Remember that lack of willpower I wrote about yesterday? Well it danced into play once again and consequently I feel a bit crap today. Part of it is my inability to say no to being bought a drink and the other part is my liver, which seems to have completely given up on dealing with booze anymore. I don’t drink very often anymore due to driving to gigs so you would think that my liver would start to heal and allow my hangover’s to reside somewhat. Instead after a relatively sober four pints I feel a bit wrong. Not a lot wrong, but just enough wrong that my body is saying ‘you know this isn’t how you should feel don’t you?’ The problem here is that tonight is the Chortle Awards which is an annual excuse to drink lots. Inevitably I will feel a lot worse tomorrow, but sometimes these things have to be done and anyway, as it is more and more evident, its not likely I will have the willpower to stay sober even if I wanted to. I don’t want to, but that’s not the point.
I let myself down last night. All my gigs lately have been really lovely and last night was the first one I didn’t really do my best. It looked like it was going to be a strange little gig with far more comics than there were audience. This is never a good ratio unless it is for some sort of audience vs comedian battle. I felt rather pleased, when discussing this possibility earlier that I had come up with the idea of hitting one of them with a chair whilst shouting ‘take a seat fool’. My days as an action hero aren’t up yet people! The reason for a small crowd is that the promoters rightly assumed that for a competition acts would bring some friends to support and vote for them. Strangely no one did. It was nice that everyone was honest enough to hope that they could perform to a normal crowd, but sadly it backfired when no one appeared and we all wished our friends were there.
Luckily the crowd improved thanks to the hard workings of those involved and promoter and compere Alan Anderson MC’d them up into a small but lovely frenzy. For such a small crowd the audience contained some of the characters I wished would be at a gig I am MCing. Two of them, for example, were men whose job is to ignite people’s waste or ‘shit burners’ as they called it, which is instant comedy gold. Some of us more experienced, and by experienced I mean bitter comics sat at the back of the room discussing why on Earth we were doing a competition anyway, but as each comic stepped up it became evident that it was a competition of a certain caliber and out of 13 comics every one of them was pretty good, which was to be expected when the range of comics had from 9 years of experience on the circuit to just 6 months. I had the pleasure/discomfort of following Luke McQueen. I have never seen McQueen before but he absolutely ripped it, with full energy and some very strong gags. Thinking that to follow that I should bring the energy down a level so not to be in the audience’s face, I walked on quite relaxed. Too relaxed though and then I felt tired, didn’t do any of the material I planned, ad-libbed unnecessarily and generally felt a bit like I really should have prepared for it. After having a cracking weekend of gigs where I honestly felt I had done the best I could, I let myself down with this rather mediocre ramble of a 7 min set.
Undeservedly I came third which means I will go through to the next heat in April sometime. 1st went to the very funny Matthew Osbourne which was well deserved and 2nd went (also deservedly) to Luke McQueen. I felt all a bit crap for being in there too but have realised that I will have to step it up for the next level. Then afterwards I unwittingly got persuaded to carry on drinking with Martyne, Paul and Alan. I say unwittingly but they said ‘fancy a drink’ and without hesitation I said yes. I am so weak. The Old Rope lot joined us and I spent some time talking about vegan beers with Andrew O Neill. Its amazing how your evening can start with visions of smashing a shit burner with a chair and finish with a discussion about filtering beer through fish scales with a man with lipstick on.
Not that I haven’t shamelessly promoted this already, but got some new vids up on my website. Two stand-up clips from my gig at the Comedy Bunker which I blogged about some weeks ago, and my first interview for comedydemon.com with Jason Cook. Considering the latter was 25 minutes of me and Jason making fish puns and generally mucking about, they have edited it into a very nice sensible four minutes. The only downside is that I have realised I laugh like a goon and I seem to laugh consistently through these four minutes. Its horrible having the epiphany that your laugh sounds like a drunk goblin. I like laughing but am wary now that it must not happen when interviewing. Lets hope that the next ones that go online I look like a stoney faced taxman. All these new vids are at:
www.tiernandouieb.co.uk
Please leave comments and all that. Unless you hate them, then don’t. I shall now go and line my stomach for further liver destruction.
