Days Without Alcohol - 97.
I was at the Soho Theatre this afternoon to take part in a comedy writing workshop. Increasingly I seem to be being asked to dole out my expertise on how to make a living from this stupid job, which if nothing else is a sign that I am getting old. It still gives me a little bit of a jolt to realise that I've been doing this professionally for almost 19 years. You'd think I'd have learned something by now. If I have it is just to be able to bullshit my way through an hour or so in front of some aspirant writers. This is perhaps a skill that I can make upwards of £300 a year at, which might prove to be my only pension. My new healthy lifestyle means that I now have a shot at making it into my seventies or eighties, by which time most hard-living comedians are dead, which at least gives me a shot at some kind of lifetime achievement award in order to justify this monstrous waste of my talents. I should have been the new Gandhi by now, had my teenage aspirations come to anything and the only thing that can go some way towards compensating for this failure is a grudging British Comedy Award for longevity.
Of course my information on what a new writer should do is some two decades out of date. My starting point was to write for the tedious topical radio show, "Weekending", but that no longer exists and I don't really have any idea what the modern day alternative is. But in a sense a new writer today has a world of opportunities open to them. There's loads of digital TV channels that need their schedules filling for a start, whereas in our day there was just BSB's "Up Yer News", which featured probably the first TV appearances of the now forty year old opera director Stewart Lee. And of course there is the internet, which you are looking at right now. You can write something and have it read by other people within seconds. If it is good they will tell other people to read it and so it goes. Or you can make a poor quality podcast on your unreliable Mac computer, or film a skit and put it up on Youtube. It actually makes it much harder to be one of those people who like to say they are a writer, but that it's too hard to get anywhere and it's all a closed shop, so there's no point in even trying (there always used to be a good proportion of such people, managing to never write anything as a result, but still claiming to be writers). Although there is an element of saturation and it's probably even harder to make a mark when anyone can broadcast their own content, I am not sure this is a bad thing. It's actually good to have a chance to learn your craft and get some experience. As I continue to emphasise I am constantly learning about writing and performing and certainly writing this blog every fucking day for five years and 136 days has been of enormous assistance to me, starting as it did at a time when I myself claimed to be a writer, but who wasn't really doing any writing.
But writing a blog is my best piece of advice for becoming a better writer. Hopefully in those 17 or 1800 entries there have been a few things of worth and hopefully I am getting better (though today was one of the first times for quite a while that I sat and stared blankly at computer screen, wondering what the Hell I would write about).
I didn't envy this room of people, all hoping to get somewhere in this profession. It brought back memories of what a struggle it was and how lost I felt back in 1989 when I was living in Acton and trying to work out how to make this my career. And that was just the beginning of a lifetime of misery. Ha ha ha.
Thanks to those of you who have already donated to the programme fund, which is looking quite healthy already, but there's a long way to go, so do keep donating people!
I am going on holiday this week. I fully intend to keep up the blogging whilst I am away, but can not be sure of access, so the entries might not appear at regular intervals. Though maybe it's a time for breaking a couple of long running unbroken chains! Who knows?
