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I tried out the yoghurt routine again tonight and after just one more listen through it was incredible how much more confident I was with it and how it was all coming back to me. The audience in an arts centre in north London really enjoyed the 40 minutes of yoghurt based material, especially the bit where they got to shout out countries, which they really didn't want to stop doing. I had done a preview of Happy Now? stuff in the first half and I wondered if the yoghurt piece is more effective if it is not preceded by four similarly pedantic routines. It was bold and ridiculous of me to do a whole show like that, but tonight the routine, without any similar preamble, felt perfectly weighted. Starting off boring, becoming high-minded, then furious, then perverted, then revealing its purpose and the complicity of the audience in its length. Someone Likes Yoghurt has enough material in it for at least two Edinburgh shows (and possibly more), but I kind of wish I had just made the whole show an hour of this one routine (I did do a special one off where I somehow found another 20 minutes of material and bumped it up to the full 60 minutes). It would no doubt still have infuriated the Daily Telegraph if that had been the entire show, but it would have been sort of amazing. It was probably a risk I couldn't take in 2005 (the weirdness of the show was already in danger of derailing my return to stand-up as it was), but then again I had taken the risk of doing this strange routine in clubs on Saturday nights in front of furious men who wanted me to talk about cocks, not yoghurt.
Anyway it was a real buzz to return to this routine and I am really looking forward to Saturday's performance. I am really not far from having the whole show (or at least the 90 minute version) ready to go, which is lucky as The Twelve Tasks of Hercules is a behemoth of a show (or a Lernean Hydra of a show) and I face an uphill struggle to both come up with a realistic edit of the material and then to learn it. After an hour or so of searching through old CDRs I managed to find a working version of the Powerpoint from the show and even to locate the missing videos and get them into the presentation as well (though I don't know how to make them play automatically like the others in the presentation and will have to just click on play on the night to make them go- unless someone can give me a simple fix). I hadn't planned to do the bit where I list all the 50 dates and where we went, as it takes up valuable time, isn't as impressive as the genealogy of Christ and yet perversely, will be much harder for me to recall (and now I am so far away from the event that I can't even use my short term memory to help me). But then I spent an hour trying to re establish the links in my brain and I more or less have it. Due to Apple making the ridiculous decision to stop their remote control working with their computers, and moving over to a system where you have a remote control on your phone (but if you don't have the app now you apparently can't put it on your phone until it is relaunched in a few months) I am going to have to do all the clicks by hand (and also the phone is not a great remote control anyway - it's unwieldy and the battery runs down too fast - this seems crazy, but this is what the lady in the shop told me is happening), which might make it harder to look like I am not just reading it off the screen.
But this is the least of my worries with this show which is very far from being lodged in my brain.
So if you want the excitement of a potential car crash come to see Hercules on Friday, for an avant garde stand-up show, you really shouldn't miss Yoghurt on Saturday.
I reckon I will be OK. I just have to take each section and work at it, like I did with these dates. But even if I use one of my remaining hour slot previews this week to do Hercules, I will only be able to do an hour of it. There will be stuff that I might not have said out loud for nearly a decade come Friday. Because even if I practice at home, I will, as usual, get bored by the halfway point and then lose interest. And then there's the slight matter of losing 20 minutes from each half. Plus I talk a lot faster now than I did in those days of a much more mannered performance. Will going faster be enough? I doubt it.
And as with Yoghurt I think the show will be better with an edit. I liked to test patience back then, like providing an entertaining show of a length that would give you time to have a drink and then go home and have sex with your partner (or alone for most of my audience) but now I am more interested in giving the crowd a good time. As a 36 year old with this strange job and no responsibilities I had no real concept of how precious a night out was to most ordinary people, whether you're a parent getting away from your children or just someone escaping their job for a few hours. And whilst I am still keen to be inventive and original (and prepared to annoy people with a too long routine about yoghurt), I now believe that you can only do that if you're also entertaining. If I want to annoy then I should do it in a way that leaves people happy, as I did tonight). Sorry to all those people in the noughties who I kept in theatres for half an hour longer than necessary and threw off all your drinking and (self-) seduction plans. At least I am forced not to do that this time by the time constraints. But which bits do I cut?
But you know, as ridiculous as this challenge is, I am really enjoying it and giving over my work time for six weeks to learning these shows, whilst trying to write a new one. It's actually a bit of joy for me. It couldn't be less like Edinburgh. How does something much harder have so much less stress?
I suppose because I am not being judged. Because I have my own permission to fail. Because falling from the tight-rope will in some ways be as entertaining as traversing the 12 shows successfully. Because I can't lose any money. Because I get to spend my days at home with my family.
I did think I would go back to the Fringe at some point. But now I am not so sure. I wonder about setting up a Leicester Square Theatre Fringe next year for the other semi-established acts in a similar position to me.
