Don't Watch That, Watch This.


The other day, I watched a rough cut of the performance of my show we filmed at The Market Theatre in Hitchin last month and Glyn has done a splendid job with it; I look set to be in the uncharted territory of being both almost happy with a representation of me doing stand-up and looking forward to sharing it.

I’m not saying it’s perfect - it wanders off a bit towards the end, but it did as a piece anyway - but the vast majority is a good quality reading of what I was trying to do that the audience were really on board for; I hope that by having a solid copy of my stuff to give to industry people, I may be able to end the stand-off between trying to book dates for them to come to and them being available to see it.

In a way, the video is like having evidence: proof of the fact I’m not as bad a comic as my inner monologue tells me or like a handful of misunderstanding reviewers might say. I was actually quite proud of what I wound up with this year, more so than my three other solo shows, and felt it was the best example so far of what I do (though it took me a while to arrive at that point), so the one review I got in Edinburgh niggled, as I didn’t feel it was true. Yet with nothing to tangible to contradict it, my faith in what I’d done could come across as sour grapes.

Now I have a video of the whole show with a strong reaction all the way through. The recording also happened to have the biggest audience, so the positive response is more evident than it was in Edinburgh where numbers were fewer. Whatever I may think of my ability at the worst of times, the video is at odds with my review in The List, which missed the point so thoroughly as to potentially be quite destructive to me if I didn’t have such a good version in the can to contradict it; without a video, the casual reader might assume that reviewer’s misconception was cast-iron truth; I’d send him a copy if I didn’t make me seem petty. As Alan Partridge would put it, “Needless to say, I had the last laugh”.

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