Warming Up

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Tonight I was a guest on Grainne Maguire “What Has the News Ever Done For Me?”, a topical panel show that takes place at the tiny Etcetera Theatre in Camden. It’s delightfully lo-fi and unusually for such projects was not made into a podcast or even recorded. If you want to see it you have to get off your arse and come and see it live. I don’t know if Grainne is planning to pitch it as a radio show (I think it would make a good one) and is just trying out the format, but as a man who has recorded way too much of his life already, it was quite a relief to exist for a couple of hours only in the moment (though now I am recording the occasion in this blog, so I have not escaped the matrix).

I had been too tired and preoccupied with Phoebe to prepare very much at all, but I always think these things are better when they are unplanned and unscripted. Put four funny people on a stage and one of them should be able to think of something funny to say every twenty seconds or so. A few times I sat listening to the others, knowing the subject was going to come to me imminently and having no idea what I was going to say. But then the subject came to me and I had to say something. And stuff came out and most of it was at least adequate. 

I am very much of the old school about this sort of thing. I think comedians should write (or ad-lib) their own material. I don’t like these panel shows where everything has been planned in advance and the panellists have been given a pad of jokes by their writers that they are determined to get in. With those shows you’re recording three hours of material for a 30 minute show, surely if the people you’ve employed are funny then you can keep the subject matter a secret and expect one in six things that everyone says to be funny enough for broadcast. Is Stewart Lee the only comedian on television who actually writes all his own stuff? What a terrible state of affairs.

Yeah, maybe it’s hard to come up with all those jokes when you’re on five panel shows a week, so you need some help. Or alternatively be on less panel shows. Rather than having a rule about having to have one woman on every panel show, how about a rule where if you are a regular on any panel show you can’t appear on any others. That would mean an influx of great new comedians and I would suggest many of them would be female comedians. If panel shows have to exist (and I don’t mind them in moderation, but there’s way too many and some persistent ones have hung around for too long and don’t take enough chances) then let’s use them as a way to introduce new funny people and new ideas and then maybe take some of those people and let them actually write a whole show (alone or with other people if that’s really too challenging for them).

Or the other option, taken by Grainne and myself, is rather than waiting for someone else to book you, just get on and make it yourself.

We had to choose our most important news story of the week. I went with the silliest one about tiny double yellow lines in Bristol, which do look quite comical, but actually make sense and it’s funny that people are protesting them because no car is that short (slightly misunderstanding how double yellow lines work). I didn’t win.

Carrie Quinlan had brought in a 2010 post election News of the World she’d found in her partner’s shed. Not only was it enlightening to see the cyclical nature of politics as well as the hopes and dire warnings about the coalition (weirdly neither came true), but it was odd even seeing the News of the World at all. It already feels like it’s long in the past. And it struck me what a crazy name that is for a newspaper.Oh, yeah, we do the news of the world, unlike any of other paper. But if there was a battle in space we wouldn’t cover that. We just do the news of the world in this paper.

Shame the paper no longer exists. I could have got a whole bit out of that observation.

Another exciting guest added to the upcoming run of RHLSTP. Bob Mortimer will be the first guest on the first show on June 1st. This is going to sell out pretty fast so book now.

If the guest who is heavy pencilled for June 22nd is confirmed then that show will see out immediately too, so book now if you know what’s good for you! And I am fairly confident that there will be good reasons for booking for any of the shows, so beat the rush and book now.