Running (and Running Out of Time).


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.

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