Tuesday, June 30, 2009

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.

Monday, June 29, 2009

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?

Monday, June 15, 2009

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.