While I’m enjoying piecing together various bits of material for this weekend’s Bath Comedy Festival work-in-progress dates and am happy with how it’s going, I'm in a bit of a quandary as to which direction I should go with the Brighton and Edinburgh Fringe show that will hopefully rise from the ashes of it.
(I like a bit of drama in a blog post.)
My sticking point is this: should I keep the show personal and use more stories about me and my family, much like last year’s Brighton and Camden Fringe show ‘...and Ephgrave’, or should I go with the material that's more outward-looking than inward, much like Glyn’s and my output.
At this stage, I'm not sure. There's a lot to be said for keeping things universal, but it's possible that in doing so, the stand-up becomes more generic and less original. The big, big, big decision I'm faced with is how much I should use projection. It's very easy for me to fall back on it, as it's so familiar a format for me, having used it so much with mine and Glyn’s stuff. I feel I know exactly how to get a laugh from it, whereas the straighter more story-based stand-up is a newer direction for me, and therefore less foolproof.
I’ll see how the different styles of material come across on Saturday and Sunday and in the gigs that immediately follow, before I make too many decisions. I realised not long ago that I don't have to try so hard to avoid the Doggett & Ephgrave-style stuff as, when it comes to it, few people in the wider picture are aware of it, and I was only trying to steer clear of it initially when I wanted to turn up to gigs without a projector, and to see if I could do something slightly different. I wanted to find my own voice, forgetting that a lot of D&E’s stuff was written in it anyway. Perhaps I can make the show fall somewhere between the two. It would make sense to take a show called Mostly David Ephgrave down a more personal route, as the title would lend it to that, but not if I can be funnier by taking it the other way. Questions, questions, questions (answers on a postcard, marking the top left-hand corner ‘EPHGRAVE WOULD LIKE SOME HELP’.)