Random Burblings

In some ways, stand-up comedy and blogging are a lot alike. In both cases, you spend a good deal of your time looking for inspiration, looking around yourself at other things happening in the world that either interest or amuse you. And sometimes, those things just fall right into your lap.

At work, I sit with my back to one of the most boring individuals in the universe. This man used to be my boss, thankfully he is no more, but I still have to share a workspace with him.

This is one of the worst kind of boring people, the ones who honestly believe that everything they say is utterly fascinating. The ones who believe that their opinion trumps all others and that they have total and intimate knowledge of absolutely every subject, far greater knowledge than any other man alive.

Oh, and he also plays golf.

That’s okay, actually, because it means he spends a lot of time talking about golf, and I have, over the years, possibly in an evolutionary way that proves that intelligent design is a whole load of baloney, developed an ability to entirely tune out any conversation which involves whacking pebbles into holes with sticks.

But I bring it up because, just to illustrate exactly what kind of man we are talking about, and to give you the complete picture, he has a golf trophy. Which he keeps on display. Not on his desk, where other people sometimes have little momentos or other items on display. No, his golf trophy is on a high shelf where everyone in the entire office, around a hundred and fifty people, can see it and be reminded on a daily basis that he is so good at golf that he got a trophy.

Rearrange the following words to make a sentence. Fuck, gives, who, a?

Anyway, so you’ve probably gathered that this guy bugs the hell out of me. Except today, when he came remarkably close to causing me to redecorate my computer screen with coffee.

I’m going to start with the punchline. It works better that way. These were the words in question which almost caused my bladder to give way and me to be reduced to a wreck of giggling blubber.

“See, I know my stuff, I know my stuff, I know about your part of the world, I know my stuff.”

So far, so innocuous. Now let me put these words into context.

He was speaking to an Indian guy. I mean a guy from India, (not wearing a headdress and passing round the pipe of peace.) This guy was a Hindu. He had said so. And to this information, my former boss asked the following question.

“So, do you do Ramadan?”

“No,” came the reply. To which he decided to further demonstrate his knowledge of far Eastern culture.

“Oh, cos the Bangladeshi boys, you know, the Bangladeshi boys, they do Ramadan.”

Now I will accept that there is no specific reason why anyone who has not been brought up in either religion should know that Ramadan is an Islamic festival and nothing whatsoever to do with Hindu. Ignorance of the differing socio-political, ethnic and religious ways of the sub-continent is no disgrace.

At least it isn’t, if you don’t follow it up with “see, I know my stuff, I know my stuff, I know about your part of the world, I know my stuff.”

So this could be my last ever blog post. Not that I’m giving up, but because, as I’m sure you are aware, there is a possibility that at some time tomorrow some scientists in Switzerland are going to upset the delicate balance between matter and anti-matter thus causing all matter to revert to the state of energy and hence the entire universe to blink out of existence in a single instant.

Which would be fucking cool if it weren’t for the fact that you wouldn’t actually be around to see it.

Or it is apparently possible that they might create an artificial black hole which will proceed to suck the entire solar system into its super-gravitational pull. Which by comparison would probably be vaguely disappointing.

Thing is, I wasn’t worried about any of this. I tend to work on the “Russians love their children too” principle that, there being so many thousands of people involved in the planning and construction of the Large Hadron Collider, that if there was any real chance of any of these things happening, at least one of them would, by now, have said “you know, I don’t think we should be doing this.”

I say I wasn’t worried. And then this morning I saw the following sentence in a news report on the topic.

“Professor Brian Cox, from the University of Manchester, is one of the LHC scientists and also played keyboard with pop band D:Ream.”

I’m sorry? Excuse me?

Are they telling me that the fate of the entire universe currently rests in the hands of the bloke that played piano on “Things Can Only Get Better?”

We’re all doomed.

Been meaning to do a wrap-up on the Fringe but life has been a bit hectic the last week or two. Also, I wrote an article for the Chortle website about the experience, so you can read most of it there.

There were some good experiences in the final week though. Towards the end of the week particularly we had some great audiences. And on the Wednesday night, in the absence of our regular MC, I stepped up and tried it for the first time. That’s an interesting and scary experience but one I really enjoyed. Usually as a comic you walk on stage knowing pretty much everything you are going to do and say, but as an MC you haven’t got a clue what is about to happen and just have to go wherever the audience take you.

Of course you can find ways to slot in bits of your usual material, but as it happened, on the night I didn’t use a single word of it. What I did find, however, is that you don’t necessarily need to be funny all the time, so long as you can just find something to say about whatever they happen to throw at you.

The other really great experience was of totally dying on my arse. I know, that doesn’t sound good, and it gets worse. Literally I stood on stage for the full eight minute slot (I was determined not to cut and run) while the audience sat in complete silence with not so much as a titter, and one chap half way through turned to his mate and in a voice that could be heard across the room said “this guy’s shit!”

So why do I describe that as a great experience? Well, quite simply because it didn’t break me, and because no matter what I do from now on, even if I am only getting mild titters, it won’t ever be as bad as that! Because even if the audience hate you and are shouting insults, at least that gives you something to work with, but total silence is something you can do nothing about. So basically, I survived the worst, it’s all uphill from here!

Life has been returning to normal though, and I lose one hellcat this weekend and the other in a couple of weeks, both heading off to their respective universities at last, so for the first time in over a year I will have my flat to myself and can set about making it look a bit less like a troupe of hobos have moved in.

After such a good first week, the second one has been a bit odd. Audience numbers are down, but by all accounts that’s normal, the mid-Fringe slump they call it. At the beginning people are excited to go out and see shows as the festival comes round again, but at this point they’re starting to get a bit tired of it all.

It started Monday with what will be known as “elderly lady” night. The elderly lady in question being the mother of one of the acts, and a game old bird who has seen a lot of comedy, but Wee Scotty hadn’t realised that. The first two acts had gone down well, but when Wee Scotty went on, he saw the elderly lady in the audience, and decided he had better tone down his usually hyperactive and expletive-driven act.

Sadly, what that meant was that he basically stumbled around the stage for ten minutes not saying much, while the audience looked on in bemusement wondering what the hell was going on. And it killed the atmosphere in the room stone dead, with none of the acts that followed seeming to be able to pick it up again.

But this just demonstrates how great a learning experience the Fringe is. Two weeks earlier I would have dreaded going on in that atmosphere. Now I was looking at it as a challenge. I walked on, looked at the audience, thought to myself “you came here to laugh, not to sit looking miserable,” and decided to perform my set as if they were pissing themselves at each and every line, regardless of whether they were or not. And it worked. It wasn’t the best night I’ve had, but I got some good laughs out of them, and generally woke them up, and came off a little proud of myself.

Unfortunately, I tried the same trick last night, with the opposite effect. They were a weird audience last night. There was one guy who sat right in the middle and was like a swirling vortex of miserable, sucking all the laughter out of the room and staring at me throughout my set with a look of hatred. It turned out afterwards that the group he was in were devout Christians, so my gags about ten inch cocks and vibrators probably didn’t go down too well. And it might have been a mistake to try to engage him regarding how big his porn stash had been when he was a boy.

But it was strange because they were a good sized audience, and there were one or two seeming to really enjoy the night, but the majority of them were just dead and they made less noise than the previous night, when the number of punters we had in was a grand total of six.

But that had been the strangest night of all. Tuesday had been a really good one, but Wednesday everything was bizarre. It all started with my Incredible Hulk act on the Russians.

They might have been Poles. I don’t know, but they were Eastern Europeans of some ilk, and big fuckers, four of them. They came down from the main part of the pub and decided to sit in the side area, just away from where we perform, and have their drinks there. They didn’t want to see the show, and they were being very noisy, so I went over and explained to them that they were in a Fringe comedy venue and would have to keep their voices down.

They nodded, I walked away, they completely ignored me and went back to talking just as loudly as before. So I gave them a couple of minutes and went back over and explained again, more forcefully. Again they looked as if they understood. Then as I turned to walk away, one of them shouted at the top of his voice “Hey man, what is your name?” I turned round and without thinking fixed them with my angriest stare and said “it doesn’t fucking matter what my name is, you keep the noise down or you fuck off upstairs, understood?”

Then I turned and walked away. Whilst quaking in my boots and thinking “please don’t stab me.” As it happens, they sat there defiantly for about a minute, then took their pints and left. But I made sure I didn’t go up into the pub again that evening, just in case.

The other thing that night I will refer to as the saga of the little beardy bloke. This guy was sat at the back of the room as we came in, apparently asleep. Then, when the show started, he suddenly woke up, got out a video camera and started filming.

Now, we had someone else in filming that night. He’d been working with us to help publicise the night and ran a little community website. So when beardy guy got his camera out, we weren’t sure if they were working together or not. So we waited until the interval, but it turned out there was no connection.

So we approached him and asked him who he was and what he was doing. First he said he was from the Fringe, but he clearly wasn’t as Fringe officials all have an ID tag hanging round their necks. Then he said he was from the Fringe website, then a Fringe website. Then that he was trying to publicise the Free Fringe. So we asked him if he had spoken to Peter Buckley Hill, the Free Fringe organiser, but he didn’t seem to know who that was.

We pointed out to him that he hadn’t asked permission to film, and he said “I’m doing that now.” I tried to explain to him about image rights, and that it would be a breach of copyright if he put any of us on the net without our signing a release form, but he didn’t seem to understand. Then we said maybe we could come to a deal, he could keep filming as long as he let us vet anything before it went on the web, and as long as he supplied us with a copy of the film to use on our own website.

Then he got very excited and started telling me that he knew of a company that, if you bought your domain name from them, would give you five free web pages. By this point alarm bells were ringing all over the place for me, as the guy clearly didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. I told him we used a proper hosting service, and he didn’t seem to know what that was, and started asking me for details.

Eventually he got up and left, but not before giving me a scrappy “business card” and excitedly telling me all about how his website was one of the most viewed Fringe sites and how much publicity he could give us. When I got home I looked at the site (I’m not going to link, but if you put EdinburghFringeFest with some “w”s before it and dot com after) and found it was one of the scrappiest and most unprofessional things imaginable, with pages so long and so full of shit they almost broke my browser loading, and with most of the contents simply cut and pasted off other proper Fringe sites.

The next day I spoke to a few Fringe stalwarts and they told me we should have been warned about the guy. The Fringe office apparently sent out a letter to all the venues recommending they not let him through the door. He seems to be a bizarre fantasist who thinks he runs an international news agency out of a run down little internet cafe, and last year applied for full press accreditation using that address and four others round the world which all turned out to be fake. On being refused this accreditation, apparently he threatened the Fringe staff with violence.

Happy days. A week and a bit to go. Can it get any weirder?

I’m not sure if I’d say I’m getting my second wind yet. I’m still pretty knackered, but I’ve got to the stage where I look forward to my ten minutes on stage every night. I’m also acutely aware that we’re nearly half way through the run now, and that it’s a kind of unreal situation. Come September it’ll be back to struggling to find some stage time, and having to travel miles to get it. Although my diary for September does seem to be filling up.

Friday night’s gig was a good one. We had Scottish comedy legend Vladimir McTavish coming along to be a guest headliner, and so in order to give him time for a fifteen minute set, we all cut ours back by a couple of minutes. But it’s always worth it to be on the bill with the kind of act who can headline the top clubs. And I got some good feedback from him afterwards, as well as from a couple of people I used to work with at Really Big Scottish company who had come along to watch.

Earlier in the evening, I’d taken in a couple of other shows, both of which I can heartily recommend. The first was a foul-mouthed puppet show called “Sammy J in the Forest of Dreams.” Adult puppet shows seem quite popular these days, but this was a good one, and any show featuring a song called “Fuck You Disney” can’t be all bad. The other show was the new one from Richard Herring, which some people are tipping for an if.comedy nomination.

Saturday I was doing a thing called the Clean (As Possible) Comedy Show. This turned out to be a lot more professionally run than most of the random guest spots I’ve been doing. I wasn’t sure what to expect, having been told in advance that basically the rules were you weren’t allowed to swear or tell dirty jokes.

When I got there it was quite odd to see quite that many people wearing “Jesus Loves You” tee-shirts in a comedy gig. The other performers on the bill were all professionals, I was the only non-pro on, and I was asked to do a “tight five,” which means five minutes and don’t run over, as opposed to a normal five which can be up to seven. I had planned for the latter so had to spend a bit of time deciding which lines I was going to drop.

I was doing a routine I hadn’t done for a while, and which I had only ever been happy with the second half of. But I rejigged the first half, using some of the cleaner lines from my usual evening set, and it worked quite well and I was pleased with the audience response, they seemed to like it a lot. I did get a bit of dissaproving mumbling when I threw in a Heather Mills gag, but I used the old comedy stand-by of saying “hmmm, think I found the level there” and they seemed to forgive me. I suppose, being mostly Christians, that’s their job.

The other thing, though, was that I had booked another couple of shows to go to with M, and hadn’t realised that the Clean show was an hour and a half and not just an hour, and so by the time I came off stage I had ten minutes to get from the Pod, in the Grassmarket, all the way to the Gilded Balloon, picking M up along the way, in ten minutes. I ran, then we ran, and we got in with less than a minute to spare.

The show was Liam Mullone’s, who I had done the Anthology show with last Sunday, and when we arrived the ushers insisted on us sitting in the front row, where we proceeded to look horribly hot and sweaty and pant heavily. When Mullone came on stage I could see him look over towards me with a look of recognitions a couple of minutes in, although whether that was a look of “oh yeah, he’s the guy from last week,” or just “I vaguely recognise that guy” is anybodies guess. I didn’t get the chance to stop around after and say hello as we had another show to get to at the Underbelly, to see Jason John Whitehead.

Saturday’s show was absolutely jam packed, I think it was the biggest audience we’ve had yet, and a rumour went round that we had a reviewer in, so we were all raising our game, although it turned out later that she wasn’t. We’ve not been reviewed yet, which is a bit of a bummer, but hopefully we’ll get at least one in before the end of the run.

Went to three more shows on Sunday, none of which are reviewed yet, starting with Andrew O’Neill’s Free Fringe show. He’s also doing a proper themed show in the evenings that you have to pay for, but he’s doing his normal stand-up act in the afternoons free of charge. It’s in a poky little cavern under the South Bridge and was packed to the rafters, showing that he’s starting to get the pulling power his talent deserves.

Next up came the Reduced Edinburgh Fringe Impro Show, featuring a troupe of improv performers doing scenes based on titles randomly selected from the Fringe programme. At the start they asked the audience to circle the names of shows, so I naturally chose ours, and they ended up using it for a bizarre scene involving a whisk. Finally it was Rhod Gilbert, another potential if.comedy nominee.

Sunday evening was potentially our smallest audience yet, but about five minutes after we started the show, hordes of extra audience started turning up and in the end we were packed out again. It was a bit of a scratchy show, because two of our regulars weren’t there and we had replacements in, and two more didn’t turn up including our compere, so we roped one more replacment in and decided to do slightly longer sets, and then one of the two who had failed to arrive decided to show up in the end about five minutes after he should otherwise have gone on stage.

But it was a good show. A rowdy audience, and a lot of the acts were getting mucked about with, but Daniel Webster who was on before me decided to introduce me as “So You Think You’re Funny Semi-Finalist,” and it was amazing the shift in the audience this produced. You start to sense this, when you are performing, and it was like they all thought “oh, this guy’s a bit serious, we’d better not muck about,” and so I just got one interruption during the whole set, and I would have liked to reply but decided to ignore it because it would have disruped the flow of the gag I was telling at the time. And I even included a minute or so of brand new material that I’d only thought up about twenty minutes earlier, but which got a couple of laughs, so I’ll probably use it again.

I’m sure you’re all going to get bored of “tales from the Fringe” very quickly, but that’s what my life is at the moment, so until next month I’m afraid that’s all there is.

A week in and I must admit a little bit of Fringe fatigue is starting to set in. But I’m enjoying it. Before it started I was told by several people, both comics and promoters, that your first Fringe will either break you or fire you months ahead of where you should be as a comedian. I wasn’t convinced, but I’ll be honest and say I can see the improvement in my performances in just this one week.

The main improvement is in terms of audience banter. I’m not that good at it, and it used to scare the crap out of me. I would be on stage praying that nobody would interrupt or heckle. But the last few days I’ve been seeking it out, even trying to engage the audience right at the start of the set. What I’ve learned is that they will either not respond, in which case you can just get on with your normal set, or else it will make them feel included in the show and thus more likely to be with you and forgive any lapses later on.

I guess that realisation started on Monday night. I always watch the compere at the start of the show, to get a feel for who the audience are. And when it turned out there was a couple in from Gloucester, the thought that ran through my head immediately was, these are my people, I can banter with them.

So the first thing I did coming on stage was ask them which part of Gloucester they were from, and they admitted they were actually from Cheltenham. To which I replied, “oh shit, I thought I’d found some homies. Cheltenham? I bet you break out the gold plated toilet paper when the Queen comes round to tea.” It worked brilliantly, and I immediately felt that shift in the audience as they came round onto my side.

Tuesday was an odd day. I wasn’t doing the usual show because I had already been booked to do Late ‘n’ Leith before I was offered this one and they clash. I was also doing an early show, and that afternoon I had been trying to develop some of the mountain stuff I had done on Sunday into actual material.

So when I arrived at the show, it turned out we only had two people in the audience, and as I got up I thought, perhaps I can try some of this new stuff out. So I actually asked them if the minded, and then waded in. And died on my arse.

About twenty seconds after I started I realised it was a mistake and that this stuff simply wasn’t funny. But I’d committed myself at this point, and had to see it through. So I learned something else, and that something was that dying on your arse in front of two people is actually worse than doing it in front of a crowd, because there is nowhere else to look. You just have to keep staring at these two people whose eyes are constantly telling you to “get off the stage motherfucker, you’re not funny.”

Later on I showed up at the Meridian Bar for the late show, only to find that while around nine comedians had turned up, the audience hadn’t bothered. But Grainne Maguire, who runs the show, had got fed up as this had happened a couple of times before, and so made the executive decision that nobody was leaving until they had got up onto the stage and done one minute of brand new material that they had never done before.

Initially I asked to be excused, as having died on my arse once with new material that day, I felt that twice in one day was more than I could take. Especially with a number of quite well known comics in the room. But having watched some of the others, I remembered a little routine I’d been contemplating about a genuinely true incident that occurred in our work bathroom a few months ago, but that I had never got round to trying out, so I got up and gave it a go, and while it needs a bit of work, it got some laughs, and so rescued my day for me.

Wednesday it was back to the regular show, and we had a bit of a weird audience in. Not nasty, but they wanted to play, and wanted to be part of the show. And as I got into my set, I found them wanting to comment on almost everything I said. Then a conversation seemed to spark up between two pissed-up groups on either side of the room, and I realised it wasn’t going to go away and I was going to have to wade in and get in their faces.

“Is this a comedy gig or the fucking Jeremy Kyle show?” I shouted. “It’s the Jeremy Kyle show, isn’t it? And we’ve just got the results of the paternity test back. And it turns out, you three are bastards. And she’s your mum.”

From there it kind of degenerated. But it was great fun, and in all honesty probably my favourite set I’ve ever done. At one point I had one woman in the audience trying to tell me about how big her porn collection was. It was that kind of night.

After that, last night was kind of quiet. I did another two shows, an early one and the usual late one, but neither was spectacular or even out of the ordinary.

In other news, I have a housefull again. Mum, eldest brother and youngest son have all arrived, to add to the purple and green haired hellcats already present meaning I have six people living in a two bedroom flat and it’s a bit like a game of sardines. But I’ve taken young M along to a couple of shows, Pete Firman and Jason Byrne, and they’re here until the middle of next week, after which the lovely witchy is arriving. It’s all go here at Sharpy towers, and chaos reigns supreme. As ever.

The world of stand-up is a ladder. A very tall ladder. Most people will never reach the top. Some fall off. Some lose their nerve and stop half-way. There are no toilet breaks, so as an open-spot you are on the bottom rung and everybody above is pissing on you. When you reach the semi-final of a national competition, you move up to the next rung. You’re still pretty much at the bottom, just one rung up, and thus you get slightly less pissed on.

Winning the competition would move you up several rungs, of course. Even getting to the final would send you one or two higher up. That’s why Sunday was a pretty important day for me. It’s why I arrived at the Gilded Balloon that evening and, rather than head up to the cafeteria area where I was supposed to meet up with the So You Think You’re Funny organisers and my fellow semi-finalists, I headed downstairs instead. To the toilet. And threw up.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Sunday morning I got up and headed down once again to the Counting House to take part in Andrew J. Lederer’s Anthology project as promised the day before. As it happens, I ran in to Andrew last night, it turns out he read the last post and objected to being referred to as a bit part player from the Kids from Fame. So to put the record straight I will mention he is also a very accomplished man, as can be seen from his IMDB page and his wikipedia entry, and he once wore Jerry Seinfeld’s trousers. (Ask him, if you ever meet him, it’s a very funny story.)

Anyway, I suppose I should back up a little more to the aftermath of the previous night’s show when I drank a bit of Southern Comfort. In fact, I drank quite a lot of Southern Comfort, and then at two in the morning suddenly realised I was doing this show the next morning, and drunkenly texted everyone I had ever heard of, including several people I hadn’t spoken to in years and some who don’t even live in this country, exhorting them to come along and watch. In the event, one of them did!

But that’s hardly the point, because, forgive me for coming over all luvvy here, but the fact that when I turned up I found I was going to be on alongside Liam Mullone, who actually featured in the first review I ever wrote on the Laughter Track, and somewhat favourably too, and who I think is a very funny man indeed, meant that regardless of audience numbers, this was going to be a good day.

Just to remind you, the point of this show was not to tell jokes, but stories. Liam went first and told amusing tales from his childhood involving his brother and silly putty. Then I did some tales from the mountains, most of which have appeared on here at one time or another - here, here, here and here. And then Andrew finished up with the Jerry Seinfeld trousers story. Our audience of two seemed to enjoy it, but I have to be honest and admit that while I was on, I was trying much harder to impress the two comics than the people I really should have been concentrating on. There’s something about seeing people you think are funny, laughing because of something you said, that just takes things to another level.

Afterwards I went home and started preparing for the competition. My nerves were on edge, and while I kept thinking I should take advantage of the free time to take in a show, I wasn’t sure I could concentrate. But by late afternoon I was crawling the walls, and so I decided that I should look on it as preparation, and go and see Tom Wrigglesworth, who won the competition five years ago, to see if some of what he had could rub off on me. In the end I really enjoyed it, and having seen Miles Jupp who won seven years ago earlier in the week, I’m now thinking I might make it a theme of this year’s fringe. I know that last year’s winner Richard Sandling has a show up here, as do Rhona Cameron and Phil Kay who were both early winners, and I’m sure some of the others must have as well.

So, finally arriving at the meeting point, I met Ian Llewellyn-Rowe, one of the other contestants that night who I had met a couple of days earlier, and we introduced ourselves to a few of the others, and then we waited for the organisers to arrive. Stephen Grant showed up and introduced himself as compere for the night, and pointed out he has compered a heat for the last three years, and on each occasion the winner of that heat went on to win the whole contest. Not too much pressure there then. And he also mentioned that they always put the strongest line-up on the first heat, so that good word of mouth would go around. Which was something of a double-edged sword. It was nice to think you were considered a strong contestant, but it also meant the quality of the competition would be equally exponentially higher.

Incidentally, when we first went in, we all lined up on the stage, and Stephen took a photo. You can see it on his own blog, here. That’s me second from the left, obviously. Left to right it’s Seann Walsh, me, Ian Llewellyn-Rowe, Nyasha Sakatukwa, Kevin Hampson, Kevin Loughlin, Ruth Cockburn and Neville Hubball.

Nyasha was up first, and to be honest he lost it a bit in the first few minutes. His material wasn’t going over with the audience and he started to panic. But then something happened. He just started ad-libbing, complaining to the audience about the fact that they weren’t laughing, and while it can sometimes be painful when a comedian does that, he managed to do it with such humour that he won them over totally and came off to a big round of applause. In a way it was the perfect start for the rest of us, because we could see he had done well, but we also knew that those first few moments had blown any chance he had of winning.

Kevin Loughlin went next, an Irishman and I think the only other contestant in my age range. He was good, very assured and had decent material, but still I was quite happy that on a good day I could be at least equally as good. Then Neville, who was a strange one. The heat that he had qualified from was his first ever gig, and this would be his second. We all asked him why he hadn’t done more in the meantime, but he said he didn’t want to do a bad performance and jinx it. As it was he was confident, and his material was good, but his lack of experience was obvious.

And then it was my turn. And it all seemed to go by in a flash. I messed up my opening lines a little, but then got into my stride and while it wasn’t the best performance I’ve given, they laughed at all the places I wanted them to laugh, and they seemed to like what I was doing, so that when the light flashed to tell me to finish up it actually took me by surprise and I had been ready to go on a lot longer. As it was, when I walked off stage I was fairly confident that I was the one to beat so far.

Ruth went next, and she was very good. But she was also a musical comedian, which is a genre which can be very hit and miss and can divide a judging panel, so I was still confident enough after she finished.

And then Seann Walsh took the stage.

Within two minutes of his stepping on there, the rest of us were just sitting at the back staring at each other in horror, with a resigned look which clearly said, “fuck it, he’s won, we may as well go home now.” Right from the word go he simply lit the room up. Head and shoulders above everyone else on the bill, he looked like a seasoned pro who had been at the game for years. Later that night, in the Library Bar, I was chatting to one of the judges, Arch Dyson, the producer of the Paramount Channel’s Live at Jongleurs and The World Stands Up TV shows, and he said quite candidly that if Seann doesn’t win the whole thing this year, then whoever does will need to be utterly exceptional.

So in the end I felt sorry for the two guys that had to follow him, essentially performing despite already pretty much knowing there was nothing they could do. They were both very good, as it happens, in fact I think in the end that both would have beaten me, so in the end I had to come away looking on it as a fantastic learning experience, and knowing that I’ve got a fair bit of work still to do.

This is my fifth year at the Fringe, but the first I’ve experienced from the “other side of the stage” so to speak, so it’s been an interesting experience so far to see just how much chaos and confusion reigns behind the scenes of the world’s biggest and most prestigious arts festival.

We did run-throughs last Monday night of the two shows I’m involved in. First up was Keara Murphy’s solo show, which is only appearing for two nights during the festival and for which I agreed to be the sound man. It’s occasionally complicated, with twenty sound cues during the show, and using our antiquated sound equipment things were occasionally difficult, but we had been promised that the venue would have a state of the art deck installed for the festival itself so we went ahead and made the best of it.

Then we went on to do our show afterwards, but as an ensemble show, and with various substitutions happening during the run, it was decided to put absolutely everyone who is performing on. I’m on third to last, and so by the time I took the stage it was getting on for midnight and the audience had been in their seats more than three hours and were clearly getting fractious, so while I managed to drag a few laughs out of them it was tough going and I’m not really sure I derived any benefit from it at all.

The Fringe itself started yesterday, but previews in some venues start as early as Wednesday. Ours wasn’t starting until Friday, so Wednesday night I took the opportunity to go along to a couple of preview shows, Miles Jupp and Reg D Hunter*, the latter of which clashes with ours so I figured it would probably be my only chance to see it.

Thursday night I was heading up to do a gig in Perth, which I figured was perfect preparation for the Fringe run. It was a paid gig as well, fifteen whole quid (yes, I’m in the big money now,) most of which was spent on petrol driving up there, and giving a lift to the headliner, Keir McAllister.

I’d travelled up to this gig earlier in the month and it had been cancelled, so this was a re-arranged date. But as we headed up the motorway the rain was lashing down and Keir said “I’ve got a bad feeling about this, I don’t think it will go ahead again.” We arrived and had to dash from the car into the venue, getting drenched to the skin in the space of about ten yards. We got inside to meet the organiser who immediately said “it’s not looking good, we’ve only sold one ticket and I can’t see many people coming out in this.” By nine o’clock the decision to abandon had been given, so for the second time in a month I drove all the way to Perth just to be given money and go home again.

Friday was due to be our first night, and I decided to get myself in the mood by taking in an early preview of Nick Revell. I’d left my phone at home on the charger and got back to see I’d missed three calls and had several text messages, all telling me the same thing. Our venue hadn’t thought the Fringe started until Saturday, so they’d booked a private party in that night, meaning that all the shows on that day had had to be cancelled.

By now, with two cancelled gigs in a row, I was starting to get a bit paranoid and fatalistic. But at least it gave me the chance to get out and catch Tim Minchin, whose show also clashes with ours and who I had resigned myself to missing.

So, Saturday morning rolled along, and I decided to wander along to a show called Anthology, a show in which comedians just tell stories rather than doing material, and at which Jo Caulfield was supposed to be appearing. But when I arrived I found Andrew J Lederer, the American comedian and sometime bit part actor on the Fame TV show, who was running the show, had contacted Jo and told her not to bother showing up as there was only going to be one audience member. As it turned out, there were two, and a couple more wandered in before the end, and Andrew gamely ploughed ahead and did the show himself.

At the end of the show I chatted to Andrew and mentioned I would love to try it myself, and he straight away invited me to come down the following day. Result. I thought.

I had two gigs lined up for Saturday, both in the same venue, so I headed down to the Mercat for the first, a show called Fresh Faces, and arrived early to take a look at the snazzy new sound gear we had been promised. Only to find they’d set it up using our shitty old equipment including the crappy radio mike with a loose connection which crackles like buggery. I managed to persuade them to change the mike, but the sound board we’re stuck with, and they’ve put it in the most inaccessible place possible making it pretty much useless for doing anything other than switching the mike on and off, meaning I’m going to have to be pretty fucking creative tonight to try to get the sound for Keara’s show set up.

Add to that that the show had an audience of precisely one, and that one being a mate of one of the other comics, but we decided to go ahead and perform anyway in the hope that others might wander in during the show. But it was a scrappy show, the MC basically did nothing but introduce the acts, mostly with the words, “okay, who wants to get up and do their bit next.” I went second, and it was kind of handy doing my material in front of a bunch of comics who hadn’t seen it before, to gauge whether they found it funny. And also, after the two cancelled shows, I was just happy to actually be on a stage at last.

Afterwards I grabbed a bunch of our flyers and went out to try to drum up some business for our show later. I went along to the Assembly rooms and flyered people going in and out of shows there, impressing on them the “free” nature of the show and urging them that it would be a good way to end their Fringe day. It seemed a successful tactic, so I’ll probably do the same again. But flyering can be soul-destroying. It’s one of the reasons a lot of people were pissed off with Ricky Gervais doing his Fringe mega-show last year. More than once I heard people say “he’d better not ever tell anyone he’s done the Fringe. You haven’t done the Fringe until you’ve stood in the street for hours trying to press flyers on people who look like they’d rather spit on you.” I feel I’ve earned the right now.

Then for the last hour or so we all retreated to in front of the venue and harrassed passers by to come in and see us. All in all it worked well and we got about 40 in, which is a respectable number for a Fringe show. And I’ve never used these words before, and feel they get bandied around far too much, but for the first time in my short comedy career, I stormed it. They laughed at everything, even things I didn’t think were terribly funny, and I got a round of applause twice during the set. I walked off the stage feeling like a fucking God.

To be continued….

* Although I usually post Fringe reviews all over this site every summer, this year I’m going to confine comedy reviews to the Laughter Track site, but will link to them here as and when they get posted. Any theatre reviews I’ll still stick up on this site.

Good Evening.

I’m here to offer you the opportunity to invest in a potentially multi-billion pound business idea that will revolutionise the toy industry. I am looking for two million pounds in return for 10% of the company, and when you hear my idea you will realise that it is cheap at half the price.

Every year, at Christmas, there is one “must-have” toy which dominates the entire festive shopping period turning every child who gets one into the coolest kid in their school, and every snot-nosed brat who doesn’t into a snivelling little shit who whines through the whole holidays making his parents life a living hell and driving them onto the xanax and the whisky.

This year, we can be the ones to control that toy. I give you…

Dead Fred, the Cuddly Corpse.

Made from a hardwearing and durable specially designed material known as oxfamsocks, Dead Fred’s amazing lifeless-like joint articulation provides an endless variety of positions in which he can be posed to represent the victim of a wide variety of fatal diseases or violent gunshot or knife attacks. Furthermore, when thrown at a wall he is guaranteed to come to rest in a perfectly natural facsimile of a recently deceased hobo.

With specially designed eyes engineered to represent the blank “into infinity” look using cutting-edge “cardigan button” technology, and the unique “freshly strangulated” downturn to the mouth, who can resist the opportunity to own such an embraceable cadaver.

We confidently predict first year sales of approximately three billion, and currently have a highly trained and motivated team of professional twelve year-old Filipino girls at a cost of a half-penny and two sherbet chews per month ready to go into mass production on copies of this original prototype, painstakingly designed by an expert team comprising my mum on a wet Sunday afternoon.

Any questions?

Have you ever done something on a whim, and then had it virtually take over your life?

There are some things that it just isn’t easy to tell your friends and family. Like getting engaged. Or getting a girl pregnant. Or being gay and coming out of the closet. Mum… Dad… I’ve got something to tell you…

I’ve been keeping a secret. It’s one of the reasons I’ve been silent for so long. But it’s time to break that silence. It’s time to own up. I’ve got a confession to make.

Mum…

Dad…

I’ve got something to tell you…

I’m…

A stand-up comedian.

Phew, it’s out. I said it.

What happened was this. Earlier this year, as many will know, I started a stand-up website with some other like-minded persons. This one.

And as a result, I started to get to know a lot of people in the Scottish comedy community, both comics and other enthusiasts. And somewhere along the way, I got encouraged to give it a go myself, just do an open spot here and there and see what happened.

So I did. I wrote myself five minutes of material, silly stuff about my fear of slugs, and my dad being a transvestite (he isn’t). And started doing it.

And people laughed.

So I did more. And I wrote more. And it all kind of snowballed. And I ended up entering a competition, one you may have heard of, called So You Think You’re Funny. It’s quite a big competition, people like Peter Kay, Tommy Tiernen, Dylan Moran and Lee Mack have won it in the past. I just entered it for a bit of stage time, and a bit of experience.

And now apparently I’m in the semi-finals.

And I’m also doing a Fringe Show. As well as guest appearances at several others.

So the usual summer blockbuster of Fringe reviews on this site is unlikely to appear this year. Stop sighing with relief at the back there. I just won’t have time to see the vast number of shows I usually do. At the moment I have 35 appearances lined up in 23 days.

And it really does take over your life. Last Saturday night I was on at the State Bar in Glasgow, and my cousin was having a Christening (his daughter, not himself) in Gloucester at 10.30 on Sunday morning meaning I left the State at about 11 and drove through the night, getting down there at a ridiculous five in the morning and spent the day yawning and falling asleep just so that I could have ten minutes on stage the night before. Tomorrow night I’m driving up to Aberdeen, about five or six hours round trip, again for about ten minutes or so in front of an audience who may not even think I’m funny.

But anyway. For those who wondered where I disappeared to, (and for those who didn’t/couldn’t have cared less,) there’s your answer.

But I’m back now. And I promise not to go away again. I’ll try to be a good boy.