Today I did my
first proper run of the show as it stands since my last date in
Brighton.
Despite not
having looked at it for a while, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed doing
the first half of it. It zipped along quite nicely and felt right,
which is a great place to be, but there’s a definite point about two thirds in
from which I know it needs work.
It’s just a case
of tightening some of the later material, while also fleshing out a couple of the
set-pieces. If some of them continue to feel a bit clunky, I’ll
replace them with something else, but I don’t intend to do much - if any - of
this before Friday’s show, as I don’t want to pressure myself unduly; there’s
always time to have a fiddle with the content before my other previews this
month.
Part of the
reason I don’t want to make too many changes now is I’ve still got to sort out
the technical side to Friday’s London date, so inevitably I won’t have
the time t to do much tinkering with the material until that’s
done. That's the frustrating side to doing everything yourself: you can’t
delegate.
One thing I want to do when there’s time is give the show a clear beginning & end that
take the title into account. I want to find a way of explaining how the title came
about, which was essentially that my wife and I have a running joke that she’d
one day take a show to Edinburgh called ‘Now Who’s a Comedian?’ and be far more
successful than me without trying. I also want a set-piece that
gently draws the whole thing together, like I did at the end of ‘Mostly David Ephgrave’
(remember that?) with the ‘Jamelia monologue leading into singing the long
note from the end of the Bill Withers’ song 'Lovely Day' over the Manic Street Preachers
University Challenge clip’. If you didn’t see the show, I will have confused
you with the last sentence, but it’s too complicated to explain out of context, except to
say I was quite proud of it. I’d like to do a similar thing again
but I haven’t yet had the time to think about it yet; it’s always about the lack of
time, damn it.