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Sunday 30th November 2014

4389/17308
It’s approaching 3 years since I last played Cheltenham Town Hall  (though I was in town this time last year - funnily enough positing the idea of Lord of the Dance Settee as a show title on that day). But the Town Hall is such a familiar venue to me and I’ve played it many times over the years, so I was surprised to discover it had been so long since my last visit.  I always do OK here. I was pleased to have over 200 people in tonight and they were one of the best audiences I’ve had for this show.
Having only done one gig this month (and that being the shorter version of the show) I should probably have tried to run through the material, but I am glad that I didn’t. It pretty much all came back to me very easily, but I was somehow all the more relaxed and messed around a good deal (in a good way). My cold was holding me back a bit, but I pushed through that and the mild back pain and threw myself into the show. My favourite bit was at the end of the Dave Manager routine when one person at the back began applauding loudly, which prompted about three other people in different parts of the theatre to applaud, but no one else. “That’s what you want as a comedian,” I commented "Four people applauding. But they’re four people who aren’t together and clearly don’t know each other. I am hoping they will meet up in the bar in the interval and become friends. "Were you one of the people who clapped the Dave Manager bit? Me, too! Let’s form a gang.”” I then commented that the first person to applaud had done so confidentially, obviously expecting everyone else to join in and then when he or she had noticed they weren’t had applauded more in the hope that that would convince the others that this was the best routine ever. Ironically the routine about the clapping went better than the prepared material with most of the audience. As someone commented on Twitter someone else should have started to try a round of applause for this and then things would have got really meta.
Perhaps you had to be there, but it was one of those gigs where everything is sharp and focused and my senses so sharp that I could pick up on this odd applause pattern and then commentate on it in a way that made it seem like a prepared routine. It won’t be usable again as material - there was something very precise about the manner of the applause and the motivation of the applauds .If I even attempted it again at another gig where a joke gets a smattering of applause I don’t think I would get it as right as I did tonight. 
But I got my timing right on the prepared stuff too (for the most part) and it was a big confidence boost to be performing so well after a mini break (although I did forget to do the pavement cyclist routine and didn't want to risk my back with the surprise denouement). My confidence has taken a bit of a knock in the second half of the year, but hopefully I am back on the horse for the London run.  (a few more ticket sales would help of course ) I am still a bit of a secret after all these years, but on nights like tonight that actually feels like rather a special thing. 2015 is going to be my year. I’ve been saying that every year since 1987, but I’ve got to get it right some time. Law of averages.
It doesn’t matter anyway as after many months of retweeting Lord Sugar’s Spurs updates I have realised that we are all in an Amstrad Matrix and nothing is real. Sugar has used his old computers and emailer phones to create an alternate reality which is almost perfect, but I have spotted the glitch. It was something I spotted last week. His commentaries of the Spurs games are always the same. Spurs go behind, he bemoans them for being terrible and tactically awful, then they equalise and he grudgingly says they are getting better, then they score again and win 2-1 and he says how lucky they have been. The flaw in the Matrix has been in plain sight all the time, but no one has spotted it, perhaps because Sugar is able to go back retrospectively and change the results so it looks like something else happened, but if you ask anyone who has ever seen them play and they really think about it, they will agree that Spurs have always won 2-1 after going a goal behind. I realised this in the last game. Spurs went 1-0 down, Sugar complained and I pointed out my theory and predicted that Spurs would win 2-1. People mocked me and told me Spurs were rubbish, but sure enough the result was 2-1 to Spurs. So today when Spurs again went 1-0 down I revealed that the final score would be 2-1 because it ALWAYS is. I advised people to bet on it and in fact to bet on every Spurs game being the same and thus eventually become a millionaire. Everyone said that Everton were playing better and Spurs would not win, but then Spurs equalised and people started to be afraid and then Spurs went 2-1 up, as I had predicted and whilst some people tried to tell me that it was unlikely the result would stand though the whole second half, I told them that I knew that it would, because Spurs always win 2-1 after going a goal down (in every single game) and that there was no point in watching the second half because the match was over. There were a couple of solid penalty appeals in the second half, but the referee (the robot referee) could not give them as the score was already 2-1 and that is always the score in Spurs games. Even though, like Truman in the Truman Show I had noticed the glitch there was nothing that could be done to stop it (even if in the Truman Show there was no need to have people moving on a loop as everyone just needed to go about their daily life and that surely the producers would just tell the people on the loop to stop being on a loop once they had been noticed - it still played out). And even though I have written about it here, Sugar is not able to change the programme without destroying his illusory world. So all bet everything you have on every Spurs result being 2-1 to Spurs (after Spurs have been 1-0 down) and all of you will become billionaires. Even if they manage to fix the glitch it doesn’t matter that you will have lost all your money, because none of this is real anyway. If we all bet on 2-1 to Spurs then we will make the fake economic system crash and be returned to reality.
Interestingly it seems Sugar is unable to retrospectively fake the results of big cup wins. If you look in the record books, it seems all of them follow the 2-1 rule. But definitely, when “live” there is no escape. I am amazed none of the professional pundits have spotted this. But they are probably in the pay of evil Lord Sugar.


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