It was very exciting to be playing the Royal Albert Hall tonight. As I walked in door 8 at the front I was able to pretend to myself that I was going to be performing on the main stage. I suppose it's lucky I wasn't as less than 100 people had come to see me, which looked fine in the Elgar Room but might have been a bit embarrassing in the main hall - especially if they had sat up on the balcony, all spread out and slow hand-clapped every time I told a joke.
But I was in the building, which is a start. One day I might get to play the big room - most likely as part of a charity night or something, but you never know. As I walked in I saw a poster for Matt Goss who is
performing there in October. He and his brother briefly attended Fairlands Middle School in Cheddar back in the late 70s, so if it's possible for one Cheddar schoolboy to play the main hall, then there's no reason why I can't. Or by that logic any of my contemporaries from that school. I hope Stephen Ford gets to play there and demonstrate his skill of kung fu kicking nerds in the back until they cry.
This was to be my first full length preview, which was a slight problem as with all my other commitments I haven't had time to do any work on this show beyond locating relevant blogs and printing them out (I hadn't even read some of them through), but I am used to the sick stomach in the pit of the stomach that comes with early previews and in recent years have come to relish the challenge of trying to talk an idea through on stage and not worry too much about whether anything I am saying is funny. Whilst people who come this early will see something that bears little relation to the final show, they probably will end up with some personal revelations that I will not blurt out when things are more organised.
It seems that this show will be a little gentler than I have been of late and there are a couple of stories I want to tell that are mainly not funny and even a little sad, but there are already at least two routines that seem to be getting big laughs and have potential for more and I did 40 minutes of material before falling back on old tried and tested stuff. To have that much stuff after having done so little work is slightly incredible and a bit of a relief. For the first time in ages, today I felt like the workload I have is manageable. I made a small amount of progress on my TV script (but it felt like I was getting to grips with what I had to do and that I might actually get a first draft completed in the next 12 days), I have a lot of preview gigs to knock the Edinburgh show into shape and AIOTM
has been getting a little easier to get together.
As a little treat (and to give you a taster of the new show) we put up the AIOTM secret stand up as a bonus podcast today. It was a really fun one and hopefully it will encourage some of you waverers to come down to see one of the last three shows LIVE.
It was mainly work today, but I got a bit embroiled in a Twitter thing in the afternoon when I posted what I thought was quite an innocuous tweet which was intended merely to explain that I don't RT things that I am asked to RT. I had just had a few requests in a row and rather than ignore them all thought I would just let people know that it's impractical and actually pointless for me to RT every PR and charity request that I get. If I RTed every charity thing then my timeline would be little else than RTed charity requests, everyone would unsubscribe and it would make the RTs pointless. Even if people didn't unsubscribe they would surely get bored and not click the links. Instead I choose to support a couple of charities and mention them occasionally and hopefully that means people might actually take a look (it certainly worked with the later SCOPE programme appeal when every time I tweeted the total would go up by £100 or so). Some people get annoyed by me publicising my own stuff, which is their right, but I would suggest they just don't follow me if they don't like it (I will use Twitter as I see fit - it's your decision to get involved or not and you don't need to let me know if it's not for you - in this case I genuinely have no interest in you or your life), but if I started publicising things with which I have no connection and which I know nothing about then it would become very tedious again. If I see a website or a film or read a book or even a tweet that I have enjoyed I will tweet about it (or choose to RT it), but that's a choice I will make. It's very unlikely that I will RT on request - I sometimes do if it's something about SCOPE - but really I was just trying to let people know that I wasn't being rude to them and also that there's no point in wasting your energy asking me to RT, because I almost certainly won't do it.
Of course some people thought I was being self-important or grumpy or unreasonable and let me know this. I wasn't being any of these things. I was being practical and thoughtful and trying to explain the situation, but there you go. Some thought I was whining. Again, I don't know how they are able to read the pitch of my voice in a written medium, but I wasn't complaining, just informing, just trying to save time and feelings. It says more about the reader it they interpret a statement as a moan or a bitch. I don't blame people for trying to publicise their causes. If I tweet about a gig or SCOPE I am hoping people will RT and sometime even request a RT. But I am not worried if people don't RT it and only expect them to do so if they want. I think most people probably get this convention.
The responses did actually make me a bit grumpy but I exercised my other right on Twitter which is to block anyone who I think has behaved in a rude or over-familiar way. I am also happy to block people who complain that my feed is annoying - I understand that some of you are simply too busy to unfollow of your own volition, so will happily save you from being subjected to something you don't enjoy and block you. I am not whining here. Just informing. It amuses me that many of the people who accuse others of self-importance are actually pretty self-important themselves.
Now I've just accused other of self-importance. Damn.
Anyway it was all good fun.
@katebevan sums it all up quite nicely (and I agree with nearly all of her points) in this blog. I thought it was interesting so I RTed it. Some people thought that was ironic. It wasn't. I didn't say that I didn't RT, just that I didn't RT requests. And Dave Gorman is linked to in that article who also has some excellent points to make on the subject.
I can't tell you how to use Twitter and I wouldn't want to. The great thing is you can do what you like with it. But it's also your own business who you follow and who you block.
