Monkey Cafe, Swansea
The problem with the Edinburgh fringe is that sometimes it’s a bit too fringey, or rather the shows people like me put on are. Half of the challenge of doing a show up there is that you can have sober people paying attention to a more cohesive idea than the drunken rabble of most stand up gigs.
Unfortunately doing a preview of such a show in such a club was always going to be tricky. But mainly I sabotaged it all by myself.
Firstly, I’d sworn at some British Rail chaps, proper nasty swear words (but with justification… the ticket I bought from the machine at 15:57 wasn’t valid on the 16:03 train becuase the machine gives out cheap day tickets before four o clock and they are not valid after – cunts)
After swearing I got hit by a My Name Is Earl type of karma by tripping over a kerb at Reading Station car park in trying to find Paul Kerensa and his Swansea-bound car, my arm landed on the concrete first, fracturing it near the elbow, unbekownst to me at the time. When finally in Swansea the arm was seized and I was in pain.
Paul went on first preview his Back To The Futon show, the crowd lapped it up and I felt equally excited and scared about doing the next hour.
I’ve been re-writing the story so much that I really haven’t had a static version for long enough to even try to remember any, so the story bits are still being read out – I started off with some normal stand up – went down well, then went into start of show stand up – still good. But here comes the sabotage. I convinced myself they wouldn’t listen to me reading the story, and pretty much told them “you won’t want to listen to this will you” with that vote of confidence they kind of agreed. So the main bulk of Pulp Boy was abandoned and I just did stand up.
And it went pretty well, until the final 15 mins or so, where I lost them, not sure how or why, but some banter failed and material didn’t hammer home and suddenly I felt very lonley and could feel my arm throbbing for the first time in 45 mins.
Woop.