The 12 year old girl drink driver was sentenced today. She got a two year driving ban. Which means she won't be able to drive again until she is 15. How tragic for her. I trust this harsh punishment will be enough to make her learn her lesson.
Did a very encouraging spot at the new material night at the Amused Moose Camden tonight. The yoghurt routine went down particularly well and afterwards I had loads of ideas about how to improve/lenghten it even further. I was still buzzing by the time I got home and couldn't sleep as my brain ticked over with excitement. I wondered if "Someone Likes Yoghurts" would make a good title for the Edinburgh show, or whether it would blow the joke if you were already aware of this line. I think it's definitely better than the more retrospective "So Far..." idea that I mentioned a few weeks ago. It's better to move on and do all new material, even if there are some old routines that I would love to resurrect.
I think there's some additional mileage in the yoghurt routine in how it is perfectly possible to make assumptions about people based on what's in their supermarket basket. And how horrible it is to have our private worlds invaded even by so innocuous an observation as "Someone Likes Yoghurts". It's nice to think that a check-out girl at Sainsbury's Local came up with my Edinburgh show title too. I will not be paying her for her work though, as I still believe that she shouldn't have said it.
If you live in London you should try to catch this new material night. There were some big names there (Harry Hill, Omid Djalili and more) trying out stuff for the first time and because it's an audience of comedy literate people, the acts are able to try out stuff that they might be worried about trying on a boozed up weekend comedy crowd. The failures were as interesting (and possibly more interesting) than the successes. It's good to see that all comics have the same problem with not being able to know whether something is definitely funny before you try it on actual people. I'll be back here on the 28th February, trying more new routines, but do book ahead as it's a small room and it was literally packed to the rafters. Yes, literally. There literally were rafters in the room and the audience was piled on top of one another like sardines and the people at the top were touching the rafters. It's a pretty hard room to play, where no-one is able to see you and the majority of the punters are on the point of suffocation as you perform, but that's part of the joy. If you can make a suffocating man or woman laugh then you know you have cracked it.
And while we're mentioning pre-booking for things, do please remember that "The Twelve Tasks of Hercules" starts its London run next week. Pre-sales are what I would call sluggish, in that so far only five slugs have booked tickets. I would remind you that the continuation of Warming Up relies on me making a living in the real world and so I'd be very grateful if you could come along to this show and also inform any friends you might have (I know, you like the internet, so it's unlikely to be many). The information is below. That's the last time I'll mention it.
Yeah, right.
