Its the last day of my show today. Not ever. Well maybe ever, but we just don’t know. It feels like this day has been a long time coming, and yet now its here I feel a tad sad. It signals the end of Edinburgh and I have to admit its been a pretty amazing month this year. An amazing month that was trumped by yesterday’s events. Today is going to struggle to be quite as good. Yesterday had level 10 strength, level 10 magic and level 10 bloody good things, so today had better be that card that somehow has an 11 somewhere or it’s not going to compete. I like top trumps but it did annoy me how there was always one card that had inexplicably higher numbers than everyone else. I used to have a ‘fantasy creatures’ set, and the Devil managed to have 110 for everything, when the limit was 100. While I was pleased when I had that card in my stack, it did often make me wonder if the set had been made by satanists or some sort of other ill ilk of people. Essentially what they were saying is that evil will always win and when I sussed this out there were several days when I didn’t play with those cards out of sheer distress. It was not the same with my Marvel Superhero Top Trumps. All of them were pretty much evenly matched in one area or another which should have made me happy, but instead just made me grow to wonder how much they cared about the Marvel Universe. I mean Galactus should be much more powerful than Spiderman, shouldn’t he? Sorry, just re-read this back and I feel like it might have been the geekiest thing I’ve ever written. I would like to apologise to all non-geeks and at the same time reassure the pro-geeks that by my laptop lies a Spiderman annual I haven’t read yet that was given to me by Belle, the head of our flyering team (I say give but its actually loaned. However I havent read it yet and its not leaving my possesion till I do).
Yesterday was mostly the bestest day ever because I got to meet Lester Freamon aka Clarke Peters aka bloody that bloody man from The Wire which is the greatest show ever! Layla, myself, my parents and Keith of the Farnan, all went to watch his Q&A at the Udderbelly, which was brilliantly hosted by Miles Jupp. Q&A sessions always have the potential to be very dull. Essentially if the answers are brief or vague it can become dull. Similarly, if idiots ask the questions it can be terrible. Luckily Clarke was very interesting, giving us tales of his last time at the Edinburgh Festival in 1994 doing a Nat King Cole tribute (we were treated to a little song), some amazing insights into The Wire from onset, characters, fellow actors and how its now being used in education and rehab centers around the US and UK. While I would normally begrudge getting up at such an early hour at the festival, it was such a brilliant way to start the day. Then to make things even more brilliant, Ed at the Underbelly introduced Clarke to me, Keith and Layla. I was worried I might just fall over backwards but as Ed had been lovely enough to introduce me and Keith as performers we felt like it was ok to just have a bit of a chat. He was stupidly friendly and chatty and after Keith went off on one about how at the talk the next day he’d get the whole audience to hide so that Clarke would get paranoid he shouldn’t have done an extra date, we left him be and skipped merrily down the road like excited kids.
From then on, the day could not really go wrong. The skipping lead us to Chocolate Soup where Reese Shearsmith sat very near us, but after already meeting Lester Freamon I could not handle the prospect of trying to say hello. That and my hot chocolate made me feel all a bit stoned, so found it hard to do anything. I am beginning to wonder what they put in it. I always leave feeling floaty and disorientated, yet I love it. I’m pretty sure there’s a magic ingredient somewhere, and I don’t mean Harry Potter put a spell on it if you know what I mean? More Harry Pot. Ok I’ll stop now, for even I know thats lame. After chocolate was gig and as several members of Layla’s family were in the audience, as well as several of my friends, I was a tad worried I would cock it all up on the penultimate day. Instead it was a sell-out, completely kick arse gig. Just about every single gag worked and the crowd were amazing. I had had the insight to record it on my dictaphone and so hopefully that will sound like one mean mp3. Should I never do the show again, I’ll pop it up on my website. If I do though, I won’t. It as easy as, er, easy things.
The rest of the day was brilliant in equal measures, with a great Comedy Club 4 Kids that I just got to sit back and watch as James Campbell MC’d, Al Barrie closed and Rich Hall opened by scary a kid called Frasier before doing an impro based on chocolate bar names before telling all the kids they could eat said chocolates that he had thrown on the stage. We were then treated to 5 minutes of chaos as children swarmed round Rich like killer ants on a corpse. Terrifying. After CC4K, we trekked en masse (Layla’s family, me and my parents) to the Penny Dreadfuls show, which I’m so glad I got to see this year. Its just superb. Despite dropping the Victorian era mantle, they have retained all their slickly acted silliness and I ended up having several coughing fits from laughing so hard. I’m sure it’ll tour after Edinburgh so do go and see if you can.
Today I have three shows – my last one, the final Comedy Club 4 Kids and a special show at the Cow Cafe with Keith Farnan. I can’t wait to finish the first two but the last one should be the most fun, and will be followed by vast amounts of drinking to send of Edinburgh 2009 for myself. I just hope Clarke Peters turns up to hang out otherwise it will still just be a 10 to yesterday’s 11.
