The script progressed with continued surprising ease. I was getting very suspicious of myself. How could this all have been so hard in the first series and yet was seeming almost easy this time. Admittedly this was just the first one, but evenso I was unnaturally calm and happy and although I did start working at 8am, the long script was completed by just after 2. Ticket sales were looking healthy and there was also a long article
about me in the Independent. I was uneasy about how positive I was feeling. All work and no play makes Homer go crazy. Not for the first time I worried that I'd get to the theatre and discover that the whole script was the same line over and over again and then blood would pour out of the lift and I'd try to kill Emma Kennedy with an axe.
But that didn't happen. Not this week. And it was like we'd never been away. I arrived at the theatre five minutes early to find Dan Tetsell sitting in one of the back rows reading his paper, just like normal. He had packs of Haribo to distribute and had bought me some tiny sound effects toys (you might be able to hear one of them go off accidentally when Gordon Brown appears in the show). Emma was a bit late as usual and producer Ben was even later as usual and Christian had texted to ask if he could come in later so he could work on his stings as usual. There was a comfortable familiarity about it all. Perhaps our shared disappointment at the Sonys had brought us even closer together.
Some jobs you find yourself really not wanting to go to and have to put your head down and get on with, but there is something really special about this team and I hope this project.
We did a couple of read throughs and some necessary editing down (but this was still looking like one of the longest AIOTMs yet), went for dinner and then it was show time. The place was at least three quarters full, well over double the audience of the first show of the first series.
This time we're doing the show in two halves. I am doing 40 or so minutes of stand up in the first half and then the podcast is the second. I hadn't had any time to think about what I would do for my solo turn, but hoped I could go out there and chat and fall back on some old routines if necessary. My ambition is to be able to go on stage and chat without preparation and be consistently funny and I got pretty close to that tonight. The crowd were very much on side, but I think it's one of the most satisfying 40 minutes of stand up I've ever done - relaxed and easy chat, some nice call backs and an accidental joke about birds not needing tables. As a super special one off we might put this set out as an extra podcast later in the week, but from now on you're going to have to come to the gigs to get this additional set (though if they're all this good I might ask GFS to stick them on a CD for commercial release).
I had been so nervous in the first series of AIOTM (AIOTM), especially in the first few shows, but today the calmness and focus stayed with me. Including the stand up set I had manged to produce around 90 minutes of brand new stuff this week (and the bits of stand up I had done before were not things from my regular set). By anyone's standards that is quite an extraordinary achievement. It was cool to have the Independent acknowledge how much stuff I have been putting out there recently. It's not something that anyone else really seems to have noticed.
And although Dan Tetsell, whose tiny baby has been keeping him up at nights, was complaining the 9 o clock podcast start was passed his bed-time (did he almost fall asleep at one point in the show), we managed to pull out the stops and do a good show - everyone adding nice ad-libbed flourishes to a script that they had only read through twice. It felt like another big step forwards for the show, although it helped to have a large partisan crowd. Unusually at the interval the queue for the gents toilet had been massive, whilst the ladies was relatively free. It says something about my demographic perhaps, but as my girlfriend pointed out, for women who are always complaining about not knowing how to meet men, this would be a great place to come. I feel that maybe these are the kind of men that most women would want to avoid. But wrongly so. These gigantic nerds are going to inherit the earth. For future reference nerdy small-bladdered men, you can get your hand stamped and pop out and use the Burger King toilet in Leicester Square.
I was pleased that the later slightly odd and extended sketch seemed to work. It's great to have the time and confidence to spend a couple of minutes setting something up and what I like about this show is that as much as the formats and running jokes and characters are useful and fun, I can change the style and tone of what I am doing as the mood fits. And do stuff that would never get an airing in any other medium. It feels like slowly people are catching on to what I am doing, though I still sometimes feel like I am a closely guarded secret that the people who like me are trying to keep to themselves. On the tube home my girlfriend was asking me if I felt bitter that I wasn't getting the acknowledgment that she (biased as she undoubtedly is) thought I should be getting. Although I can still have my moments I generally don't these days. I think I might be the luckiest comedian in the country. The things that I am doing at the moment are very satisfying to me artistically. If I was more successful than I am I wouldn't be able to do AIOTM and if I was less successful then people wouldn't come and no one would listen. I feel grounded and content and know I am doing a good job or at least
producing interesting work and as a man pushing 43 that is more than enough for me.
And I was right. Our failure at the Sony Awards made for an altogether much better sketch.
As I'd arrived at the theatre I saw a man wearing a T-shirt saying something along the lines of "The hardest life makes the sweetest music" (it was better expressed than that) and whilst I have a cushy life there is something in that, creatively speaking.
I realised too that as I had used my phone to create a camera sound effect I had inadvertently taken blurred but quite poignant pictures of our audience. They seem like the ghosts of a laugh and the one with the mic accidentally looks like a sixth form art project painting of the nature of the performer's life.
You can subscribe to the show via iTunes or
listen here. Keep it to yourself though hey? We wouldn't want the kind of success that leads to doing adverts for the Nationwide (aside: we would really).
Doing an interesting debate about offensiveness in comedy on Wednesday on the South Bank
Details here.
