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Happy Heterosexual Pride day to all the non-gays out there. Only we know the level of oppression we’ve had to face for the cross we have to bear that is our straightness. We have to have sex with people with different genitalia to us, which is disgusting when you think about it. None of us would have chosen this, but sexuality is not a choice and we have to make the best of our weird and unpleasant proclivities. I know that doesn’t make me seem very proud of being not gay. But it’s the most pride I can muster.
Necessity is the mother of invention and somehow I am squeezing everything I need to do into the available time. I don’t know how I am doing it but I am making good progress on the stand up show and have also written five story lines for Everything Happens (For No Reason) and can hopefully turn one of them into a script in the next week or so. It’s not even July yet so am very pleased to be motoring along and I think the storylines I’ve done show the scope of the series. It turns out my job is really easy. You just have to make your life so full of chaos that you are forced to apply yourself.
This series is going to be complex and there is only so much I can do with a few pages of speculation about what it might involve. There are mysteries to seed throughout and only very partial answers to give and there’s a love triangle that covers many dimensions and an infinite number of Universes to create. I can understand why the execs wanted to see something which explained what was likely to happen, and yet to me the possibilities of this open-ended situation are literally limitless. But I still surprised myself with some of the stuff I managed to come up with. I can’t allow myself to daydream too much about getting this series in case it doesn’t happen, but I am confident that if it happens it is going to be something quite different and my gut is telling me that it’s good.
It’s about time that I got another shot at some proper TV writing and the persistence that has pushed me through the last decade and a half and driven to me to write this stupid blog every single day feels like it is finally paying off.
I’ve been getting some nice comments after my previews in person and on Twitter, so it feels like the new stand up show might be OK too. Tonight in Croydon probably didn’t go quite as well as the last two shows and it’s still just a clump of stuff with no real structure at the moment. Confusingly the stuff that has been banker material for the last couple of nights didn’t get all that much and a routine I was going to drop, but did anyway just to be sure, probably went the best of anything. I chastised the audience for being so contrary and thus not helping me at all.
As much as preview time can be mortifying as you try out half formed ideas, it’s also great when something occurs to you in the moment, or you act on some half-forgotten thought and it works. There’s room to find the jokes in all the routines at the moment and I opened a door and found a satisfying new bit in one of the pieces that I am sure will be in the show. And as much as I got laughs for it, I knew there was much more in it. That’s a good feeling.
It’s fun listening 4Music Extra as always on the way to and from gigs. Today I listened to a show from the 60s that I’d never heard of called “Play It Cool.” It was very much of its time. The Mike Sammes Singers sang that song about men doing stuff “for some dame”. The female singers sounded so cheery as they reinforced stereotypes. It was a better time. They liked puns more back in 1964. It’s interesting to witness the changing comedy tastes. But I also wondered how the Mikes Sammes Singers were getting on now. This show was 53 years ago, but they sound quite young. I made a note
to look them up on wikipedia and they have quite a rich history. Mike has gone, but maybe some of his singers are still with us. This is the wonder and horror of Radio 4 Extra. Those performers are captured in amber, but it forces you to think about the passing of years, the transience of fame and the way that comedy tastes change.
On the way home they were playing “The Harpoon”, a faux old fashioned radio show that is now a piece of history itself, written by and starring my friends Peter Baynham and Julian Dutton. We were doing our radio shows with the same producer, Sarah Smith, at the same time, so that brought back memories of my own past. Not as much as listening to an old Fist of Fun did the other day, which is much weirder. It’s all literally half a life time away.
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And I forgot to say yesterday that there’s a new episode of RHLSTP up with the brilliantly funny Jessica Knappett.
RHLSTP with Jessica Knappett
