Friday, 31 July 2009
Edfringe promo video No 38274a
New from the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre, a brand new promo video for our Edinburgh show. Tickets going well, get stuck in baby.
Edinburgh Fringe Preview thoughts concluded
Last night saw the last of our Edinburgh Fringe Previews (for the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre Goes To Hollywood, which begins at the Gilded Balloon on Weds Aug 5th, ie 5 days away). It took place at Widcombe Social Club in Bath and was organised by Owen, who I met at an earlier gig and who just suggested doing this off his own bat out of the goodness of his heart. He and his mate Joe are in a band called The Edsel Furies and runs a night called Fluffys, with eccentric acts in.
I was worried at first that we had no lighting or CD player, but the guys got that sorted and I rose to the challenge of the Socks performing under flourescents. It was okay, it worked. Our support was Gentlemans Relish, a one man and his guitar act which was pleasantly somewhere between Ivor Cutler and They Might Be Giants.
As for the content of our actual hour, well. One promising thing was that our hour ended up lasting an hour and a quarter. Which means, given that an Edinburgh Hour is only 55 minutes anyway, we have 20 minutes of chaff to cut away. There is still chaff left, and I'm worried that I'm opening the show with some of it, but some of the material is absolute killer and the audiences have all been full of praise at the end of the shows and, more importantly, forthcoming with laughter during it. Though they laugh more after the first quarter. Oh the boring navel-gazing of comedians, take no notice.
I went over my epic Preview season and gave each show a star rating last night:
1) London preview - cancelled due to organisation probs
2) Leicester preview - 4 stars, brilliant start, not all new material
3) Glasgow preview - cancelled by me cos I couldn't afford the return flight
4) Milton Keynes previe - 4 stars, tremendous. They love us there and make us think anything we do is comedy gold.
5) Bristol preview - 4 stars, excellent, biggest audience and they loved almost everything
6) Bedford preview - 3 stars, a blur, started an hour late, think it went well but too dizzy to remember
7) Gloucester preview - 2 stars, mid afternoon subdued crowd, chickened out and threw in material from touring show as new material wasn't strong enough for a tough crowd
8) Bath preview - 3 stars, went increasingly well but now worried about poorer material early in the hour.
So we've gone from feeling like it was perfect from the start to worrying that it's not all that good, all I can do is sort the stuff into the optimum order, mend the dodgier of the props (Obi Wan Kenobi's arm fell off last night, without getting a laugh, which is worse) and get stuck in next Wednesday. Thanks to all my audiences for sitting through the shows, and saying such nice things, which I can only believe you actually meant. Let's see if Edinburgh audiences, and Edinburgh reviewers, are as kind.
NB: Tickets are selling well in advance, well outstripping both previous years. But there are still 2 days where we've not sold a single ticket - Monday 10th and Monday 24th. I'm wondering whether the box office has some glitch in it and thinks we're taking days off?
I was worried at first that we had no lighting or CD player, but the guys got that sorted and I rose to the challenge of the Socks performing under flourescents. It was okay, it worked. Our support was Gentlemans Relish, a one man and his guitar act which was pleasantly somewhere between Ivor Cutler and They Might Be Giants.
As for the content of our actual hour, well. One promising thing was that our hour ended up lasting an hour and a quarter. Which means, given that an Edinburgh Hour is only 55 minutes anyway, we have 20 minutes of chaff to cut away. There is still chaff left, and I'm worried that I'm opening the show with some of it, but some of the material is absolute killer and the audiences have all been full of praise at the end of the shows and, more importantly, forthcoming with laughter during it. Though they laugh more after the first quarter. Oh the boring navel-gazing of comedians, take no notice.
I went over my epic Preview season and gave each show a star rating last night:
1) London preview - cancelled due to organisation probs
2) Leicester preview - 4 stars, brilliant start, not all new material
3) Glasgow preview - cancelled by me cos I couldn't afford the return flight
4) Milton Keynes previe - 4 stars, tremendous. They love us there and make us think anything we do is comedy gold.
5) Bristol preview - 4 stars, excellent, biggest audience and they loved almost everything
6) Bedford preview - 3 stars, a blur, started an hour late, think it went well but too dizzy to remember
7) Gloucester preview - 2 stars, mid afternoon subdued crowd, chickened out and threw in material from touring show as new material wasn't strong enough for a tough crowd
8) Bath preview - 3 stars, went increasingly well but now worried about poorer material early in the hour.
So we've gone from feeling like it was perfect from the start to worrying that it's not all that good, all I can do is sort the stuff into the optimum order, mend the dodgier of the props (Obi Wan Kenobi's arm fell off last night, without getting a laugh, which is worse) and get stuck in next Wednesday. Thanks to all my audiences for sitting through the shows, and saying such nice things, which I can only believe you actually meant. Let's see if Edinburgh audiences, and Edinburgh reviewers, are as kind.
NB: Tickets are selling well in advance, well outstripping both previous years. But there are still 2 days where we've not sold a single ticket - Monday 10th and Monday 24th. I'm wondering whether the box office has some glitch in it and thinks we're taking days off?
Sunday, 26 July 2009
New flyer back
Fresh off the designing machine, the back of our 2009 flyer. Here's hoping it does the trick.
Saturday, 25 July 2009
Gig delay hell traffic journey shock etc
It's 9 o'clock in the morning and I'm still durrling (there's only a Scots word for the sensation, it's not quite tingling, it's not quite shaking, it's buzzing in a bad way) after last night's travelling.
It was an Edinburgh Preview at the Corn Exchange in Bedford, the venue that gave us our best preview and our best review in the run up to the Fringe last year. The journey from my home near Bristol to Bedford take 2 hours 50 mins according to satnav. I've done it in less, in good traffic. Yesterday wasn't good traffic.
Yesterday was the first Friday of the school holidays for the majority of kids in the country. (Not, I realise, in Scotland where they broke up three weeks ago, or in posh school where they've had at least a week off, or in some criminally mental schools who will still be teaching next week. I think I'm working at one on Monday) So Sally Traffic on Radio 2 was full of news of blockages, stoppages, crashes and holdups. She mentioned three roads that caught my ear, the M25, the A34 and the M40. Best avoid those I thought.
Now you try navigating from Bristol to Bedford without using those three roads. Whichever road I ended up on, and yes I ended up on all three of the above despite my best endeavours, I found myself standing stock still.
Having set out at 3pm, with an ETA of 6pm, plenty of time to set up for my gig starting at 7.30, come 5.30 I was phoning from the ring road around Oxford to say I'd be late. Which is when I realised my phone batteries were about to die. I hadn't charged them up in a couple of days and they were on one blob as I set out. Knowing they were about to blink out for good I rang Hev to try and get the number of the venue, I rang the venue, it was only the box office, I could only leave voicemails. Then I asked Hev to send Facebook alerts to say I was running late, then the phone died.
When at 6.30 or so I got to a motorway services on the M40 I then had the greatest fun looking for a payphone. When did you last need a payphone? I don't think I've used one in nearly a decade. Suffice it to say they're thinner on the ground than they once were. Indeed there are signs for them in the services which then turn out to have no phones underneath them (in this place they'd been replaced by internet terminals). There was one payphone, in the foyer of the motel next door.
Blah blah blah, having set out at 3pm on a journey that should have lasted less than three hours, I finally got into Bedford at 8.30. 5 and a half hours, and my audience had been waiting for the Socks to start since 7.30.
And they waited. God bless em the audience was so big and so faithful they actually all hung around in the bar until I turned up, set up at lightning speed, and started performing at about 8.45
The show was a blur, props all over the place, the wrong CD in the CD player, no time to even breathe before we started. But I think it went well. They liked it, they laughed, I've made notes, parts of the new show are excellent, a couple need tweaking, and the brand new James Bond routine (rewritten since I did the first draft as a YouTube video) worked, it stays. And the Excorcist line, new killer. This is the boring chaff that fills the heads of comedians. I drove away with mental notes like "first good laugh Ooweeooweeoo, first belly laugh Michael Jackson, need to move the Australian" blah blah.
Then the drive home. Surely hitting the road at 10.30 I'd miss the rush hour? So it was that at 20 to midnight I found myself Twittering from my recharged phone, from a standing still traffic jam on the M25. Oy vey (there's not a Scots word for that, only Yiddish). I got home nearly 2.30. Nine hours driving, one hour's performing, not a moment to rest or collect my thoughts. Durrling, I am. Durrling.
Thanks again to the good people of Bedford for being a fabulous and patient audience, I hope they'll have me back (though I may have to promise to set off 9 hours before the gig just in case), and to the people who passed on the Facebook message from Hev. I believe Pat Monahan's sister contacted him and he spoke to the promoter. Oh and thanks Pat, for letting me delay the start of his gig from 9pm to 10pm, an almost unforgivable comedy crime for which I hope he'll almost forgive me.
It was an Edinburgh Preview at the Corn Exchange in Bedford, the venue that gave us our best preview and our best review in the run up to the Fringe last year. The journey from my home near Bristol to Bedford take 2 hours 50 mins according to satnav. I've done it in less, in good traffic. Yesterday wasn't good traffic.
Yesterday was the first Friday of the school holidays for the majority of kids in the country. (Not, I realise, in Scotland where they broke up three weeks ago, or in posh school where they've had at least a week off, or in some criminally mental schools who will still be teaching next week. I think I'm working at one on Monday) So Sally Traffic on Radio 2 was full of news of blockages, stoppages, crashes and holdups. She mentioned three roads that caught my ear, the M25, the A34 and the M40. Best avoid those I thought.
Now you try navigating from Bristol to Bedford without using those three roads. Whichever road I ended up on, and yes I ended up on all three of the above despite my best endeavours, I found myself standing stock still.
Having set out at 3pm, with an ETA of 6pm, plenty of time to set up for my gig starting at 7.30, come 5.30 I was phoning from the ring road around Oxford to say I'd be late. Which is when I realised my phone batteries were about to die. I hadn't charged them up in a couple of days and they were on one blob as I set out. Knowing they were about to blink out for good I rang Hev to try and get the number of the venue, I rang the venue, it was only the box office, I could only leave voicemails. Then I asked Hev to send Facebook alerts to say I was running late, then the phone died.
When at 6.30 or so I got to a motorway services on the M40 I then had the greatest fun looking for a payphone. When did you last need a payphone? I don't think I've used one in nearly a decade. Suffice it to say they're thinner on the ground than they once were. Indeed there are signs for them in the services which then turn out to have no phones underneath them (in this place they'd been replaced by internet terminals). There was one payphone, in the foyer of the motel next door.
Blah blah blah, having set out at 3pm on a journey that should have lasted less than three hours, I finally got into Bedford at 8.30. 5 and a half hours, and my audience had been waiting for the Socks to start since 7.30.
And they waited. God bless em the audience was so big and so faithful they actually all hung around in the bar until I turned up, set up at lightning speed, and started performing at about 8.45
The show was a blur, props all over the place, the wrong CD in the CD player, no time to even breathe before we started. But I think it went well. They liked it, they laughed, I've made notes, parts of the new show are excellent, a couple need tweaking, and the brand new James Bond routine (rewritten since I did the first draft as a YouTube video) worked, it stays. And the Excorcist line, new killer. This is the boring chaff that fills the heads of comedians. I drove away with mental notes like "first good laugh Ooweeooweeoo, first belly laugh Michael Jackson, need to move the Australian" blah blah.
Then the drive home. Surely hitting the road at 10.30 I'd miss the rush hour? So it was that at 20 to midnight I found myself Twittering from my recharged phone, from a standing still traffic jam on the M25. Oy vey (there's not a Scots word for that, only Yiddish). I got home nearly 2.30. Nine hours driving, one hour's performing, not a moment to rest or collect my thoughts. Durrling, I am. Durrling.
Thanks again to the good people of Bedford for being a fabulous and patient audience, I hope they'll have me back (though I may have to promise to set off 9 hours before the gig just in case), and to the people who passed on the Facebook message from Hev. I believe Pat Monahan's sister contacted him and he spoke to the promoter. Oh and thanks Pat, for letting me delay the start of his gig from 9pm to 10pm, an almost unforgivable comedy crime for which I hope he'll almost forgive me.
Friday, 24 July 2009
Edinburgh Fringe Preview thoughts
Tonight we have our antepenultimate Edinburgh Fringe Preview show in Bedford. The next two are a matinee in front of kids in Gloucester (so the new sweary song will be missing), and finally an odd one in an unusual venue in Bath, so tonight's will be the last one where I can be sure of a big audience of adults in a theatre. I think we're almost there, with the running order of the show needing adjusting. I'll throw in more new stuff tonight (they'll get James Bond and, hopefully, Silent Movie for the first time) then we'll keep whittling it down and adding gags. But all this time I'm thinking we should have got this far months ago. Then I read Robin Ince on Twitter "off to do a preview at the Perseverance near Marylebone. Richard Herring has nearly finished writing his show making me look quite the idiot". So Herring has only "nearly" finished writing, and Ince isn't even that far on. I think that's reassuring.
Thursday, 23 July 2009
Socks do James Bond
New from the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre - Bond, James Bond. Just another bit of the mountain of material that will most likely end up rejected from THE SCOTTISH FALSETTO SOCK PUPPET THEATRE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD, which opens in Edinburgh on August 5th.
Edinburgh Previews:
Fri July 24 Bedford 7.30
https://www.ebookings.bedford.gov.uk/peo/daily_events_list.asp?day=2009-7-24
Tues July 28 Gloucester 2.30
http://www.gloucester.gov.uk/Freetime/GloucesterGuildhall/Programme/guildhallcomedy.aspx
Edinburgh Previews:
Fri July 24 Bedford 7.30
https://www.ebookings.bedford.gov.uk/peo/daily_events_list.asp?day=2009-7-24
Tues July 28 Gloucester 2.30
http://www.gloucester.gov.uk/Freetime/GloucesterGuildhall/Programme/guildhallcomedy.aspx
Saturday, 18 July 2009
Edinburgh flyer art 2009
I've finally designed the flyer for our Edinburgh show. But only the front. Still no idea what to stick up our backside.
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