Day off! Hooray!
I woke up at 12.50 this morning. I needed to be at the Pleasance at 2 as I was going out for lunch with DJ Danny Robbins (he insists on being in character at all times throughout the Festival and so I was going out with the DJ, not the actor). There was a message on the phone from Selina, my corrupt and evil PR person. She wanted me to write a 350 word piece for the Guardian, but would need it this afternoon. I had half an hour to write yet another diary piece about the Festival. This is what I came up with:
"I first came up to the Edinburgh Fringe in 1987 as a spotty student, performing my routine about a corrupt ventriloquist to up to six people a day. It was the most amazing summer of my young life: I spent afternoons crying with laughter and nights crying myself to sleep. I became quickly addicted to the highs and lows of what I still believe is the greatest Arts Festival in the world. Nineteen years on and I am well into the run of my 22nd Fringe show and more often or not when I see my name in print it has the word “veteran” shackled to it. I have spoken to several performers who were not even born when I first appeared here. It’s the kind of thing that could make a lesser man feel old. Luckily I have no self-awareness and have somehow convinced myself that I am still a teenager. Just one with some kind of premature ageing disorder that makes his bones ache every time he climbs a hill. Luckily all the young women I talk to, treat me with the same disdain and disgust that they did when I was nineteen (though for different reasons) so it’s easy to keep fooling myself.
This Festival is turning out to be a strong contender for the best of the fifteen that I have appeared at. I have found a new level of confidence and playfulness with my stand-up and there is an electric atmosphere in the dank, damp room I am performing in. I will know that the show is a true success when this combination of water and metaphorical energy causes the electrocution of someone in the audience. Hysterical laughter of 185 people is not enough for me, my jokes must kill and maim. Only in destroying find I ease. I fear that I am doing so well that the government might harness my comedy as an alternate to the nuclear industries and I will spend the rest of my life cracking jokes whilst attached to some gigantic dynamo. Maybe comedy will save the world after all."
Not bad for thirty minutes work.
I bumped into Arthur Smith in the Pleasance Courtyard. Now he is a true Fringe veteran and my favourite Festival performer, even though he had a thinly veiled parody of me in his Hamlet show back in 1995. I also recall seeing him propped up against a bar drinking alone in 1987 and wondering if that too would be my fate if I became a comedian. It turned out it was. And it's not as bad a fate as I feared. Arthur gave me an academic book about psychotherapy or something and told me to give it to someone else, who was to give it to someone else in the hope that it would eventually come back to him. I gave it to a woman from the Perrier committee at lunch. I offered to have sex with her to get a nomination like in the film Festival. She didn't seem keen. I think I might have improved my chances if I had offered not to have sex with her.
After lunch I went to see the Ron Mueck exhibition in the National Gallery. My favourite was the gigantic forty foot long baby who stares at you from her one open eye. A small boy looked at it and said "Imagine how big a cot she would need." I nearly added, "Imagine the size of the vagina it must have come out of." But thought that would be inappropriate. I also enjoyed the way that looking at the works made me look at the people around me in a different way. The art world is snobby about this artist, but he pushes all the right buttons for me. And sometimes being popular doesn't equate to being rubbish.
I had stupidly booked in a benefit gig tonight, without realising it was my day off. I was very tired and wearily trudged down there wishing I had checked my diary. But maybe it was a good idea to keep my hand in, though I was even more exhausted afterwards and went home, instead of catching a show. I haven't got ill yet and haven't lost my voice and realised today that it's because of the smoking ban. You don't lose your voice up here because of the show, it's all the shouting in late night smokey bars. I for one am a massive fan of this new legislation and I don't feel sorry for the miserable looking men standing on the streets outside the pub. Their self-pitying faces actually make me realise how many uncomfortable and stinky nights I have spent in bars breathing in second hand smoke. Well done Scotland.
