A comedian can't afford to be incapacitated in Edinburgh, certainly not on the second to last weekend (usually the biggie) and certainly not if the rest of the run has been poorly attended. I was feeling more run down today and in the half an hour before Talking Cock was seriously wondering if I could build up the necessary energy to do the show to combat the noise from the bar outside. But I would have to be comatose not to go on and I was wasn't that bad. My fear was that by tomorrow things might be worse.
But Doctor Theatre is a wonderful thing and buoyed up by my biggest crowd for a while I ended up doing the best performance of the show this Fringe. Perhaps aware that I had to fight through the sore throat and lethargic brain, with the help of three Vocalzone tablets, I got through it and enjoyed it. However great a comedian you are your show and performance are affected by audience size and amount of laughs. If you came to this show on Wednesday I think you might well have thought that it was OK or flat, but if you came today you'd be hard-pressed to be negative. Even though it's pretty much exactly the same show. The bit of magic that makes the difference is hard to put your finger on.
The Fringe makes everything fragile and there have been days when I have lost confidence with the show, and that's a self-perpetuating spiral of destruction, but today I made everything work, avoided the 40 minute lull and forgot that I was ill.
I was glad to have not my fatigue affect the performance, though afterwards I was blasted and went home for an early night - something I am very happy to do on a Friday and Saturday in Edinburgh when things can get messy. And I got to see the incredible denouement of season 4 of Breaking Bad.
It's harder to do the podcast when I am not firing on all cylinders as it does require a sharp and active brain, but luckily today I had one, even if it was inside Susan Calman's head. She'd seen me blowing my nose on toilet paper and had kindly given me a pack of tissues infused with Olbas, which led to some crude comedic observations as I discovered the tingling effect they had the sensitive insides of my nostrils. It's a real privilege to be spending an hour in the company of some of the best comedians in Edinburgh and I liked the way today's show veered from stupidity and wrongness to considered and serious thought. Calman is one of the best and her show is selling out - because unlike me she made the sensible decision to fill a small room rather than fail to fill a big one (though she would have probably done that too had she tried).
Afterwards I happened to walk past the venue that I had been in in 2004 when I did Hercules Terrace, the old Odeon cinema that had been known as the Pod Deco. It was boarded up and vacant (as I believe it has been since it was a short-lived Fringe venue). That had been another hard year for me as people did not seem keen to travel the short distance up to the cinema to see shows, even though it was a beautiful, air-conditioned building. But it's a real shame that it's still boarded up as well as a fitting warning about the fragility of the status of venues at the Fringe. A bad year for me means one less ivory handled back scratcher, but that 2004 disaster has left the city ever so slightly scarred for the best part of a decade.
