6745/19665
Slightly sad news in that the live stream tickets for the upcoming Clapham Grand gigs have not been selling at all well and so we’ve had to make the decision not to have it online, though there are still live audience tickets available.
It costs a fair bit to film and live stream the show and as it stood the nights would be running at a loss. Given part of the point of doing these shows was to try and raise money for the theatre (and the podcast) after 14 months of little to no live shows, it would have been a bit of a kick in the teeth to actually lose more money.
I had been hopeful that live streaming would become a part of the post-Covid theatre experience. With a potential world-wide audience, plus all the people who live elsewhere in the UK or who can’t leave their homes for whatever reason, I thought it might finally be a way to make the filming of the shows viable.
Chris Evans (not that one) and I have never been businessmen, but we liked the idea of filming the shows, even though there was no real way to monetise the videos and the filming costs being a couple of grand an episode. Thanks to the generosity of kickstarter backers we managed to raise much of the cost of doing this, but it would be cool if a couple of hundred remote viewers could cover it, or if we got more than that and generated income. Or maybe we’re insane and shouldn’t be filming at all.
Though I think it’s cool to have a visual record of all this stuff, so maybe money isn’t the important thing.
However, it’s not our choice at Clapham as another company were doing the filming and the streaming and for some reason they don’t like losing loads of money when trying to run their business. The losers.
I am not going to give up on the idea and it might work better at the Leicester Square Theatre, especially for the shows that are already sold out. But maybe the hunger for it will no longer be there post-lockdown. People know, of course, that the shows will be available for free in a few weeks, but that doesn’t seem to stop them coming to the theatre and if you’re there live you get to see the bits that get cut, and occasionally whole episodes that don’t get podcast.
But look, I know times are tough and a lot of people don’t have spare money (and that’s why I’ve always operated on a system where the stuff will pretty much always be put out for free) and maybe this poor showing is down to some other factor (the February gigs sold well enough online for us to turn a small profit). I know a few people told me that they were planning on buying the tickets last minute, but I don’t think we’d have done enough to make it work this time.
If you can support us
by getting down to the theatre then that would be great. I am hoping to get some big name guests to fill the gaps. It starts on Monday and obviously you won’t be able to buy tickets on the door.
I did loads of walking and running today and managed to finish off both the Midnight Library and the Geoff Norcott audiobooks. I enjoyed both, though had some issues with the Midnight Library (some spoilers coming), but mainly wish that on starting a new life Nora had to work out what was going on, a la Quantum Leap. I’d like to have seen her just slipping into the lives and having access to the memory banks of the version of her that she was in, so she could find out what the life was really like and not waste time faffing around trying to find out where her house was or whatever. Also if say, she’s fluent in Catalan (as the book claims in one life) then it’s meaningless if the Quantum Leap Nora isn’t too. But presumably she wouldn’t be. She’s only affected by physical not mental changes. That sometimes felt like a slip of logic.
But as I said before it didn’t really delve into the fact that many of the things that happen to us in our lives are actually due to the decisions, actions or inactions of others or that infinity new lives are produced every instant and thus picking one where, for example, you were an Olympic swimmer, tells you nothing, because there would be infinity more lives where you were still a swimmer but much happier or sadder or whatever, because everything would play out.
I also worried a bit about where the Nora she was replacing had gone. I do plan to address that in my version (if it ever happens). But the Nora who gets replaced for the longest near the end must have been very confused and pissed off when she returned and found she had lost some weeks and someone else, who hadn’t really properly down the academic work had been writing her book.
And the other difference with my version is that ultimately, predictably, she returns to her own life as being preferable to the others. Of course that’s partly because the other lives don’t belong to her and she hasn’t lived them or earned them (which she was never going to unless the memories came with the leap), but also because the moral has to be that ultimately we have to make the best of the life we have and to appreciate it.
Not that there aren’t some good morals in the story, but I think it would be more fun for her to actively prefer a different life, because with infinity lives there just would be ones that were much better. And I’d also like to see this story about someone who didn’t have all the (admittedly squandered) opportunities of the heroine. Because she’s smart and attractive and a potential rock superstar, chess champion, Olympic swimmer, etc, but what about someone with little potential or world class skills in their core life. That’s a more fun story. The moral is that life sucks and as much as its a lottery, some people will always have more opportunities than others.
It’s still an interesting take on the subject and my complaints are mainly about the mechanics of it all and mainly because I know the struggle of making such a broad subject work. Ultimately when every life possible is lived an infinite amount of times, there’s little investment in one of them. Which is sort of the point of my take. Someone dies, but it’s not sad because they also live an infinite amount of times and also have to die an infinite amount of times every second. And in the vast majority of the infinite timelines that individual never got born. In the vast majority humans never existed either.
Finally the winter self-playing snooker tournament came to an end, with the match that everyone had dreamed of, Me 4 vs Me15. It might not have been the most glamorous tie, but there was some exciting snooker and unusually some pretty impressive safety play.
I will return to Me1 vs Me2 snooker next week, but might couple that with a European super league of the most successful (or rich) players playing a league format. Because self-playing snooker isn’t just for lock down. And you know, there might be another lockdown.
RHLSTP with the multi-talented Mae Martin is now up
