Twelve shows down, thirteen to go (and there's the possibility of some extra performances being added). We're not even quite halfway through. That's a hard fact to swallow. I am already very weary and worn out and realising how long there is still left is a little bit daunting.
Tonight's show was a little loose in places and I lost focus at a crucial point, passing comment on a woman who was popping out of the room (due, I think, to the overwhelming heat - I know I said this last year, but I have to find a different room to play for everyone's sake). It was still an OK show, but I felt that maybe for the first time there were more newbies there because of the reviews than regular fans and they weren't quite sure about some of my more colourful ideas. Ben Dover, the pornographer, who follows my show was having a day off to recover from his excesses, which allowed me to slow down and enjoy myself a bit, but perhaps it made me a bit self-indulgent.
In a festival this long one is bound to have shows that don't quite shine as much as the others and I am a whole lot more consistent than I was five or six years ago, but I felt slightly disappointed with this one, even if I did seem to have won them back round at the end.
This time tomorrow I will be over half way through and maybe that will be all the psychological difference that I need. But 48 hours of sleep would probably help.
I walked over to the Pleasance this evening to take part in another discussion about offensiveness in comedy, this time for the Culture Show (I think it's on on Wednesday). I probably should have learned my lesson from the Asian Network chat and stuck to my resolve to never discuss this subject again. I think the piece was fine, but it's hard to make any reasonable points in a 7 minute interview, with two other comedians also chipping in. Ava Vidal and Jim Jeffries were alongside me. Ava took me to task for calling her scary in last Wednesday's Warming Up. I told her that she was a bit scary, and indeed I was scared that at any second she might rip my head off for having dared to call her that. I don't know how it all went. Watch it yourself and decide.
After my show I had a couple of drinks and then headed over to Assembly on the Mound to watch "Peacock Season", a very low budget film that I did a scene for last autumn (
you can see the trailer here) featuring loads and loads of Fringe performers.
Given it apparently cost £58 to make it is a very impressive achievement, and though maybe the jokes are a bit "in" for non-Fringe aficionados and the lighting and sound are understandably not of the highest quality, James Wren and the team have to be congratulated for creating this 80 minute film for next to nothing. At this point in the actual Fringe to see a film satirising the seedier and more depressing aspects of the whole thing could have been a bad thing, but it was actually rather cathartic to laugh in the face of it all. I don't know how or when anyone else will get a chance to see it, but it would be a shame if you didn't as the handsome actor playing the boss of the advertising company in the first scene is electric.
Little Andrew Collings is coming up tomorrow, which should help lift my jaded spirits. I plan to destroy him. I might even film the whole thing. He'll turn up all fresh-faced and excited and by the end of the week will be a wreck, crying in a bus shelter and spitting chips all over the floor. Much like the star of Peacock Season.
