I was feeling pretty up most of the day: the sun was shining and I managed a run around the meadows, passing performers having mini-barbecues and locals playing pitch and putt golf or bowls. It was all quite idyllic. There were posters up around the boundaries of the park and it was good to see that many of them have already been graffitied, mostly with crude drawings of penises going into open mouths, but a few with basic swear words. So far, incredibly, I haven't seen a graffitied Talking Cock poster. It seems like an open goal to at least draw a huge (or tiny) spunking cock in the space where I have no cock, but maybe there is some primeval magic at play or the cock drawing graffiti men have too much respect for a show that apparently takes their art of drawing cocks on things to a whole new level. Am I untouchable? We shall see.
I thought my tech would be over in minutes, but some issues with the projector meant we used an hour and three quarters of our allotted two hour slot. The Udderbelly is a huge 410 seater venue and I wondered how my sales were going - usually one can count of the first few days being pretty well attended due to cheaper tickets and two for one deals. I got a bit of a shock when I saw how low the sales for the first couple of days are. It picks up a bit after that and there's plenty of time yet, but any hopes that my 25th anniversary Edinburgh would be the one where I might sell out in advance were pretty much scuppered. I think the show is ready and the previews should be as good as later performances, so if you're in town and planning to see the show then do take advantage of these ticket offers.
Realistically I am hoping to half fill my venue on most days and maybe sell out some of the weekend gigs, so this poor start (and let's not get too ahead of ourselves as people might well buy on the day) did knock the contentment out of me a little bit and raised the spectre of Edinburgh debt (something I've been lucky enough to avoid in the last five years). It will be interesting to see how the Olympics and the recession affect attendances. There are very few acts up here doing it for the money - most will lose several thousand regardless of how many tickets they sell. But after working hard on a show you just want people to see it. In this crowded marketplace that is the hardest thing to achieve.
Stewart Lee thinks money spent on PR is a waste, but that's easier to say when you're well known enough to get an audience without needing it. I don't think most acts come here to get famous, but to showcase their stuff. It's heart-breaking if you perform to no one. There is no guarantee that PR will help that (and in many ways I think newspapers and more traditional outlets are becoming irrelevant and an act can do a lot of the work alone), but it's very hard to build a crowd without some kind of plan. And even after 25 years there are no guarantees. I am hoping the other Richard Herring will arrange a charity bomb where he uses Twitter to get everyone to buy all my tickets for Wednesday. That's how karma works right?
I got back to the flat to find a tweet with a picture of a very young me and Stewart Lee which I guessed was from our very first Edinburgh (I had had a skinhead for a play which was growing out at the time, making the photo easy to date). David Allard, now a TV producer, sitting just in front of us had posted a close up version of us all, but then managed to find the whole thing. It was indeed some of the cast and crew of the Oxford Theatre Group 1987 - odd that this should pop up on this of all days. There are plenty of people missing from the picture, which is a shame, as it'd be great to have the whole team in one shot, but you'll be able to spot Emma Kennedy if you look closely. There are quite a few people I can no longer name and even a couple of faces that I don't seem to recognise at all, which is slightly sad given the proximity we lived in for two months back then. But it's spooky and unsettling to Quantum Leap back a quarter of a century. It made my bones ache and I wanted to cry, but I couldn't cry. Typically I am pulling a stupid face, whilst Stew is trying to look cool (nothing changes), but I know stuff that that young me doesn't know (even if he presumably knows the names of all the people he's with) and have seen things that he is yet to see and his glee and hope are almost heartbreaking. But also slightly joyous. I still don't know if he'd see me as a success or a failure. Still at the Fringe at 45?
Of course he might be pulling that face because Lee is abusing him out of shot with a ventriloquist dummy.
A few people on Twitter compared it (favourably in all cases) to the similar vintage photo of Cameron, Osborne and Johnson in the Bullingdon Club. Except these were the nice and generally poor people who went to Oxford, who wanted to make people laugh, rather than destroy their restaurants. We were Hufflepuff to their Slyverine. I am not saying the country would have been better off if we had ended up running it - in fact we pretty much managed to destroy the Oxford Theatre Group due to our financial incompetence. But at least it was only a Theatre Group, not the entire economy.
We were young idiots of a different kind. I am only slightly less clueless now I feel. But here's a shout out to those young fools of OTG 87, to the Crazy 5s, to Ally and Sally, to Jackie Christie in the bottom right corner who still sets my pulse running (though she was too cool for me to even talk to at the time), to those friends that I still know and those that I don't and those that I have forgotten.
Anyway be nice to think I had got the Edinburgh blues out of the way this early on. I felt like giving Edinburgh up this evening, but I bet I will be here in another 25 years looking at a photo of me now and feeling gently sick.
