mostly david ephgrave

My attempts to help a family member get a handle on a health situation they’re struggling with is starting make me wonder if I may have been a social worker in a previous life. On one hand, I think I’m pretty adept at the requisite problem solving - certainly more so than I’d be for myself - but some days, I’m left drained and frustrated with the push-me pull-you nature of feeling you're getting somewhere to land back at square one. Today was a good day, with us attending an appointment to assess how he’s coping with his symptoms, his mood and his pain management that felt like it will lead to a lot more assistance, plus my arranging another meeting on Thursday to assess whether he’s eligible for more outside care, but I did it all knowing full well things would likely regress the minute everyone looking after him takes a brief step back. The trick, I think, is to do your best while also allowing time for yourself. A good example of the opposite happened today post-appointmen

Writing a blog is a bit of an up-down procedure, or to put it differently, a frequent teeter around the edge of a rut. Right now, I’m not so much teetering as standing dead-centre, clawing at the edge with my weak fingers, desperate to pull myself out (like a spider who’d escape his bath prison if he could just get purchase on the enamel). Put simply, I’ve written little of worth for weeks, with no hope of a positive spike in my day-to-day life to give me something good to talk about. This is partly due to with a few family issues that are taking up more time than usual, and partly to do with the fact I frequently don’t start writing until bedtime, when I’m too tired to get down anything coherent; more often than no, I'll struggle to extract a few paragraphs from my subconscious to look them over the next day to find I’ve written a load of shit; I then do my best to edit them to little improvement This is what comes from writing so freq

Tonight’s Halloween week of Strictly Come Dancing didn’t exactly set me alight. It’s always billed as one of the most exiting episodes of the series, but as with each week’s episode, whether it captures your imagination is a delicate balance between the celebrities appearing and their dances, outifts and themes. That’s not to say that hair and make-up didn’t go all out to make things look good; they always surpass themselves to make the show literally sparkle with imagination. Stacey and Kevin’s Doctor Who-style walz was a great example as they managed to make them look like The Doctor and a cyberman perfectly, while also hitting all the right buttons. While tonight’s show was a quieter affair for me, I still tweeted along with it. Here’s what I said: 6:52PM: Oh, opening VT: why so awkward? 6:54PM: Don't say Tess Daly's name three times, whatever you do. 7:00PM: "Zombie montage." https://twitter.co

I had to pull out of a radio interview today to promote next week’s St Albans Mostly Comedy so `i could sort some family issues, which was a shame as I was looking forward to it, though Glyn did it by himself so at least it was covered. I regularly find myself in the role of problem sorter with my relatives these days, which in some ways I loosely enjoy as it feels like a good use of my time; it suits me as I’ve always been a bit of a know-all. My thing is I like to try make people understand my viewpoint, so I can be prone to rephrasing it repeatedly in quick succession in the hope that one explanation will hit home and get my meaning across. If a friend of family member is struggling, I try to find a way to help that means everyone gets the support they need but not at the expense of one or all of our nervous systems. This can be particularly difficult with older relatives as they’re very unlikely to want to step out of their comfort zone to try something different, even if to me

I said goodbye to my beautiful cat Millie yesterday, which was very painful. My wife and I took her in after her original owner died nine years ago and she was the perfect addition to the household. She fitted in perfectly with our routines and enriched our lives with her company. We were worried at first that she might not be happy to be an indoor cat as we weren’t entirely sure if she had been allowed out previously, but she never asked once; we were also concerned she’d discover the two budgies we kept in the one room she wasn’t allowed into but she never seemed to catch on to it, which saved us from any gruesome Hannibal Lector-like moments. I know it’s still early days, but I’ve yet to process the fact she’s gone. I was out for most of the day, but more than once this evening it’s slipped my mind briefly. I keep expecting to see her then catching myself and remembering; to give her a cuddle and a fuss while you did what you were doing was

My capacity to be annoyed by things that don’t matter knows no bounds. Tonight's biggest overreaction was my apparent inability to hold back my disdain for one of team captains on Only Connect for his smug self-important expression; I’m not a violent man, but his conceited, self-serving countenance made me very punchy. Labouring under the misapprehension that boasting he’d “been on a lot of game shows” would impress us didn’t help, nor did his stupid beard that resembled an otter’s pelt. As far as I’m concerned, there are too many people on the planet who think they’re the centre of the universe (to mix my space-based metaphors) and who have been given audience frequently enough to feel we should drop everything to hear them speak. I’m well aware of how hypercritical that sounds as I inadvertently pretty much paraphrased the manifesto of the Society for People with an Inbuilt Superiority Complex (a club comprising James Blunt, Brian Cox and me). Perhaps I should learn to ex

The last few days have been difficult as my cat, who I dote on, isn’t very well. Unfortunately, the problems she’s having aren’t something she'll get over, which is very hard to bear. She’s comfortable for the most part, but it’s painful to see her struggling, though we hope we might be able to get some help from the vets’ tomorrow, once they’ve done a urine test (my wife being the brave one who managed to collect the sample). Pets are an import aspect of life for me, and Millie’s such a valuable part of the household, who’s welcomed me home late time after time, when I’ve got back from shows and gigs, usually settling on my lap while I unwind over a cup of tea before bed. People who don’t spend time around animals would probably think I’m being soppy in being so upset, but their lives are emptier for the lack of understanding of the positive effect having pets around you can bring; I can’t imagine a time when I won’t have any; they improve me,

There was a lot of information to take on-board during tonight’s Strictly, though there were some lovely performances sprinkled throughout the show.   My favourites were Danny John-Jules’ jive, which bursted with energy, and Lauren Steadman’s contemporary routine, though mainly for her strong performance than for the style of dance, which I'm never too keen on. I was surprised Craig Revel-Horward laid into her acting so much tonight as I thought for the first time she really connected with the emotion of the story, rather than just focusing on the steps. Don't get me wrong, her other dances have been good, just a little less comfortable, so tonight's performance really turned a corner for me. As usual, I tweeted along with the show like a teenage gimp; here’s what I said: 6:51PM: Gotta love a panto audience. 6:52PM: Do the Tom Jones step, Alfonso. Do the Tom Jones step. 6:55PM: Is Carlton a Scientologist too? 6:58PM: Wouldn't it Be Nice: great

Tonight saw our official tenth anniversary Mostly Comedy show, which was marked rather splendidly with performances from our long-time club favourite Jay Foreman and a special guest appearance from the multi-talented Kate Robbins. It’s kind of appropriate that Kate played our tenth birthday gig as we last saw her perform at our first Edinburgh Fringe in 2008 a couple of months prior to starting the club. I remember being knocked out by her show, which was on at the same venue as us - the Gilded Balloon - albeit in a bigger room. Much like her set at Mostly tonight it was a great mix of music, stand-up, impressions and anecdotes that perfectly revealed her versatility. She also happened to be in a sitcom reading we attended that year on the invitation of Michael Barrymore (who was also in it), who had kindly offered us support and advice after coming to see our Edinburgh show The Balloon Debate with a mutual friend with whom he was working on show about Spike Milligan

For the last few days I’ve been enjoying the special Autumnwatch series on BBC2, which focuses on the season in New England. I find the programme (and its counterpart Springwatch) good for the soul; it’s the perfect palate cleanser. I think it was Stephen Fry who said there’s nothing ugly in nature (though he clearly hasn’t seen some of the things that stalk the depths of the ocean or the Good Morning Britain studio) and in many ways I think he’s right. There’s certainly plenty of evidence to support it, putting Piers Morgan to one side for a moment… Watching these programmes is a bit of a go-to reset for the brain and is one of the few things that will take my mind off my day-to-day worries; it’s so affective they should put it on the National Health. A few years ago I was watching Springwatch’s sister programme Springwatch Unsprung on the night when they had Vic Reeves as a guest, and the combination of him and the fantastic Chris Packham

Forgive my hyperbole, but I was so shocked by Manon’s surprise exit from tonight’s Bake Off I’m still recovering from the whiplash. While he’s been a clear front-runner throughout the series, judging from his performance this week I thought it was a done deal that Rahul would go. I was so certain I’d metaphorically brought his car around to the tent entrance with the engine still running; even he looked sure too, displaying the low level delirium (if there’s such a thing) of a person who’d fully come to terms with the state of play and was relieved to be done with it. So why did Manon get voted out? The answer is I don’t really know. Paul Hollywood made a few references to her baking more like a French person than a Danish one tonight (which was the theme of the show) but even this feedback sound like it had been tacked on afterwards; her baking may have been a tad less complicated this week, but there’s still no reason to banish her when someone else had so clearly struggled und

Sadly, this statement from an article on the BBC News website could apply to most of Trump’s rhetoric. Story of his life. I know I’m not exactly saying something that hasn’t been pointed about by thousands of people thousands of times before, yet it still startles me how regularly Trump speaks without connecting his brain; he’ll say whatever suits him at every given moment with no need for evidence, plus I suspect he seldom knows where a sentence will end when he starts it; his lack of regard for the truth or for his own recent history is astounding in its brazenness; that or it’s pure stupidity. There’s something alarmingly self congratulatory about the whole concept of the man, who is clearly in the midst of some crazy tripped-out centre-of-the-Universe disillusionment.; I can’t help but wonder how much of the nonsense that passes his lips he truly believes.

One of my favourite moments of last Thursday’s show was revealing Jim Bowen was 44 in this picture for a guy at the back to shout, “Fuck off’. It’s easily the best reaction the photo has ever had as it perfectly mirrors what I thought when I first discovered it. It’s shocking enough to want to trace Bowen’s birth certificate in case he’d been rounding down his age considerably or had a similar ever-present existence to Pennywise from Stephen King’s It. If Bowen was genuinely in his early-to-mid forties he must have seen some truly terrible things in his lifetime akin to what Winston saw in Ghostbusters II; that or he never troubled his local chemist in search of moisturizer. I don’t mean to cast judgment so much as register my disbelief; you could add twenty years to his age without flinching. I can only hope that when I reach Bowen’s age in seven years I won’t look as old as him; it’s not too much to ask for, is it? I keep myself rel

What with all the intense press interest in the turbulent love life of Seann Walsh, Katiya and his ex this week it’s probably hard for them to just carry on with dancing; I, for one, think it’s largely irrelevant to the show and shouldn’t be constantly reiterated to the point of making everything desperately uncomfortable. Despite the fact the programme tried to rise above it and only mentioned the problems briefly so as not to appear remiss, there was still an atmosphere when the couple danced that you could cut with a knife, and not a sharp one really; this is proof of the damage social media can do. Speaking of social media, I live tweeted along with today’s gig. Feel free to look through it and add comments yourself. 6:46PM: Joe Sugg's dad is Suggs; Suggs' dad is Suggss. 6:48PM: I didn't know # Strictly had its own bank; must be funded by our TV licences. 6:49PM: There's a run on the bank. Don't tell

It’s very seldom something like filming a show goes well without question, so I was extremely fortunate and grateful for how last night’s recording of my solo show at The Market Theatre went. For starters, I was amazed we sold out, as that only tends to happen when we host an act at Mostly Comedy that’s a big pull. I’ve cancelled countless performances through the years (admittedly primarily in London) due to poor - or no - turnout, so I’ve grown to expect people won't come; each time this happens chips away at your self confidence despite the many perfectly justifiable reasons for it, so I was genuinely surprised and delighted when ticket sales suddenly picked up last week. Admittedly the venue has a small capacity, but last night’s crowd were responsive enough to be an audience three times its size. I was pleased with how easy our get-in was too. Glyn, Paul and I began at around 2pm (though to be fair Glyn had been there earlier to prep the s