I thought last week had been tough, but this was even tougher. I was up at 8 and trying to knock my ideas into a coherent script. Annoyingly, but predictably I had had a few ideas as I lay in bed when I should have been sleeping, but instead my brain was suddenly whirring into action after all its sluggishness earlier.
In the blink of an eye it was 10 and though I had been working all that time I had little more stuff down in black and white. I started to get the fear a little bit. I was meant to be at the theatre at 2.30. I contacted the cast and told them to make it 3.45.
I kept plugging away, unsure of whether anything I was writing was funny, feeling genuinely sick. I was still a bit snotty and coughy (like two rejected Disney dwarves) but considerably better and fairly convinced that my illness was down to exhaustion rather than swine flu. I was filling the script with excuses for the show being poor, explaining how late I'd written it, that I was ill. I had lost faith in my ability to be amusing and genuinely scared that this was not going to come together today. Would the downloaders forgive me? Perhaps, they get the show for free and so can't complain if there's the odd and inevitable duff one. But the audience in the theatre were paying and also a film crew from "The Culture Show" were coming along to document the evening (I don't know when this piece will be on, but it's exciting that the project has already created enough of a buzz to be included in this show). And to be honest it's horrifically and painfully embarrassing for me as a comedian to have to go on stage and do something that I know is just shit. I pushed onwards.
I made myself some lunch around 1pm, still with a lot of gaps to fill, but went back upstairs to write while my pasta boiled away on the bob. Forty minutes later I remembered the pasta, which was now gently burning at the bottom of the dry pan. Oh my smoke alarm goes off if toast gets even lightly browned, but when dry pasta is stinking away in the bottom of a pan. Nothing. I ate fish on its own without any accompanying carbohydrates. Was this an interesting enough story to make it into the show? At this stage I was pretty much desperate enough.
At 2.45 I had to print the scripts. There were some gaps to fill, but it was about the right length. I had a shower, got dressed and headed out into the world. Dazed, confused, queasy and hawking (four more dwarves). I was certainly on the mend, but the stress of this day was not helping me any.
I got to a dark theatre by 4, with Emma and Dan (who'd been on time) waiting for me with Haribo. There was no technical person there as we had apparently not told them we were coming in and no one knew how to turn on the stage lights, so some time was wasted, before we headed to the dressing room for a reading. As it usually does the whole thing felt painfully unfunny, but I was resigned to mild failure by now. Perhaps I was spreading myself too thin. Perhaps it is too much for one man to write three quarters of an hour of new material in 36 hours. Perhaps people should be impressed enough that I had tried.
I skulked off to do a little bit more work on the script, bouyed a little by the others saying they thought it was funny and cut out most of the more self-effacing and negative comments. This was a good decision. There's no point in trying to cover myself by saying I know that it is shit. I have to just go out with what I've got and be proud of it as I can be.
The tech run through seemed a lot better, even though the script wasn't massively different. I was heartened to see one of the tech staff at the theatre really laughing out loud at a run of gags. Perhaps because the tension was lifting slightly I was feeling a lot more sprightly. We had also put more points in the script for ad libbed moments, though once again I was left trying to fill one remaining gap with less than 20 minutes before show time. It was the Lily Allen bit if you're interested.
I'd been told we'd made 110 sales, but there was a late rush and we must have had at least 200 in in the end, which made for a much better atmosphere than last week and the whole thing just took off well from the unrecorded warm up onwards. All the elements are coming together bit by bit and it was brilliant to have Christian Reilly back, this time singing all the jingles himself, which worked a lot better. Emma and Dan were both on top form as well and you could tell we had just all finally relaxed and were enjoying ourselves and the audience were too. It was working. Even the bits that didn't work.
This whole thing is a phenomenal and terrifying challenge and I can't quite believe that we're managing to do it as well as we can. It's not the way that anything else is made, and yet in a way that might be its triumph. Comedy on TV and radio is too polished, too thought out, over considered. Too often it's put together by a team of disparate individuals and thus loses any voice it might have. Yet most of the major comedy successes are created by small groups of like-minded people working without too much interference. Not trying to be like other stuff, not trying to appeal to any greater demographic than the senses of humour of the people writing it. TV and radio executives should just be concerning with finding people who are capable of creating a show with other people they have chosen to work with because they all get what's going on and then leave them to it.
But I think oddly the success of AIOTM, if it is to be a success, will be the fact that it is raw and unedited and that you get to see the workings. Because I am a comedy fan and like most comedy fans I am annoyed when stuff gets cut out and I love checking out the original scripts of say "Life of Brian" or watching the out takes of Spinal Tap. I'd rather have everything included instead of having stuff taken out often for arbitrary reasons like time. And AIOTM is a show that includes all the out takes and all the stuff that might have been lost. That won't be to everyone's tastes, but I think it will appeal to the kind of people I want it to appeal to. And if I am right these are the kind of people who will always be interested in what I am doing and will continue to come to my shows for as long as I do them. And that is valuable both artistically and commercially.
I met a young fan after the show, who I am guessing was in his early teens. He was wearing a Young Ones T shirt so obviously knows his comedy and it was great to think that someone so young was appreciating what I was doing. But hopefully he'll still like me in 20 years time, just as those teenagers who first listened to Fist of Fun on the radio in 1993 are still emailing me and coming to my shows.
I may have gone off the point a bit, but there is something very exciting about this new show and I ended the day feeling proud of myself for what still feels like an almost impossible achievement. I don't know if I can stand to go through this level of tension every single week and hope I will be feeling better this week and get more of it done in time, but Jesus, twenty pages of the the 25 page script did not exist at 8am, but were being spoken in front of an audience little more than 12 hours later. And getting laughs.
That's something right there, don't you think?
Well you can decide for yourself -
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