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Well done Albert Einstein. Lucky guess mate.
It was International day of women and girls in science today. When will there be an international science day for men and boys? Everyone knows that most scientists are male anyway, so it’s ridiculous for women to get a day like this when there are so few of them.
I struggled down to the Post Office with a huge box of DVDs for Chris Evans (not that one) - he’d texted to ask if I had some spare as he’d run out. But when I got there I was amazed to see that there was no queue at all and there were three staff waiting at empty windows. My work here in Shepherd’s Bush is done. I can leave now. I just hope the next leap will be the leap home. Oh Boy!
It had taken me a while to sort all this out though, as the DVDs were at the back of a walk in cupboard and I had to post a couple of other bits and pieces off too. This was eating into the valuable time I had left to write and learn my show for the Leicester Square Theatre gig tonight. But I was in the mood to procrastinate and found myself doing everything but sorting out the bits of script that I wasn’t yet familiar with.
I texted Chris to tell him that the Lord of the Dance Settee discs were on their way. “We’re All Going To Die, you mean?†he replied. He wasn’t being bleak. In my fatherly tiredness I had assumed the he wanted the new DVD or that WAGTD WAS the new DVD, I don’t know. I had just spent £30 sending him 100 DVDs he didn’t need and wasted an hour getting them packed up and taken to the Post Office. And also sent the one person who had ordered a WAGTD DVD, a Lord of the Dance Settee one instead. What a waste of time and money! But we were able to laugh about it.
And maybe you should buy a copy of Lord of the Dance Settee from Chris, to help him get rid of this unnecessary excess. (Check out his other wares while you can and We’re All Going To Die should be back in stock by the weekend!)
I got home and did some work on the show, but still steadfastly avoided learning the two or three routines that I’ve found it difficult to learn in the last few weeks, or the couple of new ones. I listened to the first outing of the show and noted some bits that I’d forgotten about and tried to work out the order and whether I had 90 minutes of stuff.
I wasn’t nervous though, weirdly, or even panicked. I was really looking forward to the show. We’d sold over 300 tickets, which is awesome for a London first night (Friday and Saturday are both very close to selling out). I haven’t looked much beyond the February dates, but all of next week’s gigs in Sheffield, Leeds, Salford and Liverpool are selling very well too (and are all, for me, big venues), so maybe this is why I feel happy and relaxed about the show. I am kind of relishing the fact that it’s a little loose in places and more conversational. More tickets have been released for Liverpool and Sheffield if you’ve been trying to get to those.
And it was a very satisfying start to the tour proper. The venue nearly full, the audience up for it from the start and for the first 50 minutes everything coming out pretty crisply. I tried some new bits in the second half which were a little less sharp in places, but still went well and aside from it being a bit short - maybe 35 minutes, so still only 5 mins off a 90 min show- and the argument being a bit more woolly than I want it to be eventually, this certainly feels like it’s one of my best shows. But it’s much easier doing this job when there’s a big audience, as the big laughs relax both the crowd and the performer and give us all confidence.
If I am happy, I still seem to be funny, so that’s something. Maybe I am not happy.
I am really looking forward to this tour, not being away from my family (though there aren’t too many nights in hotels) but I think I can get somewhere really interesting with this show and am already very pleased with it.
It’s also gratifying to be seeing audiences growing again, though I have been doing this too long to get over excited about that. Around about 2010 it felt like things were moving onwards and upwards, but then it all levelled out a bit again. My ambitions remain limited (outside the ridiculous ones like playing the big room in Wolverhampton), but it would be marvellous to get 300-500 people seeing me everywhere I went. And this month, at least, I am going to have a nice little run of experiencing that. And obviously it’s good to know that demand isn’t dying off. Thanks for the continued support, especially after stodgy self-congratulatory blogs like this.
But the gamble of not doing Edinburgh and creating a show in a different way seems to be paying off.
