Warming Up

Onwards we plough and Edinburgh has come close to driving me to tears, but not yet to drink, so that counts as a win. Today’s show had the third biggest audience of the run so far (though tomorrow looks like beating it), very slightly up on last Saturday and I am now only about 400 ticket sales away from averaging 200 ticket sales a show. Will I do it? Who cares apart from me?

The good news (and bad news in a way) is that the figures strongly suggest that people are coming to see the podcast, rather than booking for the guest (apart from in the case of Richard Osman, whose appearance has done a great deal to give me a chance to hit that 50% sales rate). Otherwise it’s 250-280ish sales on the weekend and more or less 150 in the week (though the final week sales are looking a little low at present). My life is pretty much spent refreshing the sales report page to see if any more tickets have gone, so really this is all I have to blog about.

I have sold 0 tickets in the last 4 minutes.

I am extremely satisfied with sales by the way (some people seem to think I have been upset about it all, but I am not upset, just going on about it- obviously it would have been incredible and lucrative to sell out every day, but this is no 2014 and I should go home having been paid well for my 21 hours of work in a month. The shows have been solid too, I think. My own performance has ranged from adequate to ultra-adequate and the guests have all had something funny and interesting to say. It was Sunil Patel and Daliso Chaponda today. The podcast is here and on your podcast feed.

It’s been the usual mental strain, though more so because of the loss of almost any kind of down time due to children and the tiredness that comes from looking after them. Though Catie and me did manage a takeaway curry tonight. I also had a cracking game of football with my daughter in the garden and she has pinpoint shooting accuracy (from a distance of two metres) so I am convinced she will be playing for England (providing that concept still exists in a decade).

This week has gone by very quickly and I am definitely not as frazzled as I am usually by this stage of the proceedings, still managing the 45 minute walk to the venue (though for the sake of doing my share of child care I did get a cab home today).

I haven’t done any socialising beyond chatting to comics during the show (which is OK with me) though I did bump into Limmy in the dressing room this afternoon and it was great to catch up with him. He was down to earth and very funny. We discussed who might be joining him at the Glasgow RHLSTP in November. 

My hope had been to get the Krankies on, because what a double bill that would have been. But they live in the South West now so it’s a bit of a commute.

There are still some tickets for that one, but it looks to be heading for a sell out.

I have started thinking about getting home and this evening booked a hotel on the M6 in the Lake District on the day of the final show, so that we can head off as soon as I am done and take two or three hours off the drive.

The full run is long. It was too long for me when I was young and had no kids, but it’s much too long now. 

I have only just realised that I can come up without doing all three weeks. So if I do return (which I surely will, but perhaps not annually and maybe not for a while) then it might be for 10 days rather than 25.