I have always had a problem with the Perrier Award. I think, if I am honest, much of this is to do with the fact that I never get nominated for it. Though it is more than that. I just think it breeds an atmosphere of competition and paranoia in a festival that is already beset with enough of this kind of stuff thanks to comparative ticket sales and reviews anyway. And how is it possibly to judge such varying shows against one another and then claim one of them is best anyway? And also I've never been nominated. Or did I mention that?
Nowadays all that is academic for me as I am apparently "too big" to be considered. Yes, I can sell almost 50 tickets in Carlisle and have sold maybe 40% of my tickets in Edinburgh, so clearly I don't need the exposure.
Seriously I am glad to be out of it, though there is a part of me that knows that getting nominated for something like this would undoubtedly help me sustain my career.
But I think I'll sustain my career without awards (well I have done so far) and there is something wrong about an award for comedians that is designed to promote a product. Even if you choose to ignore the arguments that the parent company Nestle are doing unspeakable things in the Third World in order to sell their powdered milk (personally I would rather see people make a direct campaign against a more identifiable Nestle product than Perrier. A boycott of Kit-Kats would hit them a lot harder. And there's a part of me that wonders whether even the negative publicity actually benefits the awards anyway), it seems wrong to have a corporate award for comedy. And yet I know that it is too big a prize for most comedians to turn down and it's easy to get sacntimonious about it once one's own hour has passed.
Anyway, none of this stopped me going along to the Perrier party to drink their champagne and see who had won their stupid award, that so obviously should belong to me.
"Jackson's Way" was the surprise winner. It's rather a nice fairy-tale story of someone who had never done comedy before coming to do a week in Edinburgh, performing to six people, getting great reviews and word of mouth (mainly from Stewart Lee as far as I can tell - the man has unlimited power), having the run extended and now getting this "ultimate" accolade. I didn't see it. I tried to go last weekend, but it had sold out.
Anyway, he's the best in Edinburgh, so don't bother going to see anything else.
The party itself was hot. Not in that it was cool, you understand; by which I mean trendy. No it was hot in the sense that it wasn't cool: the temperature was high. Bascially it was a room full of loads of people thinking they should have won the award, with one bloke somewhere possibly feeling a bit overawed and even embarrassed that he had managed it so easily on his first year.
I ate lollipops and stole a one of the plastic Perrier watering cans that decorated the tables. It turned out to be an ordinary watering can with a piece of card saying "Perrier" stuck to the outside of it. I will leave it in my flat as a gift to the owners.
Christian Slater walked by me at one point and I spoke to the host of dotcomedy. But that was about as glamorous as it got.
Tomorrow is my last show. I am so looking forward to leaving this madness behind.
