mostly david ephgrave

Today is All Hallows’ Eve, or Hallowe’en – and what better way is there to mark a centuries-old Pagan festival than buying a novelty pasty? It’s an interesting marketing ploy on the part of Greggs The Bakers – and suggests they have a lot of faith in their product. I’m not sure that I would suggest the use of the prefix ‘scary’ if I was in charge of their advertising campaign; eating a Greggs pasty is daunting enough, without having to point it out. I’ve never understood the need for unnecessary gimmicks. If I want to buy a pasty, I want to buy a pasty; dressing it up with a Hallowe’en theme isn’t going to entice me in. I don’t look to savoury snacks to reflect current events; I look to them to satiate my appetite. Jumping onto every going trend just smacks of desperation. It’s like a few months ago, when Kate Middleton gave birth to the royal baby - and within hours, I received the following email from the rail company, London Mi...

Anyone who follows me on Twitter will probably have noticed that I have a bit of a fascination for overhearing snippets of conversation. There’s nothing voyeuristic about it. I’m not snooping. I just enjoy the confusion that often comes with hearing a statement entirely out of context.  For a split second you are let into someone else’s world – and just as you’re getting comfortable, the door slams shut, with you left on the outside, trying to suss out the circumstances. The best ones often involve mobile phones. Hearing just one side of the conversation only adds to the confusion. Sometimes, you are left intrigued: ...and other times, the mundanity captures your imagination: One thing all these overheard conversations serve to illustrate is: none of us know what we're doing. We all stumble our way amateurishly through life, trying to make the best of our circumstances. Nothing is rehearsed, and as...

I think you know the game's nearly up for your current mobile phone when you have to wedge a plectrum into the bottom of it to make it work. I have a BlackBerry Curve (for those interested in technical detail). It's pretty indispensable; not just for obvious uses, such as texts, calls and email, but also to store ideas and photographs for mine and Glyn 's material. Look through most other people's mobile photo albums and you'll find pictures of friends, family and pets; go through mine and you'll find scores of badly-worded signs, odd window displays and amusing screen-grabs I've pulled from the internet. This is my rather depressing legacy. What I like most about my BlackBerry is that it has both a touch-screen and a qwerty keyboard - which, for me, offers the best of both worlds. I’ve never wanted to own an iPhone, or any other smartphone with just a touch-screen facility. I may be in a minority, but I’m happy for it. Sadly, this ...

Recently I’ve started paying more attention to the tweets of Yoko Ono – and I’m starting to wonder if she’s taking the piss. I understand that she’s a conceptual artist and therefore her work doesn’t follow the same rigidity of structure as traditional art: it’s more about the thought behind each piece than the aesthetic result. Some of her ideas are beautiful in their simplicity: a good example is the card she gave to John Lennon on their first meeting at the Indica Gallery in 1966, which simply said “Breathe”. He couldn't really argue with that. When it comes to her Twitter posts, though, I'm a little dubious.  Yoko’s tweets are more than likely to contain the buzz-words ‘sky’, ‘sun’, ‘rain’ and ‘cry’ – and nine times out of ten, they tell you to bury something. It’s like a one-woman attempt to create a time-capsule resurgence.   It’s similar to those websites that generate spoof Daily Mail headline...

Thanks to literally minutes of research I have come to the conclusion that Jeremy Clarkson is asked to sum up each of his books in just one facial expression at the cover shoot. It’s really quite a skill, when you think about it. Take his 2009 book, 'Driven to Distraction':  466 pages, which – working on the assumption that a typical hardback averages at around 350 words per page – would total 163100 words. 163100 words, neatly summed up with an expression I would best describe as ‘resigned acceptance’. (Showing my workings.) Then there’s his 2012 tome, 'Round the Bend':  432 pages (an average of 151200 words, give or take) - all summed up with a look of mild distress. Perhaps  the punning title was causing Jeremy to lose sleep;  judging from the Daily Telegraph quote, he had very little to worry about. A year later, and his anxiousness has been replaced with a look of serenity.  I guess this should come as no s...

Some days you don’t want to try to be funny. The main reason I started a daily blog was to keep my brain ticking over and force myself to be more productive. Like most writers and performers, I have an in-built laziness; while I could spend my time being creative, I’d often sooner not. It’s much easier to just sit and be quiet (with an optional biscuit). So far the blog has definitely helped. I’ve always worked best with a deadline – and having self-enforced one every day has encouraged more proactivity. That’s not to say that it isn’t sometimes a pain in the arse. I’ve fired up my laptop on a fair few occasions without a clue of what I should write. I’ll flick through my ideas folder on my mobile (or in the couple of notepads I carry with me) – and sometimes draw a blank. Any time I get stuck, though, I remember that Richard Herring has kept a daily blog for the best part of eleven years – and suddenly the blank page in front of me d...

I’m drinking far too much coffee at the moment. It’s a habit that’s only come into being over the past few months. I’m generally quite health-conscious: I’m a pescatarian that avoids milk and eats very little dairy produce (that’s right: I’m a barrel of laughs) – and at home I’ll generally opt for caffeine-free drinks such as redbush and camomile tea. I used to have one cup of coffee a day at most. It's worth clarifying that I’m not completely clean-cut:  once a week I pop down to my local duck pond and punch a swan, just to redress the balance. Everyone’s got to have a vice. This blog is part of the root of the problem: this is my fortieth consecutive post in so many days (dickhead) – and the vast majority of these have been written whilst sat in my favourite local coffee shop. If I’ve got nothing else on (diary-wise, not clothing), I’ll arrive mid-morning, and try to knock something up in a hour at most. (Pos...

One thing that comedians often worry about is revisiting old material. Nine times out of ten, an act arriving at Mostly Comedy will ask what our audience turn-around is like – and whether they can get away with performing some of their older, tried-and-tested stuff. At our club it isn’t normally a problem: we do have a few regulars, but since moving to a bigger venue and securing better-known acts, we’ve noticed that a large proportion of our audience are often new faces; people will travel from further afield to catch the likes of Henning Wehn and Richard Herring at a small club like ours, rather than at a bigger, more expensive venue. When it comes to performing past jokes, we’re as guilty as the rest: thanks to time constraints (plus the added stress of overseeing the night and finding time to record our podcast around it), myself and Glyn will often resort to older, more familiar material; it gives us one less thing to worry about on an always ...