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.