Kev F comic art: Socks Eurovision rewrites and results

Monday, 8 August 2022

Socks Eurovision rewrites and results

Thanks to Jimi Longmuir for these excellent shots from the opening night of our show at this year's Edfringe, and also for having us on to headline his show at Boteca Brasil on Saturday night (our only extramural gig of this year's Edinburgh).

Five nights in to our painfully short run at Edinburgh Fringe 2022 and I'm already wishing we cold have done the whole month (which for various reasons, including the recent house move and other commitments, we weren't able to). Turns out we have a good show, despite any misgivings I might have had. (Did I mention our first 4 star review is in, from edfringe review?) Though a lot of this has come together very much at the 11th hour.

When we opened on Wednesday night (they call these Preview nights, but I've always counted them as the first night of the run) our show was in the state it had been at the dozen preview shows we'd done between February in Leicester and last weekend in Inverness. And it still wasn't quite right. After our opening night I went home and did some rewriting. And it was big and significant writing.

I totally revamped the opening section, writing the brand new Doing A Sam Ryder routine (part of which you can see here) which hit the ground running on Thursday and worked perfectly from the start. After 6 months of an unsatisfactory opening section, we now have a solid opener which involves the contrasting Sock characters rather than just being a string of puns. Hoorah.

I was also unhappy about a couple of recycled routines that were still in the show. They'd been put in as placeholders, way back when I wrote the first draft last year, and I'd not managed to replace them. Then, in a writing splurge on Wednesday night, I made good. So the mistaken words routine that appeared before the penultimate song (Venice, a routine written 10 years ago for a video) got the chop and was replaced by Ventriloquism, which I wrote for Social Club on Zoom last year and have never done live before. It's now taking pride of place in the last third of the show and working. The other replacement was a new mistaken words routine (Uber Alles) which now goes into an otherwise empty space after the German song.

With those bits of new material, and some more trimming and tightening, we've ended up with a show that now flows, feels good and, did I mention, has got us a 4 star review already.

Eurovision Voting & Improv

In every show this year, the audience votes for their favourite song. Which reminds me, one other change to the show, that I only came up with on the opening night, is that just before the vote, the Socks run through every contestant you've just seen - in costume. This leads to an amusing shambles where Sock on the left has to try and get every costume on in record time. Such a simple idea, and it took me 6 months to think of doing it. We also do an improv number based on the audience's suggestions. Here are the results and the improv songs.

Wed 3: Winner = Germany

Improv = USA/Wales singing about cooking sheep "Home On The Range". (You had to be there)

Thu 4: Winner = Tie between UK & Germany

Improv = Australia singing about kangaroos and dingoes

Fri 5: Winner = Germany (3rd time)

Improv = Australia (again) singing about kangaroos (again)

Sat 6: Winner = UK (2nd time)

Improv = Portugal (as seen in this clip:)