Day 17 - Aspartame Controversy

Day 17 was the day of fatigue. The day of fire and destruction. The day of sadness and the day of joy.

I had come in from "the socialising" to my flat with its omnidirectional shower at an hour familiar only to those trying to avoid conversation with the horror of the night before.

I had no hours sleep then went off to do 3 Man Roast.

The show went surprisingly well for me although some of the audience walked out. We were glad they did. I had noticed they were doing shots before the show and we are not a show catering to the laddish demographic. I think 3 Man Roast is best enjoyed sober with access to wikipedia for references and they clearly wanted to us to reinforce their prejudices while validating that drinking so much they vomit there own anus was a lifestyle choice.

At this point I should have returned to my flat with its omnidirectional shower and slept

I should have done this.

Instead I wandered about a little and ran into doyens of the Norwich Cabaret scene Joe and Lucy who were up for a while. As the show was about to go up and after hugging Bob Slayer we went to watch Frank Sanazi.

The premise is Hitler as Rat Pack singer. Its a one joke Cabaret act beautifully well thought through and realised. Hopefully the combined might of Headless, No Strings and Salt Box will be able to entice him to Norwich soon. He played Norwich once before at Bonanafana Social Club to a mixed reaction. I am tempted to say this was the wrong demographic for him. Plug him into Norwich's alt/metal scene and I think we are onto a winner.

We saw him in The Hive on Edinburgh's

Niddry Street

. A vast, dank bunker which fitted the act. We were lamenting Norwich lack of basements and medium sized venues. Which is a common gripe of mine.

Then I did my evening show LOTWAA and if you were at the show I would like to apologise. I was so tired by this point I could barely focus my vision and turned in a performance that wasn’t so my dialled in as performed on a dial-up internet connection where all the data kept getting corrupted and important bits missed out and probably it was better to leave it and come back at a better time.

After this horror show I slinked off to the Pear Tree for the birthday party of a man I have never spoken to and then went home early to birch my balls in penitence.

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.