Skip to main content

How to End April (in Six Paragraphs).


Today has been a day of bits and pieces.

It started with me popping to a friend’s flat to feed her cats: something I’m doing for the next week, in my occasional guise as a cat-sitter. I then power-walked to the office with a mic-stand in tow (which has been sitting in my flat since last Saturday’s aborted preview), before sprinting for a bus to the station to catch the train into London for a casting; my life's always this thrilling.

The audition was my first one for the best part of a month: for some reason, they've just not been coming in. In some senses this is good, as it’s given me time to think about my show, but I’m always uneasy when there’s no immediate prospect of paid work (a reasonable thing to be uneasy about).

I think the casting went well. I enjoyed it. I generally do; it’s an environment I feel comfortable in. It was as random as ever; in many ways, it was more random than most: I had to perform in just a towel and a baseball cap. It’s a times like this, when I'm auditioning scantily clad, that I wonder if I have a cut-off point. What would or wouldn’t I wear? There aren’t many job interviews where a towel and a sports hat would class as standard attire.

I sped back to Hitchin after the casting (if you can call a forty-five minute journey ‘speeding’), to meet Glyn to record a promotional clip for our SG1 Radio show, ‘Doggett & Ephgrave: In Your Inner Ear’. We didn’t have much time to do it in the end, but we got what we wanted. I’m looking forward to starting the show. I’ve always enjoyed our off-the-cuff stuff - like our Edinburgh video diaries and the More Than Mostly Comedy Podcast) - the most. It’s nice to have the freedom to ramble. It will also be a pleasant break from all the work I’ve been doing on my own.

I’m now back at my friend’s flat, with a purry cat next to me; typing on a keyboard that's rapidly being covered with her fur. I’d better stop, before I lose track of which is which. I wouldn’t want to plug the wrong one in.

Popular posts from this blog

Shakerpuppetmaker.

Have Parker from Thunderbirds and Noel Gallagher ever been seen in the same room? The resemblance is uncanny. So much so, I think something’s afoot. If my suspicions are correct, I've stumbled across a secret that will blow the music and puppet industry wide apart. In the mid-60s / mid-90s at least. It doesn’t take long to see the signposts. There’s the similarity between the name of Oasis’ first single, Supersonic, and Supermarianation, Gerry Anderson’s puppetry technique. The Gallagher brothers would often wear Parkas . Live Forever was clearly a reference to Captain Scarlet and Standing on the Shoulder of Giants to the size difference between Noel and his bandmates. The more you think about it, the more brazen it gets. It’s fishier than Area 51, Paul is Dead and JFK's assassination put together. The only glitch to the theory is scale . According to Wikipedia, Anderson’s marionettes were 1’10” and Gallagher is 5’8”. How does he maintain an illusion of avera...

'...I'm Gonna Look at You 'til My Eyes Go Blind."

Over the past week or two, I’ve been on a bit of a Sheryl Crow kick, largely thanks to rediscovering her cover of one of my most-liked Bob Dylan songs. She has one of my favourite female voices, yet despite this, I only own one CD and that’s just a single (her '97 release ‘Hard to Make a Stand’); on that basis, you can only imagine how much of her back catalogue I’d own if I hated her (it would fall into minus-figures). Dylan, conversely, takes up more of my collection than anyone else, save The Beatles and Paul McCartney’s solo work. He’s one of those artists who, when you get him, you really get him - and once I’d tuned into his style as a student, I'd time and again be blown away by his lyrics; he’ll have more jaw-dropping imagery in one track than other people fit in a whole career. These days, I mostly listen to music in the morning when getting ready, and more often than not, this will consist of a suggested YouTube playlist when I’m in the bath, r...

"Speaking Words of Wisdom, Let it Shine."

Tonight saw the second instalment of BBC1’s latest advertise-a-musical-for-months-and-then-cast-it-with-performers-too-inexperienced-to-do-it-a-thon ‘Let it S̶h̶i̶t̶e̶ Shine’ (or as I call it: ‘REAL AUDITIONS ARE NOTHING LIKE THIS’). I didn’t watch it (clearly), but being reminded of how angry seeing just five minutes of it made me last week caused me to mull over what I would call a musical based on the band’s songbook, if I was responsible for it. Here are a my suggestions: IDEAS FOR TITLE OF A TAKE THAT MUSICAL: Barlow! Dirty Fat-Dancing Orange! A Million Love-changes-everything Songs Owen! Howard's End Pray Misérables Mamma Marka! Babe (with a pig as the lead) …BUT MY FAVOURITE HAS TO BE: Jason & His Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat. "It was Orange, Orange, Orange, Orange..." (TAKE) THAT’S ENOUGH OF (TAKE) THAT.