Stand-up & Be Recounted: Paul Kerensa

Preview time! Please come along.

I had my first preview last night for the Genesis show that I'll be doing chez Edinburgh (and London) this August. It's a show all about the book of Genesis, with guest comics and other surprises (if I think of any). Last night went better than I thought it would, so that's nice and reassuring. But there's lots to be done - this is the season where comedians tremble like it's their first gig again, as we take to the stage with an hour of mostly new jokes, or ideas that might be jokes, or words that might make a sentence which may or may not prompt a smirk. So we need you!

These gigs are always at smaller venues, hidden away in secrecy so that the reviewers can't find us - this means that audience members are sparse. Plus the sun comes out (or should do, any day now), so people go into beer gardens and way from comedy clubs. So if you can make it to any previews, and quote 'Your blog said you'd buy me a drink if I turned up', then I'll buy you a drink. Deal.

At some point shortly I'll probably also post this on Facebook too somehow, if I can work out if it's a Group or an Event or a Note or a Posted Item (I've whittled it down - it's definitely not a Photo). And you might get an email from me about it too. But you heard it here first - here's where you can the Genesis show, either in preview or in finished form. Previews are cheaper of course. Oh, and I'll also list where I'm doing a couple of performances of last year's Edinburgh show, Back To The Futon.

MAY 2007
Wed 30th - GENESIS SHOW (preview), Manchester

JUNE 2007
Fri 8th - BACK TO THE FUTON SHOW, The Lowry, Salford
Thu 14th - BACK TO THE FUTON SHOW, Ammanford Miners' Theatre, South Wales
Sun 17th - GENESIS SHOW (preview), Manchester
Tue 19th - GENESIS SHOW (preview - well, bits of), The Unholy Trinity, Liverpool Comedy Festival

JULY 2007
Thu 12th - GENESIS SHOW (preview), Hat Factory, Luton
Sat 14th - GENESIS SHOW (preview), Komedia, Brighton
Mon 16th - GENESIS SHOW (preview), Bedford
Tue 17th - GENESIS SHOW (preview), Norwich Arts Centre
Mon 30th - GENESIS SHOW (preview), Soho Comedy Club
Tue 31st - GENESIS SHOW (preview), Pen-to-Paper Club, Finnegan's Wake, Ealing Green

AUGUST 2007
Sat 4th - GENESIS SHOW, Liberties Bar, Camden Fringe
Mon 6th - GENESIS SHOW, Liberties Bar, Camden Fringe
Tue 7th - GENESIS SHOW, Liberties Bar, Camden Fringe
Thu 9th - GENESIS SHOW, Liberties Bar, Camden Fringe
Fri 10th - GENESIS SHOW, Liberties Bar, Camden Fringe
Sat 11th - GENESIS SHOW, Liberties Bar, Camden Fringe
Tue 14th - GENESIS SHOW, Just The Tonic @ The Caves (venue 53), Edinburgh Fringe (1:40pm, £5)
Wed 15th - GENESIS SHOW, Just The Tonic @ The Caves (venue 53), Edinburgh Fringe (1:40pm, £5)
Thu 16th - GENESIS SHOW, Just The Tonic @ The Caves (venue 53), Edinburgh Fringe (1:40pm, £5)
Fri 17th - GENESIS SHOW, Just The Tonic @ The Caves (venue 53), Edinburgh Fringe (1:40pm, £5)
Sat 18th - GENESIS SHOW, Just The Tonic @ The Caves (venue 53), Edinburgh Fringe (1:40pm, £5)
Sun 19th - GENESIS SHOW, Just The Tonic @ The Caves (venue 53), Edinburgh Fringe (1:40pm, £5)
Mon 20th - GENESIS SHOW, Just The Tonic @ The Caves (venue 53), Edinburgh Fringe (1:40pm, £5)
Tue 21st - GENESIS SHOW, Just The Tonic @ The Caves (venue 53), Edinburgh Fringe (1:40pm, £5)
Wed 22nd - GENESIS SHOW, Just The Tonic @ The Caves (venue 53), Edinburgh Fringe (1:40pm, £5)
Thu 23rd - GENESIS SHOW, Just The Tonic @ The Caves (venue 53), Edinburgh Fringe (1:40pm, £5)
Fri 24th - GENESIS SHOW, Just The Tonic @ The Caves (venue 53), Edinburgh Fringe (1:40pm, £5)
Sat 25th - GENESIS SHOW, Just The Tonic @ The Caves (venue 53), Edinburgh Fringe (1:40pm, £5)

Worth checking with me directly before coming down to any of the previews, cos some do cancel or rearrange, and also some are quite vague (good like in finding the show in just 'Manchester')...

A leftwing audience, a rightwing audience, and a gig I didn't know about

St Albans - lovely show, redoing my Edinburgh from last year, Back To The Futon. Due to an administrative error, I don't know I was booked in to do this till that afternoon (I'd planned a nice evening in the pub with Mr Kronenbourg and Ms Artois), so it's handy I checked my email and suddenly received directions of how to get to St Albans' Maltings Theatre, because when I got there, they've got it all printed up nice in their seasonal booklet. Normally you can be replaced at gigs last minute, but when a paying audience are expecting an hour show about Back To The Future that's been in their local theatre programme since Christmas, it's difficult to find a comedian last minute to wax lyrical for 60 minutes about such a specific time-travel comedy caper.

Peterborough - two odd gigs. A small hotel in the market town of Oundle had us do half an hour of basically corporate comedy (at standard non-corporate circuit rates - well done, Mr Promoter) to 50-something golf club members. This audience didn't want to be told anything new or be taken on flights of fancy, but were delighted to hear anything they'd read in Daily Mail reinforced a bit more.

The second Peterborough gig I didn't actually do, but I offered to help out my mate Tony Vino, who was running a Fair Trade gig in some organic ethnic hippie left-wing spliff-passing cafe... basically everything that the audience at the first Peterborough gig would have loved to use as targets now they couldn't fox-hunt any more. I didn't make it on stage at the hippie gig, because they had a band on who over-ran, delivering what they called 'experimental music', but which we all recognised as 'feedback'. On stage they were twiddling a sound machine to make these hideous noises, and the whole scene looked like someone fiddling with a car battery trying to make it work, but in the process somehow finding the noise of the devil. One of the sound effects they happed upon really just sounded like a curry coming out in a bad bad way.

Safety courses and Fat Bryan

Yesterday was an odd mix of brushes with near-fame, and the ultimate in corporate wastes-of-time. Twas a day of writing at TV Centre, and a gig in the evening at Castelnau, which is an uber-posh area (road, really) between Hammersmith and Barnes. It went like this.

It was the last day of writing on part 1 of series 2 of After You've Gone, the Nicholas Lyndhurst/Celia Imrie sitcom about a mother-in-law living with her son-in-law - tipped as the new My Family, if you can conceive of such a thing. We finished early, so I popped up to the BBC Club, the cafe/bar on the 4th floor of the doughnut. Here they have complimentary Radio Timeses. Or so I've thought for the past few months. Today I was challenged by a young blonde arrogantine for my Club card. I thought that was only a Tesco thing. But no, it costs money apparently to use the BBC Club, where only the day before one of the writers on AYG (as we wittily abridge it) found a maggot in her chicken salad, after already taking back an uncooked bit of fish. So £5 a month for that substandard food and a complimentary Radio Times. For that money you can buy a Radio Times each week and still have change left for as many maggots as you can eat. So I told them where to go, and turned on my heel to buy nick a Radio Times from reception instead.

Back in the Writers Room, we'd all received an email - none of us had completed the mandatory online production safety course so no skulking off early till we had. You click on it and it says, "Estimated completion time: 9 hours." You're kidding me. That's longer than a normal workday. It's 9 times as long as a writer's normal workday. So we thought we'd make a start at least. Only our computers have no sound. And this course doesn't cater for that. 5 minute long videos with no subtitles, followed by a multiple choice question: "Who was at fault? (a) The producer, (b) The director, (c) The cameraman, or (d) Anthea Turner?" Well given we couldn't hear the situation in the first place, this was guesswork. Sadly for none of the questions, the fault was with Anthea Turner, although she was often there as an option. When we got onto the questions about "When hiring a motorbike stuntman..." and "Which forms should you check before employing a tugboat and skipper?", we were yelling at our mute screens our own questions, mostly asking why the hell writers who never leave this room need to know about the safety of any more than using a nib, let alone motorbike stuntmen.

So, no free Radio Times, and 2 hours wasted on a pointless safety course. In amongst this I lost my travelcard, meaning another £15 to get home, and I had a phone call from Barclays to call them back about something, then was kept on hold for a record (for me) 40 minutes, before finally reaching them to hear that they didn't need to speak to me after all. Lovely.

Oh, then the gig. Well I walked to it, of course, because I'd lost my travelcard and I was buggered if I was going to fork out again. White City to Barnes is a good hour-plus walk, but it was a nice evening. The gig was in a very posh road, where the audience of 20 included the brother of someone called Susan in Grease Is The Word, an actress who'd just been in Dalziel and Pascoe, and the agent of Judi Dench, Richard Griffiths, etc etc, who had the voice of God. And boyband boy Bryan McFadden, formerly of Kerri Ta Kanewa or T'Kona, or whatever she's called, now of Delta Goodrem.

I didn't know 'Fat Bryan from Westlife', as my friends used to call him, was in until the 2nd interval when someone tipped me off. By this time, I'd already, in my role as MC, raved about how Roxette were the pinnacle of pop music, and how it's been shite ever since. And how, what with Grease Is The Word and Any Dream Will Do, we don't need any more rubbish pop stars. And whether or not the local area was full of celebrities, and how only the cheap ones would come in here. Well he had been talking throughout, so balls to him. So as the show came to an end, I found myself annoying him with stuff like, "I hadn't realised we had a celebrity in... the actress that's in Dalziel and Pascoe!" He hated that.

So home I went, sans travelcard, with a brief hide in the train loo around Woking when the guard started checking tickets. Meanwhile Fat Bryan went home to his multi-million pound house and/or Delta Goodrem. But who's the real winner? I bet he doesn't know what contractors to use when hiring a trapeze artist for a BBC OB shoot.

Any Joseph Will Definitely Not Do

So Daniel's out of Any Dream Will Do. He of my former drama school, friend of my old housemate at uni, and best friend of my girlfriend. Three totally unconnected links, so I thought the least I could do was support him. And he was very good - he should have stayed in on Saturday, but no, alas the power that be didn't get behind his version of Evergreen. A quick google search and you'll see the internet is in uproar (ok, slight exaggeration) about him being booted out by Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber, the composer who wrote and cast his attractive actress wife in The Phantom of the Opera, a show all about an ugly composer obsessing over an attractive actress... Subtext, Your Lordship?

Anyway, Daniel was hard done by. In the show on the night he sang Bring Him Home from Les Miserables alongside Lewis to sing for their survival, and Danny-boy sang it better than I've heard it done in Les Mis itself. Lewis stood there like a gangly wet turkey.

I suppose Daniel didn't look as Josephy as the others - he lacked the long blond hair and generally pathetic look that the others have, but certainly had the best voice in the competition. He will go onto bigger and better things, and I look forward to him opening in a show that trounces Joseph at the box office.

I have one 'bigger and better thing' that I'd like him to start with, if he will. I'm doing this Edinburgh (and London) show about the book of Genesis, and it'd be great to have a brief cameo from him in the bit about Joseph... So maybe we can have him playing Joseph after all. Although it won't be in the West End to thousands of people. It'll be in Crouch End to about ten people.

Sitcom Club

Went to Sitcom Club t'other night. It's like a book club, but with sitcom writers, talking about sitcoms. We don't get to meet many people sitting at home writing words on a screen, so it's a nice chance to sit in a pub and bitch about how many shows we've each had rejected.

This time we had probably our biggest turn-out - 10 or 15 or so, including David Mitchell off of Mitchell & Webb and things, James Bachman, oh, and it's all down to Mr James Cary, off of my friends on Facebook, and writer of a variety of radio shows and all-round good egg.

This time we were discussing Allo Allo, and the BBC's alleged interest in bringing back that type of ensemble sitcom. Do they really want it? Do any of us really want to write it even if they do want it? I don't know that we reached any all-encompassing conclusion to any of these questions, but we did have fun saying "Good moaning" and "What a mistake-a da make-a" and "It is I, Leclerc" and "'tler!" and drinking and chatting.

It's been quite a week for name-dropping. David Mitchell on Monday evening. Nicholas Lyndhurst at the readthrough on Monday daytime. Johnny Vegas was at the gig I was at on Sunday (never met him before, seemed to enjoy my stuff). And I swear I saw the bloke from those French/English Renault adverts ("Eiffel Tower?"/"Blackpool Tower") waiting for a lift (or ascenseur) this mornin (ce matin).

After You've Gone to Jongleurs

Today I attended my first proper big readthrough of a script - for After You've Gone, series 2, three episodes therein. And given that I always get a little starstruck, it was indeed a feast of comedy celebrity. Nicholas Lyndhurst (who I managed not to call 'Rodney' - I thought 'Dave' would be a little subtler), Celia Imrie, the girl who plays Tracy Beaker, and guesting for one episode, Nicky Henson, aka the medallion man from that episode of Fawlty Towers. Oh yes, there were all there.

The episodes read well, and I was happy to hear a couple of my own additions getting some hefty laughs. One or two didn't, but that's the way of things. It's odd how you can be convinced that something's the funniest thing in the world until you actually hear someone try it, then realise it really isn't. There was a sitcom on a couple of years ago which was exactly that - everyone involved thought, no, knew, that it was going to be hilarious, and the best thing on telly, until it aired, and then as one they watched it from their own homes and all came to the sudden realisation that it was solid crap. Sure enough, no series 2. But all the way along you can be so blinkered.

In other, similar funny-is-subjective news, I was at Jongleurs Camden on Saturday. Twas a rough ol' night. I did okay, but with 7 stag dos and 3 hen dos in it was always going to be a rocky one, and for a couple of the acts, it certainly was. One act was on who's a big name on the circuit, an established TV warm-up and even now a comic actor and host of his own chat show. And he's brilliant. But all he got were stares. I thought if he's getting nothing out of them, we're in trouble. Thankfully I trimmed down all me gags to the barest bones, and the drunken mass understood and/or got most of them, and laughter was had, but it weren't easy. I felt victorious on the night, but I think in stress alone I've knocked 5 years off my life just from that Saturday night.

Blowing mostly someone else's trumpet

I just heard that RTS-award-winning sitcom Not Going Out is now also Golden Rose of Montreux award-winning sitcom Not Going Out. Ooh. That's a nice big international award for best comedy in the world or something. I only wrote bits of series 1 (as I'm only writing bits of series 2, though a few more bits), but of the 6 episodes I fully co-wrote one (although the credits won't tell you that if you watch it, cos Avalon cocked it up) and I additionally materialised on 5 episodes. So I don't know how much of the Golden Rose I can lay claim to. Not much. Maybe a couple of thorny bits. Or maybe, if it was a box of (Golden) Roses, I'd get the hard hazelnut one in the blue wrapper that no one really likes. But anyway, I'm sure I'll find some way to worm this win onto my cv.

In other news, tonight I did a first - a double-up of two different Edinburgh shows. At 8pm I could be found doing day 1 of my mini-tour of Back To The Futon, 2006's Edinburgh show, in Hemel Hempstead. And at 10:30pm, I could be found doing some work-in-progress for 2007's Edinburgh show, Genesis, at a school fundraiser gig in Sunbury-upon-Thames. The first one was more polished, but I suppose it should be.

Since a few people have asked, I'll cobble together a list of where and when these work-in-progress/preview shows will be, and either email it out to people or generally circulate it round the internet somehow. If anyone's particularly interested, lemme know and I'll convey that info direct.

Tales from the slab

Narratively, I shouldn't be here now. I don't want to sound morbid, but when I was in hopsital on Wednesday, if this was a story, I wouldn't have come out again. I'd had a nice evening in the pub with lots of my friends on Monday. I'd had a nice meal with my parents the night before. I'd just finished lots of work, and the only work I had ahead of me were a few solo pipe-dream projects, reminiscent of those moments in war films when Little Private Jimmy says, "When I get home to Blighty, I'm going to set up my own dog-grooming business..." Alright, that one never happened in a film, but if it did, you know that he'd be pushing up the daisies by the last reel. Oh, and as well as that, I was meant to tell the hopsital 2 days before if I had a cough, cold or flu, and I didn't tell them, and I did have one, right up till the day of the op.

Anyway, I beat the narrative odds, and I'm fine now. It was merely a camera being shoved somewhere that's traditionally one-way in gentlemen. It wasn't a long journey for the camera.

Anaesthetic was fun anyway. I was hoping for gas, but I hadn't realised that they haven't done that in years. I remember the injection used to ache like buggery (well, not exactly like buggery), but they've clearly got some new improved formula, because it was a lovely experience. You can just feel your head getting really high - it's a great legal rush. More please. What's that? It's opium and I can't? Grr to you.

But you know when you've got a fart brewing, but that you're lying on the slab about to be put to sleep? I knew that if I kept control I could clench it in, but I also knew that in about 6 seconds I'd be out cold and lose that clenching possibility. So my last words to the docs were: "Sorry, by the way." And the last thing I heard them so was, "Sorry for what?" And I was out. Oh to be a fly on the wall 5 seconds later, as they all realised, and as one cried, "You dirty bastard!" as they shoved that camera a little more violently than usual as punishment...

Count backwards from 10...

I'm going to hospital tomorrow. How exciting. I get gas and everything. Proper general anaesthetic. I'm quite excited, because it'll be like a weekend, except no matter how much I'm begged, I won't be able to do any work for anyone. Someone did try. He called me up and asked if I could look at a script during my anaesthetic on Wednesday. When I told him what an anaesthetic was, he said, "Well can you be thinking about it over in your mind?" It's not like a day off. It's not even like just before you go to sleep. I'm going to be out cold. No I can't read your script then, and no I can't just be thinking about it. I'll be having drug-induced hallucinations. If you want me to add those things to your script, I can, but the beeb had better invent some new channel like BBC3extra where they can put it, because it's going to make naff all sense to anyone but the permanently spliffed.

Anyway, off blog till after then. All grapes welcome, and I shall clock back in with reports of crazed giant glove-puppets and whatever else the nitrous oxide throws up.

Oh, and it's nothing serious, thanks for wondering (you didn't? Then you're the sick one). It's a camera being shoved somewhere I don't want to be awake for. I've asked if I can get a copy of the video they make - if this happens, I'll be sure to post some exciting pictures here. It'll be like Inner Space.