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I have been trying to keep up my prodigious podcasting output in spite of my baby duties. I should maybe be using any spare time I have to write something that might make me money, but some inner voice is telling me that the podcasts will prove more lucrative in the end. If I had time to listen to my own podcasts I would know that my inner voices are fucking idiots and should not be listened to. I ended up recording two more Warming Up podcasts in the early hours of the morning, after a busy day and a trip to Brighton and back, as much as an attempt to get my daughter to sleep as anything else. My speech was slurred, my brain was fuggy and I didn’t feel like I was in the same room as my mouth. But luckily my producer Terry who seems happy to work at any time of day or night, was there to edit out these many errors. Lucky because I was simply unable to say the phrase “largish glasses” correctly. Of course now I am going to have to attempt to say them again. It’s like I enjoy being humiliated.
And two podcasts did the trick. My daughter who had been awake and lively for the 90 minutes that I had been home and in charge of her, dropped off during the second podcast recording. This might not be the best advert for my work. Or, as Ben Goldacre will attest, my podcasts main function might be to help insomniacs drift off. It’s not what I was aiming for, but many of humanity’s greatest discoveries have come about by accident. If you’re a blog reader, but not finding the blogs boring enough then
you can listen to them all here. Or
on iTunes. If you are a podcast listener then you already know where to find them and in any case you will have dozed off by this point so I can say anything I like. Your mum licks dog turds. Yeah, that woke you up!
Before the Brighton gig I had battled to finish my chores. I put together a complicated third episode of the Lord of the Dance Settee podcast, which is mainly funny clips from last week’s tour show, including the Chorley heckler. Get it on the
British Comedy Guide or
subscribe on iTunes.
It was an unusually fruitful run of gigs for funny ad-libs and unusual heckles and though I had to rush a little to put this together (and the sound quality of some of the clips isn’t great - I have invested in a new lapel mic to try and improve this) I am pleased with the way it turned out. Hopefully this series will be a useful companion piece showing what it’s like touring for a journeyman mildly successful comedian unsure if his popularity is on the wane.
A couple of hundred people turned up in Brighton, numbers which suggest the wane may be approaching as I usually do better than that here (though I have already done the show here back during the Comedy Festival). In fact Brighton was the scene of the (non-charity) gig that had my biggest ever audience, when around about 800 people came to see the Lee and Herring tour at the Theatre Royal. That was getting on for 20 years ago though so most of those 800 people will now be dead and so can’t buy tickets. There was no room on the stage for the sofa - the one they had provided had an ornate back that I couldn’t have sat on, but I realised that if I stood on it that I would probably break it, but would also definitely crack my head against the ceiling or lights. There were no heckles and not too much out of the ordinary either. It felt like the crowd needed to be convinced that I was good enough for them to begin with, but they quickly came round and it was a solid and enjoyable performance that I don’t think will provide much fodder for any future podcast. But in a way that’s a relief. Got some very nice feedback from the audience. I would loved to have RTed it, but I know Dawkings is hovering there ready to call me out on my hypocrisy, in the few moments when he’s not blaming Islam for terrorism.
Disappointingly the Komedia seem to have relaxed their rule about exiting by the back entrance after 7pm (
see this old blog and the one it links to for details) so Giles the Cannibal (back for most of the rest of the dates and sporting a comic relief tattoo from his sterling work on Mark Watson’s 27 hour show) was able to reload the car without an altercation. I almost missed the frisson.
And if there aren't enough podcasts for you, then the retro RHLSTP with Mary Beard has now been uploaded on video for free on
Youtube and
iTunes.
