I had planned to sleep in until 7am to give me some chance to overcome my tiredness, but I woke up at 6 and thought I might as well get on with it. Weirdly though I felt very perky and sharp. I can't work out how that happened, because I'd only had six hours sleep, but I was suddenly reinvigorated and feeling good and I hit the ground running. By 2 o clock I had most of the script together, but still didn't have an ending and went trawling for stories, and luckily chanced across
this one about a Canadian couple who are keeping the sex of their child secret for what seem like rather odd reasons. It certainly seems a bit fucked up, to the extent where I wonder if the parents are just playing around in an attempt to make a point- though the quote from the mother is a bit odd. But looking at the picture of Storm, he (and it's a boy let's face it) looks like he understands how screwed up all this is. I haven't seen a baby looking so confused by what an adult is doing since I last checked my amazon account and saw 100 books about baby massage.
I had a bath and thought about how I would end the show and came up with quite a neat idea of giving the audience a choice of three possible endings and then only perform one of them. I liked this as it would give me lots of extra work when I had no real time to get even one ending done. It was a neat idea and I like the way the show has been looser and more interactive this series, but when I got out of the bath I realised I only had time to write one ending and hastily got on with it.
I was flagging a bit by the time I got to the theatre and everyone else seemed quite tired too. We did a read through and the script didn't feel all that good to me, but it's always hard to tell at this stage. We had a laugh at how bad Dan and Emma's Canadian accents were, but that's probably get sorted out by the show, right?
It was the biggest audience of this series - though some way from a sell out, which is a bad sign for the future of the project - but they were really up for it. I went on to do my unprepared first half of exclusive stand up and enjoyably it was one of those nights where everything came out of my mouth in the right order and the audience laughed. I did some made up bits, some new bits and an old bit and it all worked very well. The banter with the crowd was fun and the rudeness worked much better than it had at the Lyric (though my podcast audiences expect and relish my verbal nastiness). I thought it was likely that the warm up bit would be funnier than the script, but the carnival atmosphere continued and we managed to make the podcast just as fun and loose. The chat with the audience threw up lots of funny stuff and the moral maze had an extraordinary end, allowing me to make an unexpected Orient Express gag that I am very pleased with. It turned into the longest show we've done, so much so that I even cut a little bit towards the end and then came Dan and Emma's Canadians, proving that it doesn't really matter if I bother writing a script at all. I am very fortunate to have such a talented group of people to work with and an audience who seem to get what we're doing.
After a tough couple of weeks it was great to do something that makes all the effort and exhaustion worthwhile. And it's just a little bit extraordinary that all of what we've done today pretty much didn't exist at 6am. Spread the word if you enjoy it. Apologies Canada.
