I knew it would be hard to get through Edinburgh without reading my reviews. When people have told me they are doing that in the past I have thought they were being a bit ridiculous. Because it's very difficult to avoid seeing stuff pasted all over your posters, plus if you get a good review someone will inevitably tell you.
Which is what happened about ten times today - "Saw a great review in one of the papers" someone told me in a phone message. "Congratulations on the Guardian review," someone told me in an email. And so it went on. I cracked very quickly. I looked it up on the internet to see how good it was. It was
pretty good. Brian Logan very rarely gives out five star reviews, so four stars is as good as you can realistically hope for, so I was pleased. Though disappointed that I had not been able to stop myself from looking.
I am glad I did though, because knowing about the review helped to explain the slightly tricky audience I had. Numbers were up and there seemed to be a slight atmosphere of "Come on then, show us what you can do!" rather than "Hooray, we like you already and want to see what you can do!" Almost certainly there were a fair few Guardian readers in the room who weren't necessarily aware of me apart from from the review.
But to be honest, it might just have been a Friday crowd. It was one of those days where everyone had the same audience - quiet, slow to laugh, a bit slow to pick up on some of the subtler jokes. It didn't help that I was pretty tired and I found myself making stupid little mistakes again and almost forgetting where I was. A more responsive audience would undoubtedly have lifted my spirits, but it's hard to get into the rolling laughs when people are sitting back and mainly staring at you. It was far from a disaster and I worked very hard to get them going - I even got stitch at one point and my legs felt heavy. But this combination of factors made it one of the more disappointing shows for me.
You know that it's these kind of shows that you might end up getting a mediocre review from. It was like a totally different experience to last night, where everything hit its mark perfectly. But, it's less likely that people will tell me about the bad reviews, so it doesn't really matter! I hope the audience got something from it (it was far from a disaster), it's just interesting to me how much the same show can vary night to night.
But I am sure I have covered all this many times before.
The most exciting thing that happened in my day was that we finally have internet set up in our flat. It hasn't been working til now, but this morning a man came round to sort it out. I have been lost without a permanent connection, having to find other ways to pass my time than sitting in the dark browsing the same websites again and again. But luckily now I never have to go outside again. We've even managed to fix up a wireless router, which means I am writing this from my bed. I don't even have to get up now! My life is complete.
