Last night I had a gig that was a heat in a competition.
Now, as regular readers will know, I have an appalling track-record in competitions and go into comedic anaphylactic shock whenever any sort of competitive element is present.
I enter, don’t get through and tell myself I’m not going to enter any competitions again. Then I see another competition is taking entries and as I’ve been on a decent run of gigs, I think ‘I should give this another go’. So I enter again and don’t get through and the cycle repeats itself.
But I have learnt to control my adverse reaction a bit better and don’t recoil so much these days. The last time I performed in a competitive environment resulted in me having a very good gig, booked by a promoter in the audience and bought a pint. However, I still didn’t win on this particular night.
Anyway, back to last night, and I don’t want to spoil the ending, but feel I might have done already. Minutes before the gig was due to start, there were only two people in the audience and the show was set to be cancelled, with comics progressing to the next round via the medium of being drawn from a hat.
However, just as it was about to be knocked on the head, two more audience members arrived and the show was saved.
It was actually a fun gig and my set went okay-ish, but I am still feeling off the pace. I’m now going to shock you… I didn’t get through. I might have stood a better chance if the names had been drawn from a hat.
But never mind. I really should know better than to enter such things by now and won’t in future… until the next time.
During my journey home, I had a flurry of ideas to turn my repeated failures into material. I don’t know if it’ll work, but it might just have shifted my post-Edinburgh writer’s block.