Last night, it was off to the historic town of Rochester for non-historical purposes.
I can’t claim to have known much about the place before my trip, but having visited there I can now say that it’s got a castle and something about Charles Dickens. They should use that as their official slogan.
As with most of my visits to places, it was to perform some stand-up comedy. And there was a pretty good turn-out of 20 audience members in a room at the back of a pub. The thing about doing countless gigs in London in front of handfuls is people, is that I appreciate it all the more when I perform in front of an audience that has reached double figures. They were friendly too.
I was doing a ten minutes set, with the first five or six minutes going pretty well and a couple of new lines in an existing routine getting a particularly good response. The next three minutes were rather more patchy, with a totally new set of jokes I’d written over the weekend that I need to get road-worthy for Edinburgh.
Trying out new stuff and it not working out how you’d hoped is probably the thing I find the worst about doing stand-up comedy. You try it out and have no real idea how it is going to be received, with blank facial expressions a likely outcome. Last night wasn’t one of this kind, a couple of the new jokes got laughs, but probably more didn’t. It at least gives me something to work with and at this time of the year, with the Fringe less than two months away, I don’t have a choice but to go through this process.
And a week today, we have our first Edinburgh preview of Love and Langton’s Dirty Laundry. We will be performing 40 minutes (the actual show will last ten minutes longer) at the Big Green Bookshop in Wood Green. Where can you buy tickets, I hear you ask? You can do so here.