I'd forgotten it was summer...

23C in London today. A month in Scotland has made such a thing seem unnatural.

Done

25 improv shows. 23 cricket shows. 28 stand-up gigs.

Done.

One last learning

If you get caught in a rainstorm (you will) simply walk into the nearest pub (an easy task in Edinburgh) and ask if someone has handed in a black umbrella.

Don't worry, everyone does it.

When you no longer need the brolly it's only right that you leave it in the next pub you visit.

New blood

Illness meant that the 'Scenes' cast was in danger of being undermanned yesterday so I pressganged Albert Howell, an old Canadian mate and a seriously good improviser into the show.

It's a cliche known to every sports fan: the special player who makes it look easy, who seems to somehow have more time and space than everyone else on the field. The really special ones have enough time and space to make the people around them look good.

If improvisors aren't being surprised by what is being said to them on stage they go a little dead inside. They start anticipating, which means they stop living in the moment. An audience can somehow sense that they're now not watching wonderfully spontaneous creativity but rather a sort of badly underwritten sketch show. Even if the laughs keep coming they're nowhere near as heartfelt.

Obviously introducing new blood in the cast reintroduces the element of surprise. If the new performer is as good as Albert then wonderful things will happen.

Last show of the Edinburgh run is at 325pm this afternoon. We start back at Camden next week.

Lessons large & small

This Edinburgh has led me to the following conclusions: -

• Improv comedy has a way to go to be seen as a credible alternative to stand-up, musical and sketch comedy

• Younger performers cannot be relied upon to manage their own scarce resources of energy and focus

• Double-acts need both personal chemistry and decent writing. No excess of either excuses an absence of the other

• The sooner you accept that there's always a cooler party / bar than where you are the happier you'll be

• Very few performers can deliver on stage drunk or even tipsy. I am not one of them

• The best way to destroy a pair of suede shoes is to wilfully ignore the fact that an Edinburgh Fringe is a month of fliering in the rain
  

Opportunities for learning

I haven't been able to post for a few days because I've been too angry.

Wednesday's Scenes from Communal Living was so bad I was nearly speechless with rage. The poor audience sat through a procession of tasteless, pointless autopilot 'comedy' that was unfunny in every possible way. Career-damagingly bad.

Of course it was the first show of the run that industry friends of mine from Australia and Canada had come along to watch. This Edinburgh was supposed to be my showcase for improv's possibilities but this was nothing more than an eloquent demonstration of its limitations.

Post-show notes were nasty, brutish and short and I walked away disconsolate.

I found out later that for once the cast took my notes to heart. When I arrived at Thursday's pre-show meeting the cast was already in the room, focused and ready to warm up. That day's show was a good one. Yesterday was the same with equally pleasing results.

Maybe the penny dropped. Maybe my young cast has realised that when you perform on autopilot bad things happen. It's Day 24 of the Edinburgh Fringe but as tiring as that may be, the audience members are seeing the show for the first time.

Tunnel vision

Five performing days left in Edinburgh.

For most inmates of this strange and wonderful assylum that means only another five days before rest and normalcy and the struggle to right the bank balance and write next year's show.

I'm faced with a different dilemma. For months I've been psychologically throwing any task associated with my consultancy work (aka 'my grown-up job') over the wall that is August and this time next week I'm delivering a daylong workshop in Toronto.

Buy the ticket. Take the ride

As expected

By Saturday night it was obvious to all that England were going to regain the Ashes by winning the final match of the series at the Oval.

I suppose you'd call it poetry that we were on stage doing Watts and McCure Know the Score to a packed house when Michael Hussey's wicket fell and the synchronicity made for a genuine Edinburgh moment. Andrew Watts then made me sit on stage and read out the Australian scorecard to the absolute delight of the crowd.

As long as they're laughing, huh?

This will be funny but not fun...

Doing a comedy show about the Ashes is not as good an idea as it was a week ago...

Ripples

A consultancy thought for today.

This morning I was speaking to my business partner in New Zealand. He looks after our Asia-Pac clients and he's finding life extremely quiet so it was nice to be able to run through my list of projects, both potential and ongoing. Not because it gives me a sense of superiority but because of the way that the pharma industry ripples outwards from North America and Europe.

I predict that he'll be busy in about twelve months.

Hear me out

I spent much of today in Slough of The Office fame, a town boasting possibly the most onomatopoeic place name in Britain.

The occasion was my first consulting job in a few weeks; half a day in a room with seven high-ranking sales and marketing personnel to discuss an upcoming product launch. As I've observed previously getting all the right people in the room in a pre-launch setting is much like aligning planets so I took a day out from the Fringe madness to run the workshop.

Really all I did was swap the task of convincing one lot of perfect strangers that I'm funny for the task of convincing another lot that I'm smart. It still starts with suspension of disbelief.

If they hear you out you're most of the way there.

The world is divided into two types of people...

Those who cry off work claiming swine flu and those who turn up.

Halfway

We are now halfway through the 2009 Edinburgh Fringe so Scenes from Communal Living has a day off today. I am still performing in two other shows later but as Scenes is the production in which I've invested the most even on hiatus it's the one that demands most of my attention.

A few days ago I described my frustration at the lack of focus from some of my cast. I'm starting to worry that my actors are splitting into two factions; one still focused on giving the audience a great show worth the ticket price but another that now can't see past personal agendas.

I need to be a little careful here as everyone is performing for free. It's unlikely that we'll put enough bums on seats for the profit-share arrangement to kick in. And as well as performing everyone is fliering for at least an hour a day. Whilst undoubtedly exhausting this the deal we agreed to beforehand.

As ever it's all a question of each individual's motivation for being in Edinburgh. No one makes money and almost no one gets famous so why are we all here? To me the 'correct' answers are to further one's craft, to experience what it's like to perform in a month-long run and to improve one's profile as much as possible. The 'incorrect' answers are all about fun and sociability and bragging rights; for one month a year you're as much a Festival performer as Reg Hunter or Adam Hills. Only of course you aren't.

Alas, I have a couple of cast members who seem to be stuck in this second mindset and if something isn't fun they sulk. Fliering is never fun and I do my best to thank everyone every day for their efforts on that front.

But doing a bad show is no fun either and I've been openly accused of being negative for pointing out bad work in my oh-so brief post-show notes. Our reviews so far have been mixed and I can't argue with the more damning assessments any more than I can wholeheartedly embrace the more encouraging ones.

I need a break from my cast as much as they need a break from me. Tomorrow I have a day trip to London for a consultancy thing. It's a long time since I've regarded the prospect of flying into Heathrow with this much enthusiasm.

So ya wanna be a star?

Talent is so obviously 'cost of entry'. Less apparent is the need for 'emotional intelligence'.

A better day

Every review of an improv highlights the variability of the artform. In the better (kinder?) ones it's mentioned towards the end, in harsher ones it's called 'inconsistency' and raised in the opening sentence. This is the nature of improv and has to be embraced.

I'm doing my damndest to free my cast from the pattern of following every great show with a weak one. This means focusing on the consistency deficit within each show. So every moment with the cast is precious.

Today was a strange show in that we went on 20 minutes late (unheard of at a Festival) because of an issue with a punter in a wheelchair. The actors might have been thrown but weren't.

I'm still too pessimistic to declare the pattern broken but the signs are good.

Frustration

Being a non-performing director at a festival is a very different thing to the same role in a London season and some days it's easy to understand why there are so many solo performers at the Fringe.

The downside of going it alone is of course that you prepare alone, flier alone and spend a miserable 23 hours locked in your own head after a show tanks.

The upside is that your cast (aka 'you') turn up when they're meant to, focused and ready to engage in the task that brought you to Edinburgh in the first place; the show.

Suffice to say, I am learning. Every day I am learning.

The things we tell ourselves

The Edinburgh Fringe has been likened to a prison that just one person escapes from a year. That person is the winner of the Edinburgh Comedy Award (previously known as the Perrier Award and still referred to as such by everyone).

The rest of us inmates bounce around telling each other a series of palatable half-truths. My favourites so far have been: -

• Houses are down across the Festival this year because of the recession
  
• Free shows are doing better than paid shows this year because of the recession
• Houses are up but end-of-show contribution are down because of the recession

And of course: -

• A review is just one opinion

Relentless

The Edinburgh Fringe Festival is relentless. There are no days off and the second that one show comes down you're already thinking about the next one.

I love it!

Second guessing

The Festival is a marathon not a sprint. Already I've met bruised and beaten acts who are questioning why they're in Edinburgh.

In a 2006 interview for a Fringe podcast, veteran comic and The Now Show regular Mitch Benn identifies the three separate audiences at the festival and describes the frustration of trying to please them simultaneously.

The audiences in question are of course: -

1. Critics and reviewers; who need to seem decisive and knowledgeable
2. Agents and producers of TV and radio; who are looking for the Next Big Thing
3. Punters; who just want to be entertained

Obviously these needs run in parallel and the only possible response to this supposed dilemma is to follow the advice of that old fool Polonius. Do what you came up here to do.

No such thing as bad publicity

Before I left for Edinburgh on Tuesday I did a 15-minute radio interview for TalkSPORT to promote the cricket show. I almost never listen to commercial radio so was totally unaware of the programme in question. I had no sense whatsoever of their editorial viewpoint which regularly veers off sport to a default stance of extreme reactionary politics (Lock 'em up or send 'em 'ome. Better yet, 'ang 'em).

At yesterday's show a punter said that he had come to see us after hearing me on his favourite radio show, whose politics he agreed with wholeheartedly. As he represented a full third of the audience I decided to just get on with having fun at Andrew's expense.

Stress

Arrived in Edinburgh yesterday to be greeted by a very happy cast, an extremely focused stage manager and a total absence of promotional material. 24 hours later and I'm predicting that the continuing lack of promotional material will result in a decrease in the overall happiness of the cast.

I am assured that everyone is doing his or her best.

The Wolf

My favourite moment in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction is the scene where Jules and Vincent (two hitmen played by John Travolta and Samuel L Jackson) are panicking after accidentally shooting the black kid in the back of the moving car. In true hierarchical fashion they push the problem up the chain of command, calling their boss Marcellus and demanding that he deal with it: -

MARCELLUS

You ain't got no problems, Jules. I'm on the motherfucker. Go back in there, chill them niggers out and wait for The Wolf, who should be comin' directly.

JULES

You sendin' The Wolf?

MARCELLUS

Feel better?

JULES

Shit Negro, that's all you had to say.

Enter Winston Wolfe (Harvey Keitel) the fixer who charms those who need charming, brooks no dissent from those who need ordering around and so resolves the gory problem with absolute efficiency before riding off into the sunset with the beautiful Raquel.

In the script Tarantino capitalises 'The Wolf' to create the brand. Keitel's character has absolute high status whenever he is on screen and he deserves it because he gets the job done. He is Red Adair and Robert Towne and Guus Hiddink. He is the guy you go to when the stakes are so high that money has ceased to be a factor.

Every consultant on the planet should want to be The Wolf. The Wolf is recession-proof. The Wolf gets to pick and choose his jobs. The Wolf rides in, gets the job done with absolute efficiency, gets out and gets paid.

Know thy audience

Last night Andrew Watts and I did a London preview of our show about Test Cricket.

I find the idea of previewing an Edinburgh show in London counterintuitive. The American showbiz tradition has it that you do your out-of-town tryouts before taking a show to Broadway. This acts as a sort of extended dress rehearsal, a last chance to iron out the kinks before the final assault on ubercritical New York.

Yet in Britain every July this logic is reversed as the metropolis is flooded with underrehearsed shows frantically preparing for a provincial debut.

Andrew and I staged the cricket show as the 'second half' of a regular comedy night where we both perform regularly. Because the promoters really know what they're doing the room was jam-packed.

This was a mixed blessing for a show as specific as Watts & McCure Know the Score. Given the breadth of variety of shows on at the festival Edinburgh audiences are self-selecting. A hour listening to an Englishman and an Australian bang on about cricket certainly isn't everyone's cup of tea but if it is then we're the show for you. If not then there's about another fifty shows on synchronously with ours.

Last night's audience wasn't given that choice. They had paid their money to watch stand-up comedy and that offer was changed halfway through the night. The 10% of punters who love cricket thought that this was great. The 90% who either hated or in some cases had never even heard of the game were understandably underwhelmed.

Without discussing it beforehand on stage we each reverted to quite a lot of more general (ie non-cricket) material and I think most of the audience went away happy. So the show was a success but as a preview I fear that we learnt precious little as to whether the cricket-specific stuff works.

At least the 10% said they loved us.