mostly david ephgrave

While I’m enjoying piecing together various bits of material for this weekend’s Bath Comedy Festival work-in-progress dates and am happy with how it’s going, I'm in a bit of a quandary as to which direction I should go with the Brighton and Edinburgh Fringe show that will hopefully rise from the ashes of it. (I like a bit of drama in a blog post.) My sticking point is this: should I keep the show personal and use more stories about me and my family, much like last year’s Brighton and Camden Fringe show ‘...and Ephgrave’, or should I go with the material that's more outward-looking than inward, much like Glyn’s and my output. At this stage, I'm not sure. There's a lot to be said for keeping things universal, but it's possible that in doing so, the stand-up becomes more generic and less original. The big, big, big decision I'm faced with is how much I should use projection. It's very easy for me to fall back on it, as it's so familiar a format...

It occurred to me today that part of the reason I felt nervous before my solo set last Thursday was because a lot of the material I was about to do was fiercely autobiographical. This is something I haven’t done with Glyn. Most of our work centres around passing comment on things we’ve found. While we’re often self-deprecating (sometimes too much), the spotlight is seldom on us. We’re never the focus. The fact we use a projector and a screen compounds this; we spend our whole set saying ‘Look at this. Isn’t this funny’, rather than ‘look at us’. Psychiatrists would have a field day. This is much less the case with the stuff I’m writing for myself. This blog is partly to blame. You can’t write every day without eventually turning the spotlight inward (I’m enjoying my lamp-based metaphor). I haven’t revealed anything shocking, like the existence of an illegitimate lovechild – I’m holding that back for a bit – but I’ve documented a lot of what I think...