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December is a cruel month for comedians, especially ones playing the clubs - they play to office parties that are here for the beer (and cocaines) more than the comedy and even the regular clientele can be drunker and more belligerent. I have been very fortunate over the last many years to be able to basically take December off, at least from live performance. And this year is no different. Yesterday's podcasts were my last live show of the year and all I have in the diary for 2024 are three more online book club records (and a couple of other podcast commitments). Other stuff may come up of course, but basically for 2024 my work is done. I think I can write this year's blurb for
the History section of my website now and it will likely be the shortest one for a while. Have a little peruse through the rest of it for a quick nice sensation of the rapid passage of years. Watch my youthful energy and dreams turn to dust before your eyes.
I think 2024, whilst relatively successful financially, will have to go down as the least creative year of my career. I have a few plans to turn things round in 2025, but I suppose I have a choice between the increasingly insecure security of doing 100 podcasts a year and daring to try something different. Though there's maybe the option to do fewer podcasts and daring to try something different. It's unlikely that my fortunes will turn around too much in the arenas of writing or performing in other people's stuff (though you never know), but I am not ready to give up just yet. Perhaps there's still an idea in me that will allow me to buy a mansion in Regents Park without having to share it with 19,999 other people.
I do not want to buy a mansion in Regents Park.
I wouldn't say no to £20 million though. To be fair, it doesn't have to be that much.
I may have forgotten something, but I think this year might be the first year that everything I have earned has come from self-produced work. No paid TV or radio in 2024, a handful of other people's gigs (but that was still with my own material). It's just been podcasts and stand up and work that I have created. So does that actually make it my most creative year.
How many comedians would kill for that freedom, with the added benefit of not having to gig in December. I sometimes worry about where my career is going and how long it will last (and by sometimes, I mean every day for the last 35 years) and it's certainly getting trickier for me to sell tickets to my older/dead audience (the dead ones have been particularly useless on this front), but even in this year where all I've done is 100+ podcasts and created a new 90 minute stand up show it doesn't feel like I'm quite done yet.
I am going to use December to attempt to flesh out a couple of new ideas. 2025 could be the most exciting year of my career... 2024 definitely is not, but every year that I still have a career is a bonus. And you people have been very kind to me over the years. Nothing can last forever.
Today's "work" was chatting to the lovely Dan Schreiber about his book "Impossible Things" - a terrific read for kids (and adults to be fair) about the paranormal, time-travel, monsters and imaginary friends. The chat skewed quite some way from the book, but I always love talking to Dan about this stuff and wondering if we're in a simulation or in this case, talking quite a lot about the things I've done in my career that would be considered insane if not done for comedy and which have certainly made me question where the line between insanity and sanity lies and more pertinently which side of the line I am on. The human mind is incredible and improbable enough, regardless of the truth or fiction about ghosts and goolies and ghost goolies. I hope my goolie doesn't come back as a ghost though.
