mostly david ephgrave

One thing I didn’t anticipate on my way to tonight’s show in Brighton was I’d be performing to (amongst others) 27 German students. Informal. Their teacher popped his head around the door an hour before I began, to see (1) if there was anything on, and (2) if my show would be something I thought his class would understand. This was a hard question to answer as, while language wouldn’t necessarily be a barrier, they might struggle with some of the content, what with my propensity for choosing quite niche cultural references; did Noel Edmonds’ Nineties-era work make it as far as the Rhineland? Let’s hope not. My reluctance to answer with a clear yes or no may have been cause for doubt, as he didn’t commit to coming back. I took a bit of a risk tonight, by making some big changes to my set at the last minute, so I could be true to my original intention of using the three dates to chop and change what I do, to make the most of the chance to work t...

I spent most of the afternoon today putting together a slideshow for a piece of material that if it goes into my show will only last about two or three minutes. It can be frustrating when that much work goes into something so short, but that’s the way it goes. I’m a fan of intricate detail and like the thought that people watching will be amused by the lengths to which I’ll go to illustrate a point. That’s where using projection is good, as you can shine on a light on the tiniest aspects of something and get a laugh out of the mundanities of it; Doggett & Ephgrave would never have had any stand-up material if it weren’t for this, and while a lot of my solo stuff is story led, I still think I’m best when I’m using a projector as I know what to do with it. As for the piece of material I was working on, I think it has promise, even if it is very short. It may be a little overwritten, but I’ll try it out as soon as I can do it properly to make sure...

Today, I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to make the Mac-based slideshow software Keynote do something that PowerPoint does very easily.  (If the above sentence doesn't pique your interest, nothing will.) I switched to Keynote a few years back when I bought my MacBook; Glyn and I have been using it to run our slideshows ever since. For the most part, it's user-friendly, but - like with all computer technology - there's always some little bug or other that gets on your wick. I've lost count of the times a simple task took hours to complete, because some link in the chain wasn't working as it should; if I ever meet the person who devised Apple's infamous colour wheel, I'll punch them square in mush.  All I wanted was for an MP3 to trigger on one slide and then continue under the following slides as I flick through them. Then, when I realised you can only do this on Keynote if the audio file starts at the beginning of the presentation, I tried to ...

It was about forty minutes in to scouring YouTube for mouthwash adverts and taking screen grabs of them that I realised I don’t have a proper job. These small things take up time when you’re compiling any slideshow-based stand up. It’s less the case with ‘…and Ephgrave’ , which only features eighty slides at the moment (including blank ones), but the last version of mine and Glyn's show ‘Doggett & Ephgrave Project Stuff’ had 360 in it. You wouldn’t know when you watched it, as the mix of video clips, photographs, text and transitions disguise this, but it takes forever when you're piecing it together. I added a few more slides into my solo show today to make it more cohesive. Up until now, a reasonable chunk of the material didn’t use them. I wanted to bridge the gap, without putting pictures in for the sake of it. They’re good for clarity. While mine and Glyn’s Star Trek Porn Letter would work without the images of cast members in place of the sexual content,...