mostly david ephgrave

Going for castings at the moment feels a little bit like pissing into the wind. The process of doing them I really enjoy. I feel most comfortable in front of a camera, doing something small, naturalistic and throwaway. Most of the stuff I go up for is quirky or comedic, which suits me. Yet I’m not getting any jobs. It’s beyond disheartening. The frustrating thing is a lot of them seem to go well. I often make the casting director laugh, usually for the right reasons. I’ve been penciled for jobs so many times I can’t look a stationery shop in the face (which is good as they don’t tend to have them). It doesn’t make any difference. No pencilling turns to pen. It’s hard to keep upbeat about it and not let it affect your performance. It's starting to feel like an endless unbreakable cycle. I’m bored of it. I just need one job to break the seal. I keep reminding myself that I’ve got them in the past. I also keep getting close. It’s n...

Today I’m suffering from my usual post-Mostly Comedy brain drain. Last night’s gig was good. We ended up keeping it brief ourselves, but the material we did went well. It was a definite personal improvement on the night before; that what comes from having a proper stage set-up, a sold-out crowd and a slightly better get-in. That said, it was still a rush. I had a casting in London in the afternoon, which meant I didn’t arrive at The Market Theatre until 4:30pm. Glyn - splendid chap that he is - had already put out the seats, but we still a lot to do. This is the side to Mostly Comedy people never see: us going up and down ladders, moving lights, running leads over beams, blacking off the space, printing signs and programmes, setting up recording equipment for the podcast, getting stressed – then spending our customary thirty seconds considering our actual material. This is still a vast improvement on the set-up at our two previous venues, when we had to load the P.A., the...

I didn't want to see these words so close to a picture of Piers Morgan.  They conjure up a mental image I never thought I'd contemplate. Now I am. I don't even want to imagine him on the receiving end of a straightforward massage; a person as odious as Piers Morgan doesn't deserve to feel relaxed. Who's called Piers anyway, except for him? His Christian name peters out towards the end. That's peters with a small P and not a big P, by the way; the English language is confusing.  Speaking of Peters, I managed to narrowly miss this episode of Morgan's Life Stories series a year or so back.      I'm don't know which side of the punctuation point I dislike the most.

If there’s one thing I’d like to remove from my performing life it’s not being able to get into a space until just a few minutes before the show begins. This was pretty much the case with tonight’s London Mostly Comedy. The show before us came down just after 9:00pm and we were on at 9:30pm. We knew it would be like this, to be fair, as there’s always another show booked into the same room before us, but being forewarned doesn’t make it easier. There’s still a mad-panic-dash to make sure everything is set up and works before we begin. It doesn’t help that we tech everything ourselves, as we can’t afford to pay anyone else. While our technical set-up isn’t complicated, it’s essential to our act. When you only get in the space a few minutes before curtain up and don’t know quite what the situation will be until you walk in, it adds tension. You also don’t get time to run all of your cues. The show is performed to the mental background noise of ‘will ...

For the last few days I’ve been on an act-booking blitz, confirming line-ups for next year’s Hitchin Mostly Comedy dates. We’ve been trying to secure a handful of more high-profile names for months, to no avail. Then, for some inexplicable reason, the seal broke yesterday and a load came through at once. We’ve now got a nice mix of new and old faces coming to the club in early 2015, most of whom have graced the TV and radio airwaves enough to help us secure bums on seats (with the usual accompanying body parts in tow). We also have a an exciting iron or two in the fire for the Autumn, which we’ll have to sit on for a few months until final confirmation – and it’s never comfortable sitting on a hot iron, believe you me. Confirming line-ups is stressful. It takes a lot of juggling to get them right. You have to balance the fees you pay out based on what’s affordable, on how much pull you think each act will have and on how they’ll work when you put t...

Turn to page nine of tonight's Evening Standard and you'll be confronted by the shocking newsflash that PEOPLE WEAR HOODS. I never knew this. Thank God for investigative journalism. If Hugh Grant's Hacked Off brigade got their way I'd have to step outside to find out this shit for myself - and I wouldn't want to do that. Not without a hood. Admittedly, I'd have to walk to my nearest tube station to pick up the Standard to read the story in the first place; presumably passing a lot of hood wearers on the way. There's no point in going on foot to Cockfosters - which is 26.5 miles from Hitchin - to pore over a story about people's built-in coat bonnets if it's going to be spoilt en route.  That said, if I was going there with the express purpose of reading about hoods I must have known about them already. I must have seen it on their website. So why was I walking all that way? I wonder if the fact most of the people pictured are you...

This evening my wife will help me shave my jumper. That’s not a euphemism so don’t get excited. Is this what married life amounts to: removing the bobbles from each others' clothing? If so, neither of us knew what we were signing up for. It wasn’t in our vows.   When we first got together I didn’t say, ‘I own a jumper that will deteriorate over time. If you’re still with me when it does, would you mind assisting in its maintenance?’. If I had, she would have run for the hills. (There were no hills in sight.) I didn’t pop the question with it on my mind. A wedding is an expensive procedure to go through solely for that purpose. You can buy a JML Bobble-Off Lint Remover from Argos for £5.99. Still, it saves me putting it on a mannequin. I never thought I’d need to prune it. I assumed that wool stopped growing after it was separated from the sheep. It could be worse. A friend who used to work in Madame Tussauds told me how the...