The Decline and Fall of Ed's Festival - Part !X

My last show at the Edinburgh Festival says something about my shows in general and my performance problems specifically. I had a totally full house. I started off with welcoming stuff and the laughs were big and the atmosphere was great. If I had then done "Better Off Ed" to them, it would have been a roof raising hour. But they weren't there for that. They were there for the Rome show. It wasn't roof raising. It was underwhelming. I brought it back a few times with banter and other remarks - but the Rome material was not delivering. Not that I blame the material. My delivery was tired and stilted. Friday's performance on Saturday's crowd would have been electrifying. It's a shame and a few people left, but the bucket yielded £110 and people seemed happy enough. It's just one of those things where you see what you could do with a crowd. There was so much to work with there and I started off with such big laughs. Still. Live comedy.

I went back to the house after that. My housemates were cutting windows into the front of their house. They had put up dust sheets the day before, cutting the size of the place in half. It looked like there had been a murder. I offered my labouring inexperience but they asked me if I could cook dinner instead. I went to the supermarket and bought sea bass and wine and other stuff. It cost £40 altogether. Not bad for three weeks rent I suppose! I made them dinner. It came out very well. They looked happy. We ate and chatted and then ate cheese and watched people getting killed by a plague on TV. It really was a lovely evening. I felt useful. Sometimes they call me "the boy." I'm only a year or so younger, but I feel like a boy around them sometimes. They have their own place and plans and disposable income and yet retain a huge sense of fun. I have rent I can only just pay and a haircut I'm not sure about. It's not the same. Cooking good food suggests I know what I'm doing. When I cook, I do know what I'm doing. I think some people have jobs that make them feel worthwhile and grown up. I don't. When people say things like "I find this very fulfilling" I think they are saying "This makes me feel worthwhile." I think as a species we are constantly fighting to find purpose. Animals still have this inbuilt. At least, I think they do. I'm sure there are loads of depressed elephants, however.

I want to just exist and not be defined by one thing or another or to derive validation from one thing or another - but I am only human. People can get very distraught when they don't achieve their goals because too much of themselves is defined by the goals they set. If they fail, they take it personally. The universe will not bend to my will and I don't expect it to. Be bloody nice if it did though, eh?

On Sunday I went to see "Dawn of the Planet of the Apes." It was great. Escapism. I felt incredibly relaxed after. The guy I went to see it with owns a company. He worked bloody hard for two years and now works ordinarily hard and still makes excellent money. He said "I'll buy the cinema tickets if you get the drinks." The tickets were a tenner each. We had our drinks in Wetherspoons. A lot of my friends are smart, fairly successful people. I'm a bit of an anomaly in that respect. Success is relative of course, but I am more than relatively unsuccessful. Increasingly I find that my close friends pay for my dinner once in a while or just keep buying me drinks. I don't feel ashamed, really. There have been times where I've had excess money. It's nice to spend it on people you like. In my bag, I have a tupperware box which had £700 in it from the shows. I will put it in a bank. But at the moment it's a nice thing to have. It looks like Scrooge McDuck's packed lunch.

I picked up my remaining flyers and posters from the venue. No one said: "Why didn't you do a Sunday show?" No one cares. I put up about 5 posters. I have about 45 left. Note: Fewer posters. I met up with some friends and had a few too many drinks. The film had put me in a good, neutral mood. I was being silly and playful. Then we talked comedy and I felt the weight gather on my shoulders. A few Edinburgh's ago I slept with a comedian. She approached me and said "hi" and hugged me then went back to her table. I stood there and wondered who she was sleeping with for a while and then decided to go home.

I had an 8am train. Everything went smoothly. I got on the train. It was comfortable. I felt like I was leaving Edinburgh. I didn't feel regret. It felt like the least substantial Edinburgh. In the past, I would go up there and just be glad to be gigging and coming up with material. I thought it was all adding to something. I thought that something might happen, I might be spotted, I might get booked for other things, I might get a good review that would really help me on the circuit. Despite the meltdowns and terror, there was always a point. This year, the point hadn't been so clear. I was happy to get away from it.

In London, it was raining hard. I got to my flat at 1pm and fantasised about a bath and tea and Fraiser and cooking. I couldn't get into my flat. The landlord had locked the bottom lock. A lock I don't have a key for. I called my flatmate and sat on the stairs eating a sandwich. I met my friend in a pub for some drinks and food. My flatmates thought of an ingenious scheme to send the key down with someone else and I could meet them at King's cross. That person was on a train that got delayed and then more delayed. I had too much to drink and slept fitfully on a sofa bed at my friend's house. He's a doctor, but decided not to go into work with his hangover. We administrators are made of sterner stuff.

I felt tired and a bit hungover and really didn't want to go to the place I knew I had to. Edinburgh wasn't ready to relinquish its grip immediately after all.

This is a thing.

The Fear Blog. Part 6.

Aug 10

Hmm...

Woke up with a hangover, filled an empty white wine bottle with water and lay in bed. I will now tell you about what happened yesterday. It's not thrilling. This is like my flyering technique. “Is the show any good?” “Err...well, yeah. It's okay. Look, I'm a comedian, not a flyerer.” Like the Pied Piper.

First of all, stand up is hard. It's really really hard. People say “I don't know how you do it.” That's not hard. You talk into the microphone and screw up your face every so often. The question should be “I don't know why you do it.” I don't know either. If the crowd is good, my timing is good, my mood is right, the venue is right, there's a north easterly prevailing wind and Jupiter is aligned with Saturn, it's really a brilliant thing to do. If not, it feels like a horrible way to waste your time. I've probably lost the best evenings of my youth to stand up comedy. Well, I say that. I probably would have squandered them anyway. It's not as if I would have been learning to flamenco. But still. Even when you do a great new piece of material you sometimes still think “Oh, this is great!” and then ten audiences later, no one goes for it. You're emphasising the wrong bits, you can hear the gears clunking, your shiny new bit is suddenly tarnished. You can't remember why they laughed in the first place.

Friday started promisingly enough. Nice weather again. I considered going up Arthur's Seat but decided to go on Saturday if the weather stayed good. (Oh you poor sap, take your chances when they come along.) I did some web design stuff in a cafe by the Scottish Parliament. I'm quite a regular there now. It's a nice cafe/ bar in a contemporary style (I'm not sure if styles have changed since 2006, but that's when it was built. In fact I can honestly say, I have no idea what's developed since 2006-2012. It makes me shudder to think that I am living in such an anonymous bunch of years. Did people growing up in the 60s think “This blows!” Is it always hindsight? Seriously, what's changed? Smartphones? I think that's it. Keane may have released an album. Oh, and you can use oyster cards on the overground. Yep, that really is it.) It is a nice place to work and the beer is boring, so I'm not tempted to drink. They have a flag on each lager tap, but it really is stretching it. Thus CARLING has an English flag, Tennents a Scottish, Grolsch a Dutch, 1664 a French, Carlsberg a Danish flag, Budweiser an American...come off it. They're all brewed in Newcastle upon Tyne. They all taste the same and are available anywhere. Duff, Duff Light, Duff Dry. All from the same tap. The illusion of choice.

The highlight of my day was making a Spanish omelette. I used sweet potato in it. It came out perfectly and was very tasty. I had it with a salad. If you're a fan of omelette stop reading now. It doesn't get any better.

Flyering has got too hard. I don't want to do it. I don't mind trying to be funny onstage, that's something I will do pretty much voluntarily. But this flyering business is foul. I'm actually surprised when someone takes one. It's horrible to see the piles of flyers in the bin. Thousands of them. In the age of the slightly upgraded smartphone, flyering is a ridiculously inefficient way of getting people to the show. I see that the Fringe organisation isn't even mentioning the environment this year. Ironic that what is supposed to be an artsy festival is so damn destructive. If it isn't the forests felled to provide flyers for a show that no one will ever enjoy, it's the oil pumped to provide the garish printing ink. “Hey, I really think the planet should be destroyed a bit more so I can talk about self-scan tills. People NEED to hear this.” The Edinburgh Fringe: Fucking Up the Planet.

In the end I decided to talk to people instead. They laughed, they said they would see the show, they did not. An enthusiastic young girl flyered for me and got some people in. Then she sat and looked confused and left after 20 minutes. A ringing endorsement! One guy told me he was now a big fan. Taking over the world. One fan at a time. Phew. My brain needs a sit down.

I've not had anyone from the media in, of course. They are shortlisting prizes for things I'm eligible for. Surely they need to see my show? I'm not saying I'd win anything, but it would nice to be considered and dismissed, seeing as I'm eligible and all. Whoever wins the world series is the best baseball team in the world. The world being the USA and Canada. My show isn't stellar but it's definitely worth a few stars and a few nice things being said. There's still time for it, but I don't know...I've got a feeling...a feeling deep inside, oh no...The BBC got back to me to say I hadn't made it into their New Comedy Awards. I lied about how long I had been doing comedy on the application. I thought that might be a big deal. They didn't even notice, they just didn't like my stuff! I think I used the word 'fuck' three times in the recording. They asked for likeable. I'm not sure if swearing is likeable to the Beeb. I need to get out of life for a bit.When's the bus back to London? The 26th? Yuck. Don't want to go back to that life. Me in a flat in Brixton half-working. It's rubbish. Still, I can always watch multiple repeats of the Big Bang Theory so every cloud...

So after a fairly underwhelming show I went to the Anti-Hoot. A year ago it was cool. It was in the Gilded Balloon and felt artsy and interesting. People paid to get in, Lach (the host who looks like something between Woody Allen and David Cross and sounds like the leasd singer of REM) is strangely funny and makes surreal quips and does announcements for products like Air Guitars. At the old venue it felt counter-culture and subversive and great. Now he's on the Free Festival programme and the place was full of people who shouldn't have been there. Uninterested people who only came because they didn't have to pay, and yet somehow seem determined not to get into the spirit of things. The kind of people who come to my show. If you took a pub full of Yate's Wine Lodge punters and put them into a lovely country pub, would it make it still be a lovely place to go to? Nope. It would suddenly become a depressing shit hole. (Misanthropy riding pretty high there, Ed....No, sod that. I heard a 70 year old woman actually COMPLAIN because the Anti-Hoot didn't allow heckling. Bitterly complain! That's what she'd gone there to do! Didn't have to pay to get in with the express intention of sabotaging the show. “Scum. Subhuman scum.”)

There were 6 people left in that cavernous room at the end. I only stayed to support Lach. There wasn't a bill like there used to be. Just a sign up sheet. Too many open spot comics there. That killed it. Tough room though. Shitty room. I did some jokes there. Wow. Pulling teeth. Some guy actually interrupted my punchline. I told him no heckling, he said it was advice. I was too demoralised to make too much of it. ADVICE? My mother has apparently started shadowing me at gigs. I should have destroyed him. The comedian Michael Legge was there. He wouldn't look me in the eye after. Not because I was that bad, just clearly because he could see from my performance I wasn't worth talking to. That sounds a bit paranoid, but had I stormed it....

Because we were having far too much fun, I ended up at the worst 40th birthday party I have ever been to. I remember my mum's 40th. I must have been 5 or 6. I ate cake under the table. That was by far more fun. Michael may be a nice chap, but when we're having drinks together he gets out a little electronic scattegories type game and insists we play it. He doesn't approach women either. Starting to see patterns emerging. We were in a metal bar playing scattegories rather than trying to get Goth chicks when he got a text from a girl he had met at Daniel Kitson's show. We trooped over to a multi-level hell-hole called Espionage. Nothing about this place was secretive or undercover. Not the alcohol consumption, not the spray tans, not the groping. If Bond ended up drinking here I assume it would come post-breakdown.

Initially we couldn't get in as it was already 3am, but being a Mancunian Michael just slipped under a rope and found another way in and I followed. Working our way down the levels of hell, we got to the lowest bar. I remember snogging a girl there when I was 25. Grrrreat days. No they weren't, but I was 25, and that's the age we're told people want to be. Yay. At the back of the bar was a door and we had to say the word “Shaggers” and we were let in. Hilarious. A private party, a codeword on the door. Was it full of the cream of Edinburgh? Playboy millionaires and models? Nope. Five fat, middle-aged men jumping up and down to Come on Eileen. These luminaries included the promoter of a ragged chain of comedy clubs that doesn't seem to book me any more, one of the country's worst MCs and another of the country's most low rent comedians. Michael found the girl and realised he didn't fancy her at all. Did I tell you that Michael has to get 2 pint glasses for every pint to remove the fizz from the beer? Apparently it bothers his stomach otherwise. It didn't bother me before, but ending up at that party, it started to.

“Sorry, Ed”

“That's okay, Mike. All part of life's rich scattegories.”

They everyone started to do a conga. Ed, you're there. At last. The inner circle.

FML, viewers. FML.