Edinburgh is looming on the horizon and I am in the unusual position of feeling pretty prepared. The podcast is booked up for the first week or so and Talking Cock is running at 61 minutes and seems pretty solid. I was hoping to incorporate the slideshow tonight, but encountered various baffling technical issues.
To begin with I couldn't get my remote control clicker to work. I though maybe the battery was dead and so bought a new one - as I threw the old one away I wondered if maybe I should have held on to it. But it was too late. The clicker still didn't work and so I popped into the Apple store to see if they could assist. The two assistants who I talked to seemed a bit baffled, wondering if the thing worked by bluetooth. Then one of them googled it to find it worked by infrared, but we still couldn't set it up. It took us about five minutes to work out that the Macbook Air doesn't have infrared.
So far at least thirty minutes had been taken up with trying to make a clicker work. I went home to try it out on my older laptop and the remote control recognised its old friend straight away and played a song on iTunes as if by magic. But I couldn't get it to sync with Google Chrome which I am using for my presentation (on the advice of hobbit king Rob Sedgebeer who has put the slideshow together for me). I tried to download some software that Rob had sent which claimed to make the clicker work for other apps and browsers, but I couldn't make it work and it kept on filling my screen and there seemed to be no way to get rid of it short of turning off the computer. I had wasted well over an hour by now and decided that I'd forget about the clicker for now and just operate the computer manually.
But when I got to the venue tonight everything was a bit chaotic - there'd be a bad accident outside and people and shows were delayed. I tried to fix up the computer to the projector, but it made the size of the display change. And nothing was where it should be, even when we finally got the image on the screen and worked out how to turn off the mirror function that Simon Munnery had set up for his show the other day.
It was going to be another show without the tech aspect, though to be honest it pretty much works without it anyway. In 2002/3 I had all the questionnaire answers appear on screen behind me as I mentioned them - I suppose I thought this helped prove they were real and differentiated one comment from another - but it's overfussy.
I am sure we will iron out the issues one way or another, but this reminds me of why after my first three solo shows I pretty much decided to pare things down to being a man and a mic. It makes life a lot easier.
Perhaps I felt I needed the crutch (the crotch crutch in this case) of the powerpoint presentation because I wasn't as confident with the idea of solo performance back then. I also wore a cod (herring) piece and leather trousers ten years ago, perhaps feeling I needed a costume and a persona. It's interesting to see how my confidence has grown so I can get rid of these things.I listened to a bootleg recording of the tour show recently- recorded at what I think might have been an unusually quiet St Albans gig in 2003 (no man would shout out the bit about loving his own and other cocks and I waited what felt like ages for someone to finally relent - usually it would only take a few seconds, but the men of St Albans were surprisingly reticent to admit any sexual experimentation). I don't much like watching or listening to my own performances, but I was surprised at how badly I did the show back then - I hit punchlines too heavily and if I am frank sounded like a bit of a twerp. It might still be the case - I haven't listened to me doing this one yet- but again suspect that I have improved. It might just have been the odd atmosphere of that one show that caused me to be shit. I'll never know. I didn't have the foresight to record this show at all and only have this copy due to someone deciding to tape it themselves (doubtless it will crop up on the DVD).
Despite going up an hour late and not having the tech I was hoping for, tonight did feel like a very good show. I kept up the pace without rushing and the jokes and the serious bits all seemed to hit. Hopefully my Silver Jubilee Fringe will be a good one.
Here is an up to date list of the Podcast bookings - note that Al Murray now doing 20th not the 14th. Interview guest(s) first, stand up second. Book now if you're coming up - you'll be able to hear them all for free (barring tapes going wrong) on iTunes and the British Comedy Guide
2nd Sarah Kendall - Iszi Lawrence
3rd Lucy Porter - Catie Wilkins
4th Marek Larwood - Doug Segal
5th Andrew O Neill - Juliet Meyers
6th Brendon Burns - Mary Bourke
7th Susan Calman - Markus Birdman
8th Mick Foley - Gavin Webster
9th Nina Conti - Christian Reilly
10th Matthew Kelly - Matthew Osborn
11th Craig Campbell - Helen Keen
12th TBC - Ahir Shah
14th - TBC - Grainne Maguire
15th Sarah Millican - Lou Sanders
16th Tony Law and Simon Munnery - TBC
18th Nick Helm - Jay Foreman
20th Al Murray - TBC
