rats over a couple of days and kept them in a large wooden barrel.
He then dropped the pup in with the rats, put a lid over the barrel and sat on it.
All hell broke loose within the barrel...a deafening cacophony of squeaking and growling and scratching.
After a few minutes there'd be silence and he'd let the pup out.
All the rats inside were dead, and from that moment any time the pup saw a rat it would instantly go into attack mode and kill it.
Isn't that a charming, rural tale?
I'm not saying I approve of this, I'm just submitting evidence.
If one day I'm accused of going on a killing spree at my local Scotmid store, I will testify that witnessing this event as a 7 year old warped my mind, and since that day the "voices" in my head have commanded me to spray the people at the cold meats counter with automatic gunfire.
I'm joking of course!

07/01/08 New Regime

Well, unfortunately my new 2008 turbo-charged creative regime has crashed on take-off...
I picked up a bug yesterday.
It's a sore throat/runny nose/watery eye/sneezing fits/generally "feeling a bit shit" combo.
I've done nothing of note since the symptons appeared and am just waiting patiently for it to go away.
Typical...
I watched Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's programme about intensive chicken production.
It's good to see that what goes on at these places is being subject to increasing scrutiny.
I reckon in a 100 years time, people will be stunned to comprehend the cruelty which we've allowed to go on in our quest for cheaper and cheaper mass-produced meat.
There were some comical moments though...
He was asking people at Tesco's if they'd taken advantage of the "2 chickens for a fiver" offer.
One women said yes, and informed HFS that she gave one of the two chickens to her dog.
At one point HFS as getting harangued by a bumptious lady along the lines of "it's ok for you to buy yer organic chicken but we can't afford it etc etc"...
In the words of St William of Connolly, "she was no stranger to a fish supper", and didn't give the impression of being under-nourished.
There was this "healthy" move by a lot of people away from red meat to fish and chicken.
It's bollocks of course.
The factory farmed chicken is full of fat you arses.
Judging by all the radio phone-ins going on, it's rather depressing that for a large percentage of the population, the cheapness justifies everything that goes on in the industry.
Unfortunately, HFS's programme is probably just preaching to the converted.
Talking of prices...I had a problem with my gas boiler...
A man came out to fix it...took him about 15 mins...
101 quid...bastard!
ouch!
I might be forced to get some cheap chickens from Tesco for tea.

05/01/08 Old

The Festive Season is now finished. It's official.
As I walked home late last night I passed many a discarded Christmas Tree lying forlornly on the pavement.
It was as if they had all fallen victim to a series of "drive-by choppings".
If I had some chalk, I would have been tempted to draw a crime scene outline of Santa on his sleigh next to one of the trees.
Then I would definitely have gone on to win the Turner Prize and Charles Saatchi would end up buying the exhibit off me for 6 squillion quid.
There were a couple of times during the recent poker match where it really hit me that myself and my fellow players were maybe not quite the hip young gunslingers we used to be.
Someone refused to deal because "leaning over to deal" would hurt his back.
There were one or two failing-eyesight related complaints of not being able to read what the cards were.
There also seemed to be a ridiculous number of trips made to the toilet.
What happened to us?
Perhaps we could get the next match sponsored by a Prostrate Research Organisation and/or "Stairmaster"?
Then last night I found myself droning on in the pub about how the FA Cup is dead in the water, and that football is all about money and nothing else, and how it was different in my day, and that there's no glory any more, and I realised I'd turned into a typical pub boring-old-fart who would have hugely irritated the younger me with his pompous certainty of all that's wrong in the world.
Thankfully, I squandered any gravitas by knocking a full pint of cider over someone as I was making another fascinating point.
I've got a SatNav system now.
There could be some great comedy material here.
I don't think anyone has ever covered this subject before, so that's something to work on in 2008.
Disappointingly, I haven't yet been able to add to the single cigarette I smoked 3 days ago.
I thought I'd cracked it, but looks like I'll have to try and find another opportunity to get the nicotine addiction up and running again.
The good news is my cough is a lot better.
But that's hardly consolation.
The weight gain is going really well though. I've found it surprisingly easy to achieve noticeable results.
I don't know what all the fuss is about.

04/01/08 I Am Cool

Well for the second time in the last 3 games I emerged as the overall winner at the "Texas Hold 'Em".
I am clearly an extremely talented player, and found it somewhat galling to be continually labelled a "lucky bastard".
It's all skill and judgement as far as I am concerned.
"Lucky bastard"....!
Ridiculous...
I was also delighted to have to smoked a single cigarette, as well as eaten a big bowl of chilli, even though I had already had my tea.
It was a win/win/win situation.
I had a quiet chuckle at a few things during the match.
There were very vocal directions at the start of the match to keep play moving quickly.
However, any delays in the play always seemed stem from the same players who had earlier proposed the "quick play" regime.
There was a couple of times when a player thought he had won a big pot, but on closer inspection of all the cards, it turned out he's lost.
The turnaround of emotion from triumph to despair in a few seconds was quite a spectacle.
Some people might even go on to say it was hilarious.
I'm not saying that...I'm just saying it was interesting.
I'm not one of these people who laughs at other people's misfortunes.
Having Hogmanay on a Monday is a bit weird...it seems to drag the "Festive Season" on interminably.
In my head, 2008 hasn't really started yet.
It offically starts on Monday when everybody goes back to work.
I would normally be going back to work, but I'm not as my contract finished just before Xmas.
I've got some writing ideas and am going to slavishly write 1000 words every day.

02/01/08 Same Old Story

Pathetically, I STILL haven't managed to smoke a cigarette in 2008.
In spite of all my good intentions, I have failed...thankfully I still have time on my side.
The "putting on weight" element of my New Year Resolutions has been going really well so far, although I made a bit of an arse of things today as I found myself doing a 3.5 mile run.
What a twat!
If I keep on with this sort of nonsense, I'll end up burning more calories than I actually consume...and that would be really embarassing.
Thankfully I have some people round fro dinner tonight and I have a spare Xmas pudding in the fridge.
We watched the John Wayne film "McLintock" yesterday.
I remember liking this film a lot as a kid, so was interested to see how it would stand the test of time.
Some interesting politics going on in it...
There are a couple of young men competing for the hand of McLintock's daughter Becky.
One has just arrived from New York with some new dance steps to show off.
He also played a musical instrument.
In the context of the film this categorised him as an effeminate, ineffectual buffoon.
Wayne also referred to him disparagingly as "College Boy!", adding "possessing a formal education" to the list of unacceptable qualities for a would-be suitor.
Thankfully, the other young man was an uncomplicated farmer who enjoyed punching people in the face as a form of cultural expression.
McLintock encourages the farmer to thrash his daughter across the backside with a metal shovel.
He then performs the same act on his wife (Maureen O'Hara).
He carries this out after receiving this advice form an old friend ;
"I'm a peaceable man but my father used to say, 'You raise you voice it doesn't do any good... it's time to raise your hand.'"
(a few jaws dropped in my living room at this point!)
There were also a horribly patronising portrayal of a Chinese person, and some sterotyped Indians, as well as every scene having someone slugging from a bottle of Scotch, (apart from "College Boy" of course)
Then McLintock made a speech to his daughter saying she wouldn't inherit his vast estate as he would be giving it back to the Indians.
"Give it back now you thieving big right-wing bastard! Don't have to wait till you're deid!"
Hmmm...life seemed much simpler when I watched this when I was a wee laddie...a

01/01/08 Happy New Year!

Ok, my main objectives this year are to put on some weight and increase my overall consumption of cigarettes.
I know I'll never stick to it, but might as well kick off 2008 with some good honourable intentions.
I think in future I'll desist from watching the news on TV during the festive season.
It's been an unrelenting rolecall of tragedy and miserable awfulness for the last 2 weeks.

Though I did enjoy a programme on a couple of nights ago documenting the history of Hogmanay broadcasts on the BBC.
I'd missed most of the shows when they were shown (probably because I was out getting paralytic somewhere), so it was a revelation to witness for the first time some wonderfully disastrous Hogmanay stock footage.
Edinburgh Castle was the backdrop to a hilariously shite "gospel" version of "Flower of Scotland" performed by an American choir.
To be accused of absolutely murdering a song ,which is fairly dreadful to start with anyway, is no mean feat.
Robbie Coltrane doing stand-up and running over-time, ending up talking through the bells was another classic.
I'm not too big on musicals but I enjoyed watching "Oliver!" yesterday.
This is my favourite bit....
I also liked the "Oom Pah Pah" song.
It's set in a pub and has lots of buxom women dancing provocatively on tables as the customers look on.
I sometimes think it'd be great if real life was a little bit like the magic world of musicals, and you could actually go somewhere to experience a joyous event like this at first hand.

28/12/07 On the road

Well, if John Motson was doing the commentary on my Christmas Day events , he'd inform you that this was only my second Christmas outside Scotland ; the other being in Peru in 1997.
I was curious to see how this event was celebrated in a different country, so it was with with great anticipation that I headed down the M6 towards Manchester.
I couldn't believe how quiet the roads were...it was the least stress I've ever experienced on a drive down south. If only it was always like this.
My brother has just bought a new house there and he's kindly volunteered to do the Christmas honours.
As in Scotland, people celebrate Christmas down here by (usually) eating a big turkey, exchanging gifts and drinking excessively.
As I drove through Manchester, I saw a man in the street in his underpants holding a bottle of beer and shouting,
"Is THIS what you fucking WANT???"
before being sick, then going trudging back into his house. I assume this is some kind of traditional Christmas role-playing, although I'm not 100% clear on what is being depicted here.
Perhaps the man was representing a character from a Charles Dickens book?
Anyway, Christmas Day was great.
The only bum note was the cancellation of the Xmas Pudding.
I was poised with a ladle and a bottle of brandy, however, a mini-oven was mistaken for a microwave oven, and the upshot was that rather than taking 10 minutes to cook, the pudding cooking time was estimated at 3 hours.
After careful consideration a decision was made to cancel the pudding.
I poured brandy over ice cream and set it on fire, but it wasn't the same really.
I watched some television after that.
I have to say that I was shocked and stunned to find that "To The Manor Born" wasn't very good.
In fact, I'd go as far as to say that it was 60 minutes of damnable ghastliness.
The BBC executives who commissioned this disaster should be kicked to death by a gang of clog-wearing Television Commissioning Editors.
Any humour in the original series was derived from the will-they-won't-they aspect with regard to their future involvement in some "horizontal folk dancing".
You take that aspect away and you are left with a steaming great turd.
The Catherine Tate show was a bit ropey as well but the first sketch with Kathy Burke was utterly brilliant.
Coronation Street made me cackle with laughter as well.
Kevin and Sally had just found out that their ridiculously vampy daughter had been having an affair with her teacher ; Kevin had kicked the shit out of him in the street, then they'd retreated back into their house.
The stilted dialogue and acting in the scene back in the house was very funny.
Rather than shouting and ranting at the tops of their voices, they calmly discussed this calamity as if they were reading the news off an autocue.
There are more searing, emotional arguments in the Park family when someone has gone to the second row of chocolates before the top row has finished (unforgiveable in my book)

This is a bit of a curiosity
It's a comedy short that many countries in Europe always show at Christmas.
The weird thing is that it is a British production but is completely unknown here.
It has its moments but is a bit slow moving.

Now, this is what I call a trailer!
This was made in the days when trailers would contain ALL the best bits of the film, and you'd often go to see a shite film then mull over how great the trailer made it look.

21/12/2007 Finest Hour

In terms of the reaction of friends and colleagues to THAT review, I can say, without fear of contradiction, that providing the story for the article has represented my greatest triumph in the world of comedy.
Wherever I've been in past couple of days, I have been greeted with wall-to-wall laughter.
I'm very proud!
I'm a bit concerned now about my comment on the article as one of my aquaintances has described my contribution as "sanctimonious".
Anyway, it's time to move on...
It's only 4 days till Xmas...and the original cast of "to The Manor Born" are re-uniting for a special one-off Christmas special.
I can barely contain my excitement.
I can remember with great clarity the devastation I felt when the series ended all these years ago.
I tumbled into a deep depression and it was many months before I was able to pull myself together and get my life back on track.
But only "4 sleeps" to go, and it's back!