Being Lofty

Really wanted a nifty title for this blog (not that it's of any great interest, don't get your hopes up, go read David Mitchell in the Guardian, he's brilliant*) and have ended up with a name that sounds like a Fringe show about the star of It Ain't 'Alf 'Ot Mum. (Mental note, must craft that into a pub quiz question: which sitcoms have two apostrophes in front of their words? See also Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em.)

I've found the Loft Bar (the slightly exclusive performers bar to which I have a pass) to have lost its novelty. Last weekend I enjoyed a Saturday night where I was part of a group that felt like the Algonquin Round Table. I met fascinating people I'd not met before, and some that I slightly knew and got to know better, with whom the conversation was brilliant, in the old illuminating sense not the more modern Fast Show meaning. Other even more famous people would drift around our table and we'd be the flame around which moths would flutter, you could leap from meeting to meeting and conversation to conversation, in the most enjoyable way. I felt like I was interesting to listen to, and I felt I fitted into all the chats I was having. It was like a choreographed corridor scene in ER or Casualty, with less blood.

Last night, one week on from my most enjoyable night at the Loft, I had a second night in a row where I felt the conversation never quite reached those, er, (mustn't say lofty heights, mustn't say lofty heights) those ...heights. Friday night had its high spots, like celebrating an interesting new person's birthday with champagne and I dearly hope I get to talk to that couple again, but both nights have had an awful lot of awkward moments where I'll be talking to a couple of people and they both leave at the same time, leaving me stranded and floating.

At those junctures I have been employing the technique of writing a text on my phone, which makes it look like I actually sought out this splendid isolation in order to have a moment alone. And usually, by the time I've written "I am twittering this because I don't know anyone else here" which, frankly, should be one of the standard templates in everyone's phone, I have caught someone else's eye and found a lost soul or a group to join.

But the gilt's gone off the gingerbread, and unless conversations introduce me to people I really benefit from knowing, either for the pleasure of their company or their significance in the industry and cynically manipulatable usefulness to me and my career, I'm not now enjoying talking for the sake of talking, or the commensurate drinking for the sake of drinking that accompanies it.

I've even had a couple of conversations where, I think, I've said the wrong thing or pissed someone off. No-one's been so rude as last year when Jim Rose of the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow 1 star The Scotsman (to give him his full title) turned his back on me mid conversation in the style of Naboo in the Mighty Boosh. That remains the most jaw droppingly rude I think anyone's been to me in civilized society. But last night I was talking to two Australian comedians I'd not spoken to before, we even had a table to ourselves, then they both excused themselves saying they had to leave early, and lo two minutes later I saw them clustered on the far side of the bar so they clearly had only wanted to get away from me, which can lower your self esteem no end.

Another conversation last night was with a woman who lectures in branding and marketing at a music school. When she said that branding and self-promotion was the most important thing about music I enjoyed the opportunity to have a non-Edinburgh conversation so took a deliberately contrary position, saying that I thought, in a school teaching music, that to consider branding and self-promotion to be the most important thing was a dreadful point of view. I looked forward to this being one of those beautiful dinner party conversations which follows the pattern of Marxist dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, sparkles for a few minutes then moves onto other topics, everyone having aired and exchanged opinions in a light hearted but possibly thought-stimulating debate. What I forgot was that my response is what everyone from the creative industries says when she says that, and she obviously has to spend every conversation defending her brand and marketing oriented corner against we airy fairy writers and performers who think art comes first. Plus I was probably about to be marginally less interesting than a spotty first year, so she just said "I really don't want to have this conversation" and that was that.

So, though I will inevitably find myself magnetised towards the Loft Bar again and again before the month is out, I'm wearying of the hope of finding the company that will lead me into great conversation once more. Maybe tonight it will happen and I shall feel that I am F Scott Fitzgerald and my companions are Dorothy Parker and Oscar Wilde. Or maybe I'll have an early night cos I'll have been flyering all day** and I have an early start tomorrow. Let us see.

Kev F, Sunday morning, Edinburgh


*Or, by the way, if you are a follower of blogs on Facebook I do find Michael Legge and Liam Mullone to be consistently worth reading, although you do wish they could be happy just for once, even if it'd give us all less to read. Also worth reading are Richard Herring's Warming Up, and Graham Linehan's Twitter feeds. On which subject the two people least worth reading on Twitter are Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross, fact.

** Last night was a total sellout. That makes 3 total sellouts in a row, five in total, three more shows that were just a tiny handful short of full, and our lowest audience so far has been 50. That contrasts to 2007 where we only had more than 50 punters in twice. I tell you, looking at my sales graph of a morning is one of the greatest pleasures of my day. But today we start the day with sales way down in the tens or twenties, so I must flyer, even though the rain will make it a very difficult task. Yep, branding and self-promotion are the most important thing in this game, fact.

Edinburgh shows reviewed

After being here in Edinburgh for ten days and only managing to see two shows so far, I tried to make up for it today by packing some shows into my schedule. My criteria were that I had to see the shows for free (nobody believes I'm on a budget, but sadly I am) and I was just going to see whatever took my fancy next. I was also quite amenable to flyering, being a champion exponent of the art myself.

So the first show I went to was chosen as much because I'd been well flyered for it as anything else. It was Helen Keen's show The Primitive Methodist Guide to Arctic Survival. A very enjoyable show, Helen is witty, literate and entertaining and tells stories inspired by her ancestor's actual arctic exploration, and looking at the history of such nonsense. The show includes some very nice shadow animation, and reminded me of the fine cartoon animation in Bec Hill's If You Can Read This My Cape Fell Off which I enjoyed last week.

I hoped to see a second show not long after Helen Keen's, lining up my first Free Festival show Oscar Wilde's Lord Arthur Savile's Crime. But when I turned up at the Counting House I found it was cancelled because, I was told, the performer had swine flu. And so the epidemic begins.

I next tried to get to There Are Jokes In It on the Free Fringe at Espionage, but it was packed to standing-and-not-breathing-room-only, so I headed back to the Gilded Balloon where the next show up was to be something with Nun in the title. But I met my good friend Dan March outside the venue and promised to go to his show. That wasn't for another 45 minutes, so I ended up killing a lot of time and doing a lot of to-ing and fro-ing before I saw my second show, Dan March's Goldrunner.

Goldrunner looks back over Dan's life in the light of his 1991 appearance on Blockbusters, and grabs the audiences from the start with very funny true stories delightfully performed and hilarious clips from the original show. And he had a deserved full house. I grabbed the very last free seat, which was a good thing, as my schedule would have been way off target if I hadn't got in.

I tried after that to go straight to A Team The Musical, but it was sold out, which is how I found myself in The Princess Cabaret, which is definitely the best show I've seen in Edinburgh so far this year.

Telling the stories of various Disney princesses from Beauty & The Beast to the Sleeping Beauty, The Little Mermaid to Snow White in a series of comedy sketches and songs, it filled me with admiration and envy. I wish I'd written half of those sketches or songs. Genius ideas like how the Sleeping Beauty would react to the world 100 years later, to the reality of how rubbish Alladin is compared to his princess wife are dealt with excellently, and the songs have some great original music, cracking witty lyrics and brilliantly snappy delivery. Highly recommended.

3 shows in a day, and maybe I can do the same tomorrow (although I do have to flyer too, so we'll see). Now watching King Kong on ITV, and about to miss the ending of it in order to go do my show. Oh it's a hard life.

Edinburgh 2009, week one

I notice from the header that I've very quickly fallen into the trap of calling this month simply "Edinburgh". That is so the sort of thing these namby pamby southern comedians do when they come up here for the Fringe then never show their faces here the rest of the year. And it's precisely what I said I wouldn't do after I spent all of December in Edinburgh playing in Winter Wonderland. I was to say the Fringe, not just Edinburgh. Whatever, I've been doing Edinburgh for 10 days now and it has been brilliant.

Brilliant but different. For starters Heather came up for week one and will return for week three and on the day of our arrival we learnt our flat back home had had a big water leak, so that cast a big damp shadow over us, just as I was trying to get my show running and she was supposed to be having a holiday and doing an art installation. We've got it sorted by the way, and she's at home doing that now.

The other big difference from other Edinburghs - dammit other Fringe years - is that I've booked daytime work outside the Fringe. I've been delivering my Comic Art Masterclasses around Edinburgh, three days at Balerno High School's summer school then morning or afternoon visits to libraries in Granton, Muirhead, Corstorphine, Blackhall (Google them, they're Edinburgh's flyover estates and the kids are lovely), and at Edinburgh central library (where yesterday a kid in my class was sick, NB: kid vomit smells just like cat vomit, fact). I have more of the same in this coming week too.

All of which means I have to cut back on late nights, and can't do so much flyering in the day, something which is vital to promote your show. It also means my tradition of the last two years of producing daily Sock Puppet videos has totally gone out of the window. The Socks have maintained YouTube silence all the time we've been up here and I'm worried our fans might forget us.

Few such worries on the ground here in Edinburgh where the show has had a record year. As of yesterday we'd sold more tickets and taken more through the door than we had by the end of 2008's Fringe, and more than half the shows have been sellouts (some are technical sellouts, with a few empty seats for admin reasons, but four now have been total every-single-ticket-sold sellouts, and tonight's is, I believe, already the same).

Our TV profile got off to a great start with GMTV:


...and the BBC:


And Heather became the lead story in ArtMag:


And the icing on the cake of our first week has been the 4 star review in The Scotsman, along with a big photo:


So it's good for the show, looks like I'll be making money this year, now I really have to work out how I turn this success into getting the Socks onto the telly and into the big time where they deserve. I'm thinking on it. And being quite knackered. Having pulled a few good late nights at the Loft Bar, having some great conversations with hordes of great people far too numerous to mention, coupled with the classes and the flyering, which I do love and have done some good long stints of, I'm feeling a tad weary. So today I shall see some other peoples shows, and prepare for two more weeks of light entertainment self promotion.

Getting on the telly, the big conundrum

With the Edinburgh Fringe feeling like it's halfway through (though in fact it's only a third of the way in), I've got the show up and running, the audiences building, and our first very good review (which subsequent reviews may now try and detract from but I hope not. Did I mention I made our 4 stars from The Scotsman into a t shirt and wore it all day yesterday?), now is the time when you start asking yourself why you're doing this.

And I don't know why everyone else is doing this, performing at least one show a day for a month (and I'm the lazy one in the comedy camp, most people are pushing to do extra gigs, and Marcus Brigstocke who I spoke to yesterday is doing three shows, Early Edition, School For Scandal and his solo show, every single day), but I think I know why I'm doing it.

I have a comedy act, the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre, that I've been developing for three or four years now, and I think it's funnier and has more potential than anything I've ever done before, and the audiences agree by coming in bigger and bigger numbers (a little later today we will have sold as many tickets as we sold in the entire month last year) as do the reviewers. So I want to promote that act.

And the obvious direction in which I want to promote them is the telly. Our touring shows have been doing increasingly well, bigger audiences and more venues year on year, and I aim to repeat that process in 2010, as well as doing more shows in London, which we keep failing to do, simply because regional theatres pay good money and dingy clubs in London often don't, especially if they've not heard of you yet. But telly remains the prize.

I know it is for everyone, so I know the competition is stiff and has possibly never been stiffer, there being an exponential growth on the number of comedians on the scene and a well known contraction in the TV industry and its budgets. But dammit we're good, we already prove how well we work on the small screen with every one of our YouTube videos (which reminds me we still haven't filmed anything while we've been up here), and we're cheap.

It's not like we're a four man sketch troupe that'll need a set as big as the Banana Splits to do their show, or a three man sketch troupe who'll need to recreate the Goodies set to do theirs, or a double act who insist on their whole first series taking place in a zoo. We're two socks. We're cheaper than animation to make, all we need to spend the money on is writing it and filming it.

So all I have to do is meet and impress the right people from The Telly and make sure they know what they're missing. Anybody know where to find them?

4 star review in The Scotsman

The Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre is so delighted to have received a 4 star review in The Scotsman that I've just spent all morning making it into a t-shirt. Here it is, enjoy:

By Roger Cox
Published: 13/8/2009

To begin with, the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppets come across as a couple of sweet, innocent little chaps, but don’t be fooled: they’re filthy wee tykes at heart.

They have gags about Michael Jackson and blow jobs that would make Jerry Sadowitz blush (OK, maybe not him, but almost anyone else). Their most taboo-breaking moment, though, comes towards the end of the show, when, with the room at its warmest, wettest and most potentially infectious, they choose to address the “elephant in the room” and sing a little ditty about swine flu. The awkward mixture of uproarious laughter and anxious sidelong glances this provokes among the audience is worth the price of admission all on its own.

4 stars – The Scotsman

Obsessing about the figures - Edfringe 09

Yesterday I got a bit obsessed by my sales figures in a way that I must try and stop doing. The first few nights of my show (SFSPT Goes To Hollywood, Gilded Balloon 22.15)were sellouts. This was quite dazzlingly brilliant and unprecedented for my shows and gave me delusions of adequacy, so it was galling when, on day four, my sales dropped and I ended up only 75% full.

I realised afterwards the reason. Last year I had, like every other show in my venue, had my show booked in with the first 4 shows at half price and the next two as 2 for 1. This year, somehow, I'd forgotten to do that. That meant that on Friday and Saturday, when my show sold out, I did so at full price, while everyone else was only taking half as much. However for Sunday and Monday, which are harder days to sell on, punters were seeing everyone else's shows listed as 2for1 tickets, mking mine prohibitively expensive.

So, on Sunday, when I ended up selling fewer tickets than I'd sold for the same night last year, I ended up making nearly twice as much money cos all my punters had paid full whack this time.

However Monday 10th was looking so poor (in advance, by the start of the run, it was the only show to have sold zero) that I had the box office change its tickets to 2for1s so I'd cost the same as everyone else. The drawback with that strategy was that the punters would only know I cost 2 for 1 if I told them personally. Which is why yesterday saw me doing my longest stint of flyering of the Fringe so far.

I ended up selling not badly, one ticket more than the previous night. The irony is, since all those people bought their tickets on the day and as a result of my flyering, they would most probably have bought them at full price if asked, rather than 2 for 1. So I went and worked myself silly, then cost myself a couple of hunded quid in potential dosh.

Today all shows revert to a level playing field, with all offers removed, and all shows on their normal price for weekdays, a bit more expensive at weekends. And we'll see how well I sell with absolutely no flyering, as from 10 till 4 today I will be giving my Comic Art Masterclass in a couple of librarires, in Granton and Muirhouse.

Happy flyering everyone else.

Abscission - Heather Tweed's Edinburgh art installation

Heather Tweed, who some of you will know I've had the pleasure to be married to for many years, is up in Edinburgh working on an art installation project. It's been slighly held up by domestic tribulations, ie our flat back home got flooded the day we arrived in Edinburgh and that needed sorted, but she's still managed to make a start on the work, and this week it will start to kick off in earnest.

She's secreting small pieces in places around the centre of town, in small plastic bags with labels that explain what to do when you find the piece (you can do nothing, leave it somewhere else, text, send a photo, Hev explains it better.)

It's the lead story in the new issue of Edinburgh's Artmag. Read it online at http://artmag.co.uk/artnews/ or pick up a copy free at any Edinburgh gallery. Photos of work in progress and more info at Heather's website http://heathertweed.co.uk

There will be clues and alerts appearing soon about where to look for new pieces. Follow @heathertweed on Twitter, and hashtag #abscission