HeadSpill

I’ve had some interest from the Channel 4 comedy report, who have asked me to come up with a series of short video clips for their website about my ‘Road to Edinburgh’. I’ve also had interest from the Eczema Society, who I got in touch a while back explaining who I am and what I was planning to do.

Meanwhile, back the writing of the show itself, I’ve been re-reading the leaflets the Eczema society provide to deal with and manage eczema, and some of it brought back quite painful memories. Ouch. The toughest part of coming up with material is knowing what to leave in, take out, and above all keep it funny. It’s a tricky line to walk, eczema itself isn’t funny, and the show shouldn’t be piece of public therapy. It should also be accesable to everyone, without shying away from the subject matter. tough remit, but certainly doable. The Next stage really is to get as many previews as I can, to test what works and what doesn’t.

The flyers are done now, they look very classy.

On Sunday I was a guest on the new Andy Crane Radio show. He’s a lovely bloke, and I felt a warm glow of security sitting in his presence thinking back to watching childrens telly, and singing along at home to the opening credits of ‘Around the World with Will Fog’. I was 14. My nice bubble of security was quickly punctured when he then asked me about home life, my lovely girlfriend and if I was going to get married or not.
It’s not a touchy subject or anything, but I had a proper flap, and the whole thing became a bit surreal in my head for several moments.

I missed my mum’s birthday this weekend. I feel bad about that.

Writing my first Edinburgh show has got my head in knots. I’m swinging between getting too close to the subject matter and being too loose about what I want too say. It’s  like having a table half of ingredients and no recipie to bind them together. I do have a plan as to what it’s all about, but am trying not to fall foul of over marketing it in my head, deciding what it’s all about before it’s written.
There’s a danger in the kind of personal subject that this is, that if I outline too clearly what it’s about I’ll restrict my options to broaden the topics to tackle, but conversely to not have an outline is too wayward and provides no focus for what I’m writing about.

I’ve got 2 beginnings, several middles and no end at the moment, I suppose that’s the problem. 10 years back when I wrote little indie comics I didn’t have this bother, stories went all over the place and were about anything, but this is different, it has to have the ring of truth or indeed be true itself. Most of it is, about 80% of it is, but I have embellished some of it for laughs.

The problem with over analysing any subject is you can very easily kill any of the things that made it interesting in the first place, but then the hope is by doing that you’ll find that one area of common experience that is unspoken by everyone, but everyone knows, and finding that speck of common experience is comedy gold dust.

After a run of particularly unsatisfactory gigs over the last month my mojo was well and truly restored last week when the headliner failed to turn up and I ended up mc’ing and closing the gig in Skipton town hall. Big room, and lovely crowd.

The yang this lovely slice on yin came the next morning when a tooth that had cracked eariler in the week drove me nuts with pain and I shot off down the road to the dentist to have an emergency extraction on a decay ridden right molar.

The show comes along slowly, still needs work.