Day 23 - Patent encumbrance of large automotive NiMH batteries

3 Man Roast appraoched its end as we performed its penultimate performance. Most 3 Man Roast audiences have been lovely but this lot were BRILLIANT.

There were going along with us from the off and practically everything we did raised a laugh. Joyous to the last despite Will Howell's ever worsening voice. By this stage he was sounding like a phone pest.

LOTWAA was the most interesting gig of the run. I say gig. It was a breakdown on stage.

Paul Duncan McGarrity did about 15 mins compering at the top. I then went on and decided to add in about 5 mins of material from nowhere and chatted with a woman from Lincolnshire about drunken uses for vegetables.

Then Laurence Tuck went on and mentally unravelled for half an hour. His first jokes did'nt get a response so he went off-script. Anybody who knows Laurence will know this is unheard off. He is more likely to perform his set in Latin than deviate from script. It was wonderful. But he overan dramatically.

Dan Adams did not go on as we did'nt have time.

After which Paul Duncan McGarrity proceeded to do half his set to close the show.

To quote one audience member "Is it always that weird?"

Perhaps it should have been.

Then one act who was waiting to get into Funny Fillies (the following show in out venue) and had a squint which made her look as if she was trying to outstare a wall, tried to get onto arguement with us claiming there had been a discussion that women were not funny.

However, nobody was having this conversation as she had misheard something and she came off more like a mad woman arguing with herself.

But the end is in site.

Despite how boring reality looks from here.

Day 21 - Vertebral subluxation

The wheel has turned.

Most of this Fringe people I know have grumbles and mumbled of bad audiences and small numbers. Both 3 Man Roast and LOTWAA have been a delight from start to finish.

It seems now the karmic overdraft we have amassed has paid off and both shows are being watched by the unappreciative and drunk.

Piffle frankly.

Yesterday, I finally saw Paul Foot's show Still Life. As anybody will be able to tell you he's my favourite live act on gthe circuit. (Simon Munnery is my favourite comedian full stop but I prefer watching Paul). His shows are bizarre, obtuse creations so far removed from comedy clubs and the nonsense Outline Magazine peddles on their "funny" page as to be a seperate genre. Its like being forced to watch musical theatre for a year and realising that what everybody thinks theatre is then going to watch the RSC do Ibsen.

The show was an exquisite nonsense and I think he is two years away from his Magnus Opus.

Hopefully I can temp him back to Norwich at some point.

Day 20 - Hongcheng Magic Liquid Incident

Today was the dread of all days. The final Monday. However, it was suprisingly event free.

3 Man Roast was excellent and I do believe I finally relaxed onstage. LOTWAA was pretty awful with a diffident, uninterested and tiny crowd. One couple told us they had just walked out of their two previous shows and proceeded to walk out of ours. I was wondering if that was there hobby. Like their own audience hokey-cokey.

Once again it struck me I must get at least 10mins of just jokes in my set. I have always had problems writing "JOKES" as personally I don't enjoy listening to jokes very much. Jimmy Carr and Milton Jones tend to leave me cold. I tend to prefer the acts whose sets are built on wit more than anything.

I ran into John Osbourne's whos show John Peel's Shed is almost the talk of the Fringe. Then I went to see John Kearn's Dinner Party with John Kearns and Pat Cahill.

This was probably the most enjoyable peice of nonsense I had seen this Fringe and I highly recommend it

This is a short blog as I need a nap

Toodles

Day 19 - Manatee of Helena

Sunday is the day of rest.

They say no rest for the wicked.

Yesterday was Sunday and apparently I have done something dreadful as it was day which strained even my delicate constitution dear reader.

I had to get up at 11am to find my Flat with an Omnidirectional Shower was now a  Flat with an Omnidirectional Shower and No Hot Water as the boiler had gone for a Burton.

So once icecold wash later I felt awful and set up for the day in the worst way possible.

3 Man Roast was not running today. I have been told this is due to the venue showing sport. I don't believe this and think the predatory lotharios Alex and Will are too busy seducing their respective prey to bother with a show, dear reader.

Instead I went off and performed at Miss London's Pick of the Fringe. I show I enjoyed thoroughly although none of the others seemed to.

The venue was a lofty church set within the bowels of Edinburgh's 4D geography and, as massive vaulted churchs are the standard performance space in Norwich. I was unfazed by it. But a varied show by all concerned.

After some vigorous sitting I went to LOTWAA where I preceeded to put in the best onstage performance of my life.

I frankly could have basted in self-satrisfaction all night but instead went to the Gilded Balloon to congratulate the originator of Norwich stand-up gigs, Pat Cahill, on his Amused Moose victory and then discovered the Wine Room tech was an old uni friend of mine.

Then I went to sleep.

So there

Love you all. Try the fish. Goodbye

Day 15 & 16 - Extropianism

As I was unable to access a computer yesterday due to needing a little nap today is a double post.

I think time is compressed in Edinburgh. It’s a year of gigging in a month both physically and emotionally all compressed into 30 days. It the comedy circuit as zip file. Because of this I'm not exactly sure which day some of these incidents occurred in so this post will take the holistic view of it all.

3 Man Roast has been uniformly lovely and LOTWAA has been less consistent.

There seems to be a pattern where Laurence Tuck and I do well and Dan Adams not or vice versa. On one of the days was the first time I thought we did uniformly well. As LOTWAA has a later slot the audiences can be a little friskier than with 3 Man Roast. The learning curve is excellent as an upshot of this.

I have long shied away from doing any material about coming from Norfolk as its all mostly hack nonsense (Give me 6) peddled out by even the best comedians. However, after doing about 2 and half hours of thinking with a premise which started off with a joke about Northern Ireland I suddenly came up with an original quip which inverted the whole thing. I have trotted this out in front of the disparate demographics of Edinburgh audiences and it appears to be working almost universally.

Thusly I shall be trotting it out on the circuit from September onwards.

3 Man Roast picked up a 4* review from Whatsonstage.com with the lovely sign off note

                         "These boys are definitely ready to graduate to a larger room."


I also ran into fellow Norwich resident John Osbourne's whose show John Peel's Shed has been picking up 5* reviews across the board. 

Most evenings have ended tomorrow morning and however much Diet Coke I am consuming I have yet to become a more confident and independent young woman.

Day 12 - Perpetual Motion

3 Man Roast was not on Sunday so I spent most of the day lazing on a Sunday afternoon.

Will and I met up for lunch and, as our press blurb says, we did'nt perform because we were eating.

Will and I had a 2 Man Roast. It was almost spiritual. Even if the lunch descended into our writing a series of hilarious Doctor Who based jokes utterly incomprehensible to anybody except fanboys (and girls).

After that I went off to do LOTWAA in the evening and was, once again, lovely. This is becoming an uncomfotably regular occurence. According to the bar staff our numbers are larger than any of the other shows and all our audiences are if not universally wonderful then never unpleasant.

I also have picked up some followers on Twitter from the show.

This was my last LOTWAA for 24 hours as Monday night I am off the Pleasance to watch The Wrestling.

If its repeated next year and I'm not in it I shall cry. Given my general physical resemblance to The Undertaker and my hobby all the roads are pointing to me. Give me a Goldberg gimmick and the match writes itself.

I'm not saying I should be there as that's what you should be saying.

Then I closed the evening hanging around with Norwich's finest John "5 Stars" Osbourne and Tim "The Leader" Clare.

Then I had a relatively early night which is unheard of at the Fringe

Day 10 - Social Credit Parties in Canada

So Edinburgh is progressing absurdley quickly.

3 Man Roast was a hard gig. The audience laughed by I dont think they believed in us at any point in the show. I feel a lot of stand-up is about making people emphasise with you and the audience did'nt do that at any point. They laughed intellectually but at no point were on they the journey with us. Which is a shame as we had a fire regulation scaring 42 in the room.

LOTWAA was a delight. The audience were all in the right frame of mind and a hour away from drunkeness.
Mark Simmons compering was pitched perfectly and set the right tone for the evening. I opened and, despite a quiet stage right, the audience were all on board.

I made the psychological error of concentrating on the quiet stage right, and did'nt enjoy myself as much as I should which was a shame.

We had John Fleming in to watch us. I have been in e-mail communication with John for a while now and it was lovely to finally meet him. One of my major interests is the origins of the alternative comedy movement in the late 1970s and it was a pleasure to meet somebody so connected. As he runs the Malcolm Hardee Comedy Awards and he has watched us I think we should now claim we were considered for the award. I think thats in keeping with spirit of the whole thing and I doubt most punters will pick up on my selective use of language.

Mark Simmons had some very complementry words about my set when he said I was a "Non-generic comedian" and my act reminded him of the comedians you would see at The Stand. It was'nt necessarily for everybody but thoughtful and funny. I had never considered my material in those terms before but it was the biggest compliment I think anybody has paid me.

As with these things form follows funtion. I have a peice of material in my set about martial arts. It is a very niche peice of observational comedy which I have broadened out to make accesible but its origins are very specific. After the gig an audience member complimented me on how accurate and lovely it was to hear it observed. That had now vailidated that for me.

The audience was also made up of two people I was at Dundee University, two friends from Norwich and an old Fringe friend. My set talks a lot about my University drinking days which were over long before I came into the comedy world so it was nice if strange to have people there who were part of that period.

Also according to an audience member I had the best shoes on of any act that night. Damn right. I have better shoes than any comedian with the exceptions of Mick Ferry, with whom I once spent an hour discussing the virtues of Loakes and Barkers, and Paul Foot.

I then toddled off to Brookes to bath in ego run-off and the most miraculous thing happened. Somebody in Brookes schmoozed me. This has never happened before, ever, and if it never happens again at least it has happened once.

I have no shows to recommend as I took the day off from watching shows as my mind could'nt take it

Day 8 - Underlying Priciples of Microeconomic Behaviour

The day began with using a blunt mach 3 to shave. I may have well used the quill of a procupine as I stupidly eviscerated my throat and spent the next hour in swollen agony.

This set the tone of the day.

A few people were referring to it as Black Wednesday which seemed accurate. All the problems began with either science or God depending on your inclination.

The heavens opened like the bowels of an Ebola patient and continued and continued to pour upon the soil in an attempt to wash away the stain of the teenage drama student.

The audiences for bothe shows were hard work.

3 Man Roast was less a comedy gig and more Georgian dental work. I do not attend to go further into it as I would rather forget the whole experience

LOTWAA was an improvement but then anything except a cannibal holocaust would have been.

There was a silver cloud on this accursed day. LOTWAA had a few industry people in and despite the sheer hard work to get anything from the punters they seemed to enjoy it.

BBC Radio 2 were in having a look (well listen) as was a scout from a television company.

He came up to us after the show after the stating how much he enjoyed it. This has never ever happened to me since I started stand-up. Living in Norwich I have little exposure or context in the wider comedy world and that one comment stopped me in my tracks.

Laurence and I had a drink with him afterwards and he seemed interested in what we had to say.

We celebrated modestly with a quick trip to the vainglory of a mostly empty Brookes Bar.

It was at this point I was waylaid by somebody asking me if I was interested in a Doctor Who comedy project which was happening later in the year.

It was at that point I had to go for a lie down.

Fringe Blog (slight return) Days 1,2,3 & 4

When I posted a few days ago I stated I would blog every day but unfortuntaly due to my forgetting to get the wi-fi code from my landlord who has disappeared off for a wedding anniversary I have not has access to a computer until today. So this will be a brief summary of my first weekend back at the Fringe.

I arrived in a relatively quiet Edinburgh and within an hour was on stage with my first show "3 Man Roast" with Will Howells and Alex Holland. Which of course was the perfect time to have a reviewer from 3 Weeks in to see the show. When you are in a venue as small as ours the audience member with the notepad and pen sticks out like an extended metaphor. The audience enjoyed themselves and that is as much as I wanted from the first show. So the reviewer be damned (I say this but I have been fanatically looking at the 3 weeks website for the review. For good or ill at least it is attention)

After sitting down for some hours my evening show "Lifestyles of the Weird and Aimless"" with Dan Adams and Laurence Tuck was a much smoother affair. No reviewers in this time although we did have a mentally disabled girl who demanded a Hot Dog which I could cope with.

Edinburgh is the same as it ever is, full of schmoozers, boozers and radical reinterpretations of Brecht.

The rain is like an ever present migraine. Always there lurking and avoided only by going indoors and self-medicating.

My traditional flashbacks to my wilder Scottish youth come as thick and fast as they ever do. Every streetcorner reminding me of sharing drinks with tramps and women called Angela.

I watched some Free Festival shows yesterday the highlight of which was Norway's Daniel Simonsen at the City Cafe. The show's not about anything and all the better for it ploughing into absurdist anti-comedy by way of nothing.