This past week, I have most had two gigs. At one, I was trying out new stuff, which went down quite well. At the other, I was performing allegedly tried-and-tested material, which fared a little patchier.
Wednesday was the one with the new stuff, and what I thought was nearly four minutes of new material turned out to be slightly over two minutes. It wasn’t met with a rapturous response and there were some obvious areas in need of work, but it received enough of a reaction to suggest that there is something there I can work with.
On Thursday, I fulfilled a lifelong ambition and performed in Staines. It would be easy to make a cheap-shot about Staines, but I will choose not to; although with the ‘lifelong ambition thing’, I think I already may have done so. Regardless, the limited amount I did see of the place was not enough to form an opinion of it. At best, I am apathetic to Staines. At worst, I am indifferent.
I found the gig quite hard work, which was largely my own fault for failing to grab it by the ball-sack. I was on first and evidently didn’t engage with the audience enough. They laughed a decent amount in the first part of my set, but really didn’t go for the stuff that followed. The final quarter picked up a bit, but not really enough to consider it a success. But never mind.
In other comedy news, at the moment I am strongly considering not doing Brighton Fringe festival next year. The thinking behind it is that as I have to book holiday off at work, it would be nice to use it to go on an actual holiday. At the moment, we are considering perhaps doing two weekends, but I think it is safe to say that we won’t be doing a consecutive week-day run.