4274/17193
Feeling sluggish all day and everything took an age to get done. I ambled my way to the gym, childishly sticking strip ads for my show onto other people’s posters. I tried to do so sensitively so as not to obliterate anything important. It’s amazing how much dead space there is on most people’s massive billboards, including “I Killed Rasputin” which has a nice space for a row of dancing Mes.
I sat in a coffee shop taking ages to write my blog and getting annoyed about a couple of ill-considered moderate to good reviews that my shows had got. In the old days I thought the perfect revenge on critics would be to pin their reviews to my clothes and leap off the bridge above the railway station, but this year I have too much to live for, so have decided that I will provide a valuable, if slightly self-sacrificing service of bumping off every single critic in town (whether they like me personally or not) like in the film (if my memory serves me right) “Theatre of Blood”. As much as we all abhor the murder of another human being I think I might finally become the Fringe legend that I dream of being by such a serial-killing. And the beauty of it is there would be so many suspects for each murder that it would take the police ages to find me. I reckon I could get through them all. I am old and pretty much artistically dried up (according to the reviewers) and so my eventual imprisonment would be no loss. And like “The King of Comedy” when I am released after a few years after it was proven I was temporarily insane then I’d have one Hell of an Edinburgh show. And it would be critic proof. Because I would also despatch anyone in the audience with a notebook.
Of course critics fulfil a valuable function and they’re nearly always at least quite nice about me. But it would still be fun wiping them all out and I think most juries would look on the action quite favourably.
I managed a brief swim before having an excellent curry at the Spice Pavillion on Dundas Street. My wife continued to put up admirably with my protracted bad mood, though the walk up the mound through throngs of dawdling tourists made me more tetchy and it seemed my killing spree might start with a family of Spaniards. Murdering innocent children would probably do my dreams of being the Robin Hood of serial killers any good at all. It seems to put people off you if the news is anything to go by.
I tried to write my Metro column before the show, but had to have a lie-down instead and realise that my short fuse is mainly down to exhaustion. I have put my heart and soul into this year’s Fringe and as much as I should be letting the lovely response from the audiences and nice comments from people in the street speak for themselves, it’s not surprising that I was hoping for a little validation from the industry. It still might come, of course.
I have rarely felt less like doing a stand up show than I did backstage tonight and things took a bad start when the new tech trying to learn the cues accidentally plunged me slowly into darkness as I opened the show. But it was the kind of fuck up I probably needed to snap myself out of my self-indulgence and I commented that it was unusual to be heckled by my own technicians, but that they had seen the show before, so probably knew what they were doing. The still too small crowd were a little bit quieter than usual, but it went OK. I went out for a drink with the lovely Christian Reilly afterwards and had a pint of beer and a big whiskey and chatted to some people. And that was probably all that I needed to snap me out of my funk. At least a little bit. The desire to commit senseless (and sensible) murder subsided. All work and no play...
Still no review in the Scotsman, but a nice interview piece.
