This isn't a very good sign, but I was totally wiped out today. My throat was sore, I was tired and achy and I couldn't get a thing done (in the day time at least). Perhaps I overdid it yesterday by going to the gym and carting a big bucket of programmes up to Kings Cross for my gig and maybe I am not looking after my voice in a show that requires lots of shouty bits. Maybe gigging every night is taking its toll. Or maybe I am not quite over my illness of a fortnight ago. Or am weakened by my new diet. Or have become emasculated as a result of having no alcohol for 16 days.
Whatever the reason or reasons this is a bit of a worry with Edinburgh just round the corner, where I have so much to do. As I observed on Twitter, "I am getting too old for this shit."
Evenso I had no choice but to make the commute to Clapham Junction tonight with a bucket and a rucksack full of programmes (and a few tweeters have commented on seeing me walking around Shepherd's Bush with a bucket - I think they may imagine I have started up a window cleaning round or something). I missed the train by less than five seconds - the doors closing when I was just feet away and slumped onto the platform, exhausted.
A walk up Lavender Hill at the other end meant that I had achieved something of a work out today as well. I was drenched with sweat, just as I had been
almost four years ago to the day, but this time had not time to buy a T shirt.
I have even more memories of the Battersea Arts Centre than I do of the Croydon Warehouse. I can't be sure what the first show I did here was, but certainly I previewed all my plays here as well as doing the dry runs for the first series of TMWRNJ and so it was a regular haunt in the mid-90s, but I've done most of my subsequent shows here at some point too. The crew here were phenomenally helpful and efficient, having to search around for a lead when they realised I wanted to run my slideshow from a computer on stage, but rising to the challenge and calling in half a dozen other techs to climb up into the rigging and make it all work. Everything ran smoothly. I still have some major bits to sort out, but it hangs together as a show and I got some very nice comments from the ushers afterwards, which is always a good sign.
I came off stage to be met by my comedy angel, Daniel Kitson
who often turns up at times of doubt and need. He was previewing in the same room after me, with his latest show that is on at 10am every day at the Fringe. Typical of him to do things differently, but as he pointed out that gives him the rest of the day to do whatever he likes and he thinks he will still be able to stay up til 3am most nights. And of course given that it's Kitson he is bound to sell out whenever or wherever he hides himself. If there is a comedy God of Edinburgh then, after the Frank Chickens, it is, of course him. His set involves 29 old style light bulbs dangling from the ceiling. It looks beautiful.
I didn't stay to see the show as although revitalised by my own performance, I knew I needed my bed, but it is always a pleasure to spend time in his company. I told him how much I had on in the month of August and he expressed his concern, saying that when he'd done that much last year (or maybe the year before) it had come close to driving him mad. I will, I hope, get through it somehow. But maybe I won't take quite so much on in the future. I am not sure I will get to see Kitson at that unGodly hour and feel I might be asleep most of the time that I am not on stage (or in the gym - well that's the plan). But as always a hearty recommendation to the rest of you to get up early and experience his genius. Buy your tickets now. He will sell out and may even have done so already.
It's frightening to think about how many years I have been coming to this venue. It doesn't seem so long ago that I was rehearsing Punk's Not Dead here. But it's fourteen years. I remember we all made friends with the people who worked in the cafe then. I wonder where they are now.
I wonder if I will still be doing my shows in this venue in 2024. Seems impossibly futuristic. But then that Richard Herring still in his twenties probably wouldn't have believed he'd be coming back here in far off 2010. Or that some people would want to pay to see him this time!
The other day, Stewart Lee was on 6Music and discussing the fact that the critics who had written him off in the early 2000s were lauding him as a genius for pretty much exactly the same material, delivered in the same way just five or six years later. He put this down to the fact that they had now seen Jerry Springer the Opera and so thought that he must know what he was doing on stage and thus what had irritated them before now seemed clever and theatrical die to his other success (he also suggested it was because he was older and fatter and thus they took him more seriously). But revisiting this old show has made me realise how much of how something is perceived is down to how you yourself are perceived (and in a lot of cases by the media). Although I have added about 15 minutes of new stuff and messed around with the stuff that was there a bit, the basic framework of the show and much of the content and the performance is the same as it was in 2001. And yet I think there's a good chance that the show will be taken more seriously and given more consideration than it was by the movers and shakers of 2001. It's good to know that a show that I wrote when I was 33 is this satisfying (to most people anyway - a few complaint emails have come in) and as I've said before it's great to give it a chance to get the recognition that perhaps it deserves. Let's see.
But Stewart Lee's experience should be an inspiration to us all and a reminder to other acts/writers not to get too caught up in bad/mediocre reviews. Sometimes you need to wait for everyone else to catch up with you.
