mostly david ephgrave

I did quite bit of work on my show today, both in terms of running the material and orchestrating the admin that goes with it, but I'm finding it hard to make improvements - or to even know that's what they are - without a director to steer me through it. Sadly, it all goes down to personal judgement at the moment, as it’s next-to-impossible to get someone to commit to helping me out and - even if they were to - they’d have to be just the right person for the job. What I could really do with someone to tell me what’s already right as I’m naturally hypercritical, and I don’t want to replace stuff that works with stuff that doesn’t, if things evolve that way without the benefit of an outside eye to put a lid on it. I was surprised to find a fair amount already worked when I did my work-in-progress dates in Bath in April and Brighton in May; I don’t want to lose the essence of what I did there through over-thinking and over-editing it, but at the same time, I still w...

What I could really do with at this stage of putting my Edinburgh show together is an editor. I have so many little bits and pieces and ideas flying around that I can scarcely keep track of them, let alone decide what’s best 'in' and what’s best 'out'. This is partly thanks to my blog, which has been a fantastic source to call on, as I wouldn’t remember half of the things that crossed my mind over the past few years if it weren’t for it, but it can also be an overwhelming record to get to grips with; it can be luck of the draw as to whether I’ve picked the right entries, or whether there are some far better ideas that have been lost, under the weight of it. Yesterday was a case in point: before I started a run, I noted down a couple of rough ‘new’ ideas – i.e. old blogs that I hadn’t yet looked at in a stand-up context that had popped into my mind – to have a quick look. In doing so, I stumbled across a piece I’d half-worked up for ...