Saturday 21 August 2010

Views and Reviews

Had a great solo show today - packed audience and went really well. Still no sign of a review from the journalist who was in the other day and I'm starting to get paranoid about whether it's going to disappear into the ether. Impossible to tell with a free show whether any other journalists have been, be gutting not to get reviewed at all.

This year the edfringe website has been magically set up so that it's totally impossible for audience members to leave reviews of free shows (which is infuriating) so I skipped over to the chortle website to see if anyone had put any comments up under my name there...

Well one person wrote something nice but then I see someone has slated me at great length for a performance I did at an awards ceremony a few months back for the National Union of Journalists. This was a gig where due to a mix up I found out I was on less than an hour before I was onstage (shower, taxi, panic) so I hadn't had time to prepare anything special. I was ill but decided to attempt to be heroic and go on anyway. The crowd - all regional journalists 90% of whom hadn't won an award - saw me in the middle of the afternoon after dinner and a lot of long boring speeches and weren't allowed dessert or any kind of break before I was on. One group at the front were ignoring me and chatting among themselves throughout regardless of what I said to them. It was never going to go well. And certainly it was the worst reception I've had in several years, an incredibly tough gig which I fought and fought to win round but ultimately just couldn't save (although there was a group of lovely people in who took the time to come and tell me they liked my stuff and apologise for the others). Why is it though when I have one bad gig someone feels the need to publicly lambast me (and not bother to mention any of the extenuating circumstances of course) but when I have night after night of really rocking gigs the reaction is minimal? If you liked my show (or performance at another show you've seen recently) please head over to chortle and write something nice. About ten nice comments would chase the nasty remarks off into obscurity on page 2 of the comments and cheer me up enormously!

Lee Camp and Tobias Persson at Midnight Hour tonight and I'm actually going to go out and have a few beers afterwards for once!

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