By this time into my run at last year’s festival, my average audience size was less than half what it is this year, and I’d had one fairly duff night when I was just exhausted and wasn’t sparkly at all.
this year audience figures are up (28 in last night), I’ve played well and talked vaguely funny bollocks each night, and things are looking good. I now have three special guests booked – Guy Pratt on Friday, Julie McKee on Saturday, and Ronnie Golden on Sunday – three very fine performers, all with their own excellent shows at the festival, coming to enhance my gig in an entertaining way.
Last night’s gig went well again – some press peoples were in, so we’ll see if they like it, but all in all, it was a fun gig with some laughs, and a particularly bizarre version of MMFSOG (which I’ve started explaining for some reason – just seemed like a funny story, I guess…. maybe I’ll post it here one day.)
The audience looping percussion bit of the show is working really well – the resulting track, which I tend to take down similar lines each night, is a fun little improv thing, and often very strange, but it’s great to hear something coherent emerge out of the random collection of squeaks and utterances from the various volunteers.
My other big acheivement yesterday is that I managed to avoid pissed people for the entire day whilst flyering. I’ve just taken to not even offering flyers to people who look like they might have been near alcohol in the last 12 hours, as a self preservation method… It worked.
However, I did see a rather slow moving chap who was inadvertantly covered in posters by some over zealous theatre company. The second direct marketing fatality of the festival – suffocation under layers of earnest Shakespeare and sellotape.