The show really came together this morning. It is interesting working on something brand new and trying to establish a tone and a house style. I think it's going to take a week or two before we perfect this, but things were definitely coming together this morning. I was particularly proud of a routine I had written based on a group discussion yesterday about whether you pronounced Pope Boniface as Bonny-face or Boney-face. And whether this meant he was handsome or afflicted by a rare condition which gave him a boney face. You'll have to listen to the show to see if it made it through to the final edit (Saturday at 1pm on radio 2). Whenever me and Dan were going through this particular routine in rehearsals I found myself laughing uncontrollably and tears were pouring down my face, practically unable to carry on speaking. This was an almost water-tight sign that the routine would garner no laughter from the audience whatsoever. But it's a while since I've laughed that much during writing or rehearsing something. It used to happen quite a lot with Stew. I particularly remember being paralysed with laughter when he first read me the Jesus came knocking sketch that he had written. My only contribution was to suggest that there should be more "Aaaaahs" in it. Then we got on to the whole "Not Aaaaah!" thing. And within about ten minutes had created a rich seam of comedy that we were going to mine (and over-mine) for the next five years. For once, it was an Aaaaah situation.
So maybe it was a good sign that I was being made to laugh like this again (and I was laughing more at Dan's deadpan reaction rather than my own admittedly hilarious script).
After feeling pretty certain that we were doomed last night, I began to think that maybe we might pull this off after all.
We were performing at ULU and the place was packed (oh you'll all come to see me when the tickets are free won't you, you leeches!), and I found myself uncharacteristically nervous before we started. There was no way of knowing if what we were about to perform was total rubbish or just a bit rubbish. We were about to find out.
Even though I inevitably fucked up my opening line, it went pretty well. Most of the stuff worked. I noticed that TV's Emma Kennedy started performing her socks off when she in the sketch that she had written. And not really trying in any of the others. But apart from that everything was fine.
I managed to get through half of the Boney face joke before I started laughing. I am pretty sure we didn't manage a take that won't have one of us struggling to suppress our laughter.
In the final scene I found myself laughing into the microphone whilst the others were doing their lines. How unprofessional is that? We didn't re-take it, so you should be able to hear me acting like an idiot in the show. Hopefully the audience at home will find it as amusing as I did. It seemed to go OK with the freeloading idiots who had come along.
It was acutally really cool to be doing a radio show again. As with Edinburgh the pressure is now off. I am not reliant on this show going well in order to get more work like I was when I last worked on the radio. Which means I can just relax and enjoy it. Hopefully it will be a fun series. Let me know what you think.
