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Two remote interviews today - one for Book Club with the wondrous Jo Caulfield and an additional Edinburgh Fringe podcast with comedy genius Mike Birbiglia. Remote records work well for the Book Club which is a slightly more serious chat than a regular show, but I prefer to do RHLSTP live. You can lose a bit of spontaneity and also the audience really helps make the show work. I don't think Mike would be aware of who I was, but having watched a lot of his stuff this week, I felt there was a lot of crossover in our content and style. His mastery of story-telling made me slightly wish that I'd persisted with the solo theatrical shows that I did before stand up. Not that I lost that entirely and several of my stand up shows are still really story-telling pieces.
I wasn't expecting much from the interview. I hoped we'd hit it off, for sure Maybe become best friends and then he'd ask to see my stuff, realise it was brilliant, get all the American producers to put me on in a big US tour and get me into some movies. Just the usual stuff. And the interview was good and fun and he was funny and interesting, but none of those things happened and there felt like the smallest of pullback from him. It's hard to be sure. It was early in the morning for him and we weren't on the same continent, let alone the same room and maybe my expectations were too high. I think he had an OK time on the whole, but I want my guests to have a fantastic time on RHLSTP. It'll be out in a couple of weeks, so I'll leave you to judge. I think he might have thought I was a little bit of a dick. And it takes someone very perceptive to spot that in a relatively short remote conversation.
He is an amazing performer though and his shows have a very British sensibility. You can watch three of them on Netflix and I particularly liked My Girlfriend's Boyfriend, which ends in a way that might seem like a disappointment, but I love the fact that things don't wrap up so neatly, because it's what life is about.
His latest show The Old Man and the Pool, which I haven't seen, is about contemplating mortality due to illness and so there are some obvious parallels with the show I am currently working on. I am in two minds as to whether I should go and see it because I don't want to cross pollute, but I have found the Netflix shows inspiring - showing the value of pushing that extra mile, to make the show as perfect as possible and maybe rather than hoping that someone might talk to me for an hour and then arrange for me to tour the world, I should take the more realistic option of making my show as good as possible and hope that leads to a UK tour where I sell 25 more tickets per venue than last time.
I suppose at the back of my mind I feel my body of work is maybe underrated, but that is the trap that many performers fall into. And it displays solipsism. Which is illustrated by talking to most of my podcast guests. There are a huge number of extremely talented comedians out there, so it's inevitable that some of them don't get the platform that they deserve. Jo Caulfield is certainly a rated comedian, but I still think she's underrated. She has an amazing on stage persona, where she is caustic and rude, yet somehow and audience love her and empathise with her (because she is like all of us I suppose). But that's a very tricky tightrope to walk and she does just enough to let us see the decent heart behind it all. Her book is also excellent and multi-layered, funny and thought-provoking. Hopefully it will be a huge hit, but there are no guarantees. That's the nature of this horrible and wonderful beast.
Anyway, I enjoyed my day of talking to comedy geniis (I was trying to do the plural for geniuses there, but genies is maybe better) and I think the podcasts are good. All we can do is keep striving to do this job better, so it's great to inspired and to feel a barely palpable suspicion that you've failed to impress someone you admire.
But isn't that what RHLSTP is all about?
That's my genius.
