Travels with my art, good to be busy

The Socks set on stage at a particularly Halloweeny Ace Centre in Nelson

It's been a very busy week and a bit, both travelling with my art and also sat at my desk.

On the road I've just completed a weekend which saw the Socks play the ACE Centre in Nelson Lancs Friday, then a sellout solo 90 minute Saturday night show at the Carriageworks in Leeds, followed by a day of Comic Art Masterclasses at Sci Fest in the Baths Hall in Scunthorpe (which, newly renovated and fantastically equipped as it is, still brings to mind the classic Jasper Carrot routine Scunthorpe Baths).

This three day excursion, for which Hev joined me for two pleasant overnight stays in Burnley and Leeds, and a lengthy 5 and a half hour drive up on Friday with a lighter 4 hour trip back Sunday night, with that delightful feeling of satisfaction of a job well done that such an exhausting trip can give you. They were all great gigs, with lots of happy punters and the fillip of being reminded one can be pretty good at doing what one does for a living. (This, of course, follows last weekend's Socks tour of Horsham, Margate and Canterbury, which did very much the same.)


A flipchart, Scunthorpe, yesterday

But it was at my desk that the week was completed, with a particularly productive burst of work. As an aside I rattled off two Socks videos, a new sketch BBC Weather Map and a re-recording of Halloween, but those were a cough and a spit. I also began work on illustrations I'm going to be doing for a new play at Hull Truck Theatre, a novel commission which I must get completed in the coming week.

But the best work is the one I can't really talk about yet. I've written a whole load of brand new sketches, on a certain theme, all for the Socks, and assembled them as a first draft of a pilot episode of a TV show. I've met with some people about it and I'm waiting to see what they think. As part of the material I've presented to them, the Socks have recorded a video which, very unusually for me, I haven't immediately stuck on Youtube or the world to see. It's strange for me not to share things as soon as I've done them, and if any interest is shown in this material I'd like to perform it in front of an audience as soon as possible to find out if it's as funny as I think. But even if it goes no further in a hurry telly-wise, and I'm hoping it will, I'm sitting on almost enough scripts and more than enough ideas for next year's Edinburgh show. On which subject I have some money to chase, if you'll excuse me...