I had around about 100 in tonight. If at the beginning of the Festival you had told me that you could see the future and that I would be half full on the last Friday of the Fringe I would have said, "Jesus, what happened? Did I get really terrible reviews? Did I murder a baby? What happened?" As it is I am actually quite pleased to have got so many in. I have long ago stopped caring about the money that will soon be haemorraging from my bank account. Good news for those of you who live in London and want to see my show: I will be performing at the New Ambassadors Theatre on the 18th September. It would be a great boost to the project if the theatre was reasonably full, so please come along and help me scrape back a little of my outlay. The details are in the gig guide. Bring your friends. And hopefully if you don't live in London or Edinburgh I will be bringing a new improved and 90 minute version of the show to a theatre near you in the next year.
Tonight I was dragged along to a rubbish show where some "celebrities" sat in front of satellite TV and then flicked through the channels attempting to make jokes about what they saw. Apparently this is on TV too, but this was a live version. You can see how they came up with the idea and it's not as if they're the first people to do it, but the panel tonight (with the occasional exception of Rich Hall) weren't very good at it. At the end Richard Bacon the host said, "Come again tomorrow where one of our guests will be Iain Lee!" He said this as if it was the most exciting prospect ever. So I let out a loud and sarcastic cheer, before adding, "I suspect that is the first time that that sentence has ever garnered such a response." Certainly none of the other people in the audience were excited at the prospect of hearing the ad-libbed comments of the "11 o'clock show" funny man.
And yet still he continues to get work.
Sometimes it feels there is little justice in the world that I have chosen to make my living in. Yet the only response is not to lose heart and to keep tapping away at the rock face, in the hope that you might strike a seam of gold. And not puncture the sewer pipe that so many people manage to locate.
I am keen to get home and to start working properly again after a year of basic inactivity (the Hercules thing aside). I can only wonder where it will all lead.
