mostly david ephgrave

Today, Glyn's and my sketch show 'Doggett & Ephgrave's Comedy Shorts' became available to watch online in its entirety for the first time since we shot it, back in 2011; after all, what's nine years between friends? While the film's by no means perfect, it documents one of our most productive periods, in which we wrote, shot and edited the 25-minute short in three weeks, in time to be shown as part of The Comedy Project's 2011 season at the Soho Theatre in London that April. The filming itself took about a fortnight with nearly every second of each day accounted for, and the editing took us right through to the early hours of the morning of the day we premiered it. We originally intended to host that night's show too, but we bowed out so we could keep a low profile in the lighting box because we were frankly exhausted (though I was still riding the audio levels throughout, so no punchlines were missed). The sketch show was a massive exer...

I’ve spent the last few hours running the material I plan to do at Monday week’s SohoTheatre Comedy Project gig , plus working on a couple of new bits I might try out at Thursday’s Hitchin Mostly Comedy . I’m pleased with how it's coming together on the whole. I’m making a point of running the stuff for the Soho show at least once a day, to get comfortable with it. If I can make the meat of the material second nature, I’ll be more relaxed on the day. It’s still very new. While there are a few weak links between set pieces, it’s beginning to feel cohesive. I’m looking forward to trying it in front of an audience. More than anything, I’m looking forward to the Actors’ Temple Work in(Hope of) Progress gig at the end of the same week, as it’s likely to be a more relaxed and receptive environment. My approach can be looser. I can risk doing unfinished stuff, to see how it lands. Once the Soho show has past I can switch my attention to writing more for Brighton. While I’m ...

I’ve been at Doggett & Ephgrave HQ today, stitching together material for Saturday’swork-in-progress gig . The biggest challenge at the moment is to make it feel cohesive. Parts of it sit together nicely; others feel pretty cut-and-shut. If the material doesn’t flow, it could be irritating and tiring for the audience. They’ll be no natural resolution and no sense of an end in sight. I don’t want that. There’s a loose theme forming, centring on my relationship with my family, but not everything fits into it. I’m not too concerned if the links are a little haphazard on Saturday  – I’m using the gig to find out what works and what doesn’t – but it’s something I’ll need to smooth out before the Soho Theatre date in March. The audience for that will probably be a lot less patient, based on previous experience. That gig is a month away today. No pressure. To throw a spanner into proceedings, I started the day by disco...

Today I visited The Actors’ Temple: the venue where I’ll be previewing new material alongside Mr PBR (A.K.A. Peter Broughton-Rates) from the 28 th February onwards. It’s a lovely little space and perfect for our needs. It only seats twenty, or thirty-five at a push. That’s good. There’ll be less pressure to fill it. Working on the assumption that we split our audience allocation down the middle, I only need to find ten willing friends a month. I’ll have to be fickle: befriending ten people every three weeks or so, then dropping them for a different ten to encourage a good turnover. As long as I don’t base my expectations on the amount of people following me on Google+ (twelve) I should be all right. Worse case scenario, I’ll turn to Grindr. There’s a projector and screen rigged, so I can go down that route should I choose to. At the moment, I intend to use A.V. minimally to punctuate a few jokes, though if I’m struggling for ideas as the months go by, I may change strate...