Ah being back home is a delight. It means I can waste the precious remaining hours of my life playing snooker in the nude and commentating via Twitter on QPR home games, guessing what is going on based on the sounds made by the crowd. QPR were playing Chelsea today (though if I am going to take this commentary job seriously I should try doing it without knowing the opposition and try to guess who they are (chants from the crowd and the accent they are sung in might help me with this), which made things trickier to read as both teams are from London and so the "away" team was likely to have as many if not more supporters along. Thus it would be harder to determine what was going on via the volume of sound. Would a big cheer indicate a QPR goal or a Chelsea one? I was working blind, but that is one of the down sides of this whole enterprise.
Annoyingly my wife had a friend round and I had to go and talk to them for a bit, when I would much rather have been in the attic trying to guess the score of a sporting contest that I had no interest in. But luckily they were in the garden so I could still listen to the game whilst pretending to listen to them. I was fairly confident that the game had ended as a 0-0 win for QPR (anything other than defeat is a victory for this team who will be delighted if they manage to avoid demotion as jammily as they did at the end of last season), but the score was not important. What was important was that I have found another irritating and stupid way to make mild comedy out of sport. If only I understood technology I could maybe set up my own internet radio station to commentate on the match live, though for it really to work I think the viewer might want to see the commentary synced up with the filmed footage from the match. How right had I been in my assessment?
I pretty much am already in the situation where most of my day is spent broadcasting something essentially to no one. I look forward to my dotage where my whole day is filled with nothing but these meaningless exercises, to an audience of none. Only then will I be satirising the futility of existence, the way we busy ourselves with unimportant things to make our life seem more busy, the increasing decline of our usefulness and the vanity of the individual. As such it will be the greatest work of art ever to have been created (other than the monkey Jesus obviously), but no one will know that it is or be aware of it. And if they became aware of it and lauded it it would immediately become valueless again.
Oh it's funny now whilst I am still on top of it all and able to control it. But how funny will it be when this long mental suicide is complete?
I managed to get out of the house and away from my self-indulgence by heading to the Leicester Square Theatre to see the ridiculously talented
Ausentatious improvise a lost Jane Austen novel. Even now I could not escape my infuriatingly omnipresent self (at least from my perspective) as before the show screens were advertising
the Leicester Square Theatre Podcast reminding me that I have yet to book someone for the first of those and making me feel a bit sick. The screen also said the show as on "Various Monday's" taunting me with its misplaced apostrophe.
I was soon pleasantly distracted by the show though. Impro can be a wildly varying experience and as a comedian and writer (and let's face it, in podcast form an improviser myself) I am not often impressed with this skill. Often impro games have enough structure and repeated situations to mean that the participants barely need to make anything up at all. At the outset it might seem that this idea of improvising a "lost" Austen novel simply from a title suggested by an audience member is narrow enough to allow much of it to be prepared in advance. But I was actually astonished by how easily and imaginatively the cast created an hour of entertainment from the not particularly Austen like title of "The Falling Circus" and how little time they spent on the more predictable Austen tropes and characters. It was artfully and amusingly and playfully done, the cast deliberately setting traps for each other that had to be dealt with. It's pointless trying to explain the jokes out of context - it would be as useful as a football commentary from a man who can't see the match - but if you get a chance do go and see this brilliant sextet at work. It was very entertaining and they gave our free cupcakes. It's good, but it's not a naked man babbling to himself as he plays snooker against himself.
