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Properly back on the myfitnesspal app today and I got a good idea why my weight has been slowly creeping upwards. Although I haven’t been massively overeating, I haven’t been keeping an eye on my calorific intake and even eating reasonably sensibly today I’d nearly used up all my available calories after lunch. A few days with a bit of snacking and no exercise is going to skew things quite quickly. It’s all just a matter of keeping an eye on what you’re doing and I feel confident that I can knock off the extra weight quite quickly.
I was feeling a bit better today, but a hectic day of preparing for my gig, gathering up all the necessary props, burning CDs for the show and working out what the Hell I was going to do to transform my Edinburgh show from 65 minutes to 90 was quite wearing. By the time I’d driven to Winchester and set up the show I was feeling below par again and my brain was a bit fuggy and my throat a bit scratchy. I knew it was going to tough to get through it. But aside from throwing myself off the script with a couple of ad-libs early on and having to go back to see if I could pick up the faint ant-trail of the routine in my head and not quite having the usual energy or ability to shout I think it went OK.
As I can’t afford a hire a van to cart a sofa around the country with me I am relying on venues to provide me with a settee to jump on. I am sure that in some venues I won’t be able to have one and quite a few of the stages are too small for me to get anywhere near doing the full show that I did at the Fringe. It will be quite interesting to see the different furniture I end up with. The one we got for the Fringe turned out to be a good one, solid enough for me to bounce on quite safely without it breaking or toppling over, with a sturdy back that I could sit on when I was pretending to be on Chard Island and big cushions that provided padding for the big denouement. Today’s sofa came from the children’s library attached to the theatre and was slight and not too stable and if I dived on to it would have gone sliding across the stage (and maybe out the fire door and down the hill as if I was auditioning for a part in “Last of the Summer Wine:The New Class”.
The sofa was decorated with cartoons and local references, which gave me plenty to talk about at the start of the second half. There was a guitar saying “Hello” on there, which I thought was dangerously drug-induced to be putting on a settee that would be sat on by children. If I remember I will try to take a photo of all the settees from the tour (I have already missed a few from the previews and the one from Laugharne) and then I can make it into another art installation. In fact maybe I should buy all the settees and then pile them up on top of each other.
Would I have enough material? Would I remember all the bits that I hadn’t done for six weeks? Where were I put the interval? All in all it went pretty well, given how lousy I was feeling. And hungry. The first half was a bit over 45 minutes and the second half a bit shorter, but it felt like a full show already (with only the addition of two of three bits that got cut over the previews and Edinburgh run) and I now have time to expound and expand. And the great thing about this show is I can easily add any new bits that I fancy as I am not constricted by an obvious theme.
The audience were a lot of fun, chipping in in a positive way (one of them actually pre-empting the big payoff at the end of the show, which I couldn’t do tonight in any case). There were over 100 in, which is fine. It’s hard to ascertain if that’s high or low as I haven’t played Winchester too many times (though weirdly am doing it twice on this tour). Katherine Ryan was my direct competition (this gig was part of a mini-festival), so it’s encouraging to get that many in a small town against a hot new TV act. My career might not yet be over.
Episode 4 of the ground-breaking/bank-breaking series Meaning of Life is now out. You can buy the full length version with extra stand up and full interviews here on both video and audio
Or listen to the shorter free version on the British Comedy Guide
or iTunes
The free video of episode 4 can be seen here- (vimeo)
or here -(youtube)
(HD versions will take a little while to be up there)
Watch the whole series on vimeo
or youtube -
We're still some way off breaking even on this series, so if you don’t want to pay for the long version then any small contributions via the badge page would help us move onwards and make more stuff like this.
If you want to read all about what’s coming up for me in the next month or so then check out my latest newsletter
If you have a very strong stomach then you can get a look at the before and after pictures of me and the other comics doing the Men’s Health challenge here. Sadly I am pretty much back to the before level already, but it was nice (in the broadest sense possible) while it lasted.
