Saturday 6 August 2011

Day Two: Don't Leave Before The Miracle Starts

Dear reader, please put your flat palm along the right-hand side of your face. Go on, do it. That was the distance between my face and the pneumatic drill that woke me this morning at 9am, only 5 hours after I had eventually got to sleep.

As a result of a lack of sleep, I started off the day in a grumpy mood. I did some day-job work for a few hours whilst having some of that trademark fast-talking South London banter (Steve Bennett, Chortle review) with my flatmates. Once again, I was reluctant to leave the house at all and it was only because I had a meeting with our venue captain (more about that later) at 3pm that I left at all.

I seem to be stalling while I'm alone and I really wish I had a buddy to pal around with. There is loads of comedy that I want to see and I've been to loads of shows alone in the past but something's not right at the moment. I keep hoping that my mood will lift once Gagstronomic and Slappers starts. But right now, I'm still lonely. A great comedian once said, "I had this gaping hole of loneliness which I tried to fill with crisps." Tonight, I toyed with the idea of filling the conceptual hole with three types of cheese, some coarse Ardennes pate and some chorizo. I settled for a microwaveable Lancashire Hotpot. The hole remains.

I checked out the venues I will be at for most of my performances this month. The first is, essentially, a section (let's call it a section) of a basement pub similar to a Walkabout. The section is separated from the rest of the dicks, I mean pub, by a black curtain. A. Black. Curtain. The capacity is somewhere around the 30 mark which means, at least, that even if 3 people turn up, it'll be 10% full. Re-reading that last sentence, I feel like a bit of a dickhead and that I had an error of judgement on how best to communicate to you, the reader, that only if a few turn up, it may very well look full. I failed and should have gone with just saying it clearly rather than trying to baffle you with simple percentages. Sorry about that.

Tagline: In nature, a yellow and black combination symbolises hazard. In real life, yellow and green symbolise drunk rugby-loving cunts. This is my venue.


The performance space is only about a metre and a half deep so it's just as well that I dropped that skit where I do a move-by-move re-enactment of the Spice Girls Brit Awards 1997 performance of Who Do You Think You Are? (That is a nineties reference that perhaps only a few will appreciate the intricacies of.)

Each of the venues have an allocated "venue captain" who are able to sort out any problems I guess. Venue captain sounds terribly new-age corporate. I was once asked to consider that my job role as Business Analyst for Readymix Concrete Kent involved being a Gross Margin Champion. I almost beat my own ears off by repeatedly slamming them in the drawer of my pedestal after that. However, it's time to bring that back. Venue captain? No, no. Venue Champion please.

Onwards to the venue for Comedy Slappers. In an actual Walkabout bar which is located in a shopping centre next to a Frankie & Benny's and a Pizza Hut. It's a good size though it is glass fronted and I foresee some people just staring through the glass in awe/disgust/confusion. Like Michael Barrymore's "My Kind of People". I may "use" that. Another nineties reference.

I sat and watched three girls drinking wine together. I didn't fancy a drink, I wanted a sleep and a cuddle. I then considered that relapses are bad enough without them happening in a shopping centre. 

Day two and I still haven't seen any comedy but I will. Honest. First lot of gigging and flyering tomorrow. I already have a contempt for my audience, preparing myself for failure by blaming the fact that the audience at 9.45 in a mock-antipodean sports bar on a Saturday night just won't "get" me. This is not them, this is me. This is my massive arrogance covering up the fact that I am concerned about shaky parts of my 15 minutes that I'm struggling to put my faith into and that I should have been doing something about for the last six months. It's never the audience's fault. Unless it is.

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