Alex’s Blog

It’s the beginning of a new decade, so it’s time to sort yourself out. Do you want to be the same old grumpy, boring, fat and stupid you of the noughties? Of course not! So turn your life around, try something new and rid yourself of ugliness using my fantastic guide to a whole new you, for a whole new decade!

Step 1: A Positive Outlook

Yes, maybe you think January is actually a rubbish time to stop your life from being crap. It’s dark and cold, and the memories of a loving, laughter-filled and delicious Christmas are fading, to be replaced by the cold reality of your fat, grey reflection staring back at you in the bathroom mirror.

That’s why it’s time to Think Positive! Yes, you really can ignore reality if you just delude yourself enough! Turn that frown upside down! Those tears are tears of joy! You’re not fat, just cuddly! You’re not ugly, you just have an interesting face! You’re not sad and alone in a big scary world full of people you wish would die – you’re just independent!

At the end of every day, try to think of three good things that have happened to you that day. For example, although today has been a fairly average day for me, I can easily think of three good things about it:

• Today I wasn’t brutally murdered by an escaped maniac!
• I managed to eat all my breakfast without spilling any down myself! Shame about the cup of tea I had afterwards though.
• I got a letter! That shows there’s someone out there who cares! Even though it was an unscrupulous debt collection agency. Still, as they said themselves, it would be a real shame if something bad happened to my house – they’re such caring souls!

Step 2: Rebrand Yourself

So now you’re positive on the inside – it’s time to get positive on the outside too. Cast off your old name and go forth into the brave new world with a moniker that tells everybody who you are, and why you’re so great!

I hired a cutting-edge but cheap advertising agency to come up with a new brand. After several minutes of blue-sky thinking and meticulous market research, I now have a new identity to present to the world. Say goodbye to plain old “Alex Warren”, say hello to “Alexwar^® sponsored by Anusol”.

Step 3: Change Your Look

Hey, you with the stupid noughties face! Announce your new life to the world with a fresh new look…

Step 4: Give Up Alcohol

You might think that the best way to while away the bleak winter months would be to drink so heavily that you spend much of this early part of the year completely unconscious, and the rest of it utterly oblivious to the misery that surrounds you. Not so! We’re thinking positive, remember? You don’t need alcohol to lull you into your new happy-go-lucky way of life, you just need a mantra.

So, next time you find yourself reaching for that bottle of vodka, just sit down and repeat to yourself, “I’m happy, I’m happy, I’m happy, I’m happy, I’m happy, I’m happy, I’m so very happy, I’m happy, I’m happy, so very happy, happy, happy, everything is fine, everything is fine, everything is fine, everything is fine, everything is fine, I’m happy, I’m not crying, I will be OK, I’m fine, everything is fine, everything is fine” while rocking gently back and forth.

Step 5: A New Career

After following the above steps, you’ll probably turn up to work and realise that it just isn’t fulfilling you any more. And, by complete coincidence, you may find that your current place of employment are more than willing to let you seek out a new life elsewhere. They’ll be simply begging you to leave!

Perhaps you’ll find the job of dreams out there. Maybe you’ll decide that 2010 is the year for nothing but quiet contemplation, perhaps alone in a bedsit or some kind of hospital?

Step 6: Save Money

With your new direction, you’ll have a lot less money coming in, and you won’t be able to rely on your old friends to support you, because they will have stopped speaking to you. But they were useless anyway! They were holding you back, and you don’t want to return to your old ways now – you’ve come too far. Just think positive.

• Save on transport costs by walking everywhere, or just going nowhere!
• Eat less! You’ll save money, and not be quite so hideously fat!
• Stop washing your clothes! You may stink, but nobody will complain since nobody talks to you any more anyway! And we all like a bit of peace and quiet – so there’s a bonus!

Step 7: Your New Life Awaits

If you’ve followed this guide, you’ll have transformed from a sad, unloved, repugnant waste of space into a much happier one.

May all your dreams come true in 2010 (except those induced by heavy medication).

And so at last, after some delay, we arrive at the fifth and final part of my reviews of the shows I saw at Edinburgh. It’s been quite a long and drawn-out process. I hoped I might finish these reviews sooner to be honest. But never mind, we’re finally here, and there are only three shows left to talk about. Here are links to part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4.

Adams & Rea
at Pleasance Courtyard. Adams & Rea.

We did an “Of Mics And Men” “preview” “show” with Adams & Rea, so once again I’ll excuse myself the embarrassment of a full review, but if you like silly musical comedy about corner shops, picking up litter, and the BBC’s “Test The Nation”, this is for you, so check out their website for dates of upcoming gigs.

Chortle give them a 3 star review.

Alex Horne: Wordwatching
at Pleasance Courtyard

I’d never heard of Alex Horne until I saw him in the pretty shitty “We Need Answers”, which I reviewed in part 2. Although much of that show was sub-par, I did enjoy Horne’s geeky PowerPoint animations which he’d clearly spent far more time working on than was strictly necessary. So we decided to check out his full show, “Wordwatching”. This was all about his mission to introduce new words, and new meanings for existing words, into the English language. There are various reviews of the show on the man’s own website, so it seems pointless to repeat their various points here.

His attempt to have three Alex Hornes conversing with each other - one on a big screen, one on a small television and one real Alex Horne - was a jolly good attempt, even if his laptop crash ultimately turned it into more of an endearing failure. Jolly entertaining stuff though.

Rating: 7/10

Knock2Bag (Free)
at The Jekyll & Hyde.

Mark Restuccia was MC for this, our final free show before getting the train back to London. Also present were Albion Gray, Rupert Majendie and Mark Dandy. I won’t do a full review as I know Mark from my stand-up course, and the others vicariously from various open mic nights - but I will say I was impressed with the quality of the filmed sketches used as inserts between the comedians. Nice work!

And so, at last, that’s all 20 of the shows I saw at Edinburgh, reviewed or at least pseudo-reviewed, or, at the very least, listed. I think the only thing I can conclude is that reviewing is a waste of time. Especially since Edinburgh is now over, and so, except for the few which are currently touring, you can’t even go to see most of the shows any more. Which must make you wonder why I bothered writing all of these reviews in the first place – and why you bothered reading them, since most people I know probably will have given up reading these pointless reviews long ago.

And so we continue with part four of my reviews of the shows I saw at the Edinburgh festival. It’s getting quite tiring this. Not too many more to do now though. Here are links to part 1, part 2 and part 3.

Glenn Wool: Goodbye Scars
at Underbelly

We went to see this as he’d been recommended independently by several people, and I’d never heard of him, so it seemed worth a shot. He’s a Canadian “rock and roll” type comedian, with material about sex and drugs and that. Not usually my cup of tea, to be honest – but there was enough intelligence here that even I could enjoy the jokes about chlamydia.

My rating: 7/10

The Late Show
at Underbelly.

Michael Legge was the excellent MC for this. It’s quite hard to find the right words to describe a compere as good – I want to say that he warmed everyone up well, without overshadowing the acts, but that just makes him sounds like a bit of a failure, which he wasn’t by any means. A good MC can really make or break a comedy evening, and Legge’s banter hit the spot.

The acts were:

Andrew Lawrence: I’d not seen Andrew Lawrence before, and I was expecting good, if warped, things. He certainly was very strange. I could imagine Andrew Lawrence being one of Jim Davidson’s heavily mutated great-great-grandchildren after some kind of nuclear holocaust. By which I mean, he’s a fucking strange bloke but I’m not sure I really liked him that much, hence my rating: 4/10.

Janey Godley is a scary Glasweigan who terrified most of the front couple of rows. She was very entertaining and certainly not someone I would want to mess with, so my rating is 7/10.

Rob Deering was the final act, and this was the same day that we’d seen him do his Boobs 2008 show, which I reviewed in part 3. I was worried we would pretty much be seeing the same show again, but fortunately he did what was essentially his show from last year instead. So it was more songs with the guitar and the funky record-a-few-bars-so-you-can-accompany-yourself gizmo – and it was much better than earlier. A drunker audience and a better venue made it an excellent end to the evening, so my rating is a big fat 10/10.

The Mid 90s La La La (Free)
at Espionage

This was one of the few free shows we went to. It was Friday, and we’d been in Edinburgh for six days by this point and we’d barely seen any free shows at all, so in the afternoon we decided to go to the nearest one.

Patrick Lappin and John Osborne presented some silly poems about the years 1994-1997. It was apparently directed by Luke Wright, though you have to wonder how much direction goes into two blokes standing up and reading some poems. The material was decent enough for a free show, I suppose, but they could really have done with interacting with the audience a bit more.

My rating: 4/10

John Gordillo: Divide and Conga
at Pleasance Dome

We went to see this because it got a five-star review in Chortle. It was in quite a small venue which was packed, and Gordillo opened by trying to revise our expectations down a bit – he was surprised by the number of good reviews he’d got. It was a show all about his staunchly Marxist Spanish father, and I can’t really describe it any better than the Chortle review. I thought it was pretty good, but for me it fell a bit short of the five-star goodness I was expecting.

Here’s a three star review from the Guardian for some balance.

My rating: 8/10

Carnival des Phenomenes
at Gilded Balloon

This bizarre late-night show was very cabaret-ish, like the sort of thing you would stumble across in Lost Vagueness at Glastonbury. It opened with some DJing from a man wearing an enormous gorilla head. It was that kind of evening.

Rob Broderick was the MC, and the acts were:

Frisky and Mannish: Fantastic musical comedy duo who did various songs and medleys, including a brilliantly sinister rendition of Eternal Flame by The Bangles. Check out their website – they’ve got various dates coming up in London. My rating: 9/10

Some disco guy: I’ve no idea who this guy was. He was just some disco guy with a massive wig. He taught us some silly disco moves. My rating: PG

X Files Improv: A guy who apparently used to be in the X Files, doing some improv. He was quite a minor character in the X Files. He apparently does a full show where he takes suggestions from the audience and turns it into a “hilarious” X Files episode. We thankfully got only a small taster of his tedious brand of oh-my-god-I’ve-seen-this-all-before improvised comedy. The disco guy was doing sound effects to the scene and he was by far the funniest, because he seemed to have no respect for the man whatsoever. My rating: 1/10

Doktor Cocacolamcdonalds: He appears on stage wearing only his pants and a lot of makeup, and plays a collection of broken 80′s Casio keyboards and guitars. You couldn’t make it up. Only he obviously has. My rating: £2.88/10

Rick Shapiro: I have a theory that people only like Russell Brand because he used to be a bit of a druggie, and people think that’s so cool it means he doesn’t actually need to be as clever or as funny as he thinks he is. Anyway, this isn’t a review of Russell Brand, it’s a review of Rick Shapiro, and my point is that Rick Shapiro would eat Russell Brand for breakfast. Actually that’s a bit tame. Rick Shapiro would anally rape Russell Brand at a family breakfast in front of his grandmother, pounding harder and harder until Russell Brand’s anus is gaping and weeping blood all over his boiled egg and weeping relatives. Then he would eat him and shit him back out into his grandmother’s eyes. I’d love to extend the metaphor even further, but I think you pretty much get the picture. Also, I’ve just remembered that Rachel’s mum reads this blog. Anyway. Rick Shapiro was a drug-addict rent boy, and is clearly screwed-up in real life almost as much as his comedy is. It was a shoutly, rambling, incoherent mess of a comedy set, which apparently is par for the course for him. Frankly I thought it was absolute crap, and left after enduring it for way too long, as it seemed it might never finish. So, Rick Shapiro wins the honour of my first zero rating: 0/10.

The Guardian has a review of a show that he did back in March, which sums him up pretty well.

That’s all for part four. Only 3 shows left to review…

This is part three of my reviews of the shows I saw at this year’s Edinburgh festival. Here are links to part 1 and part 2.

The Honourable Men of Art
at The Stand

Daniel Kitson, David O’Doherty and Andy Zaltzman were joined in the second half by Alun Cochrane for this late show, which was basically just them dicking about. Much of the performance was taken up with a very closely fought Scrabble match between Kitson and a member of the audience. And in the second half, another member of the audience was challenged by Cochrane to a dressing-up race. There was very little prepared material, save for some ridiculous impressions by Andy Zaltzman (Marvin Gaye: “Hello dad, you look cross”), and some comedy songs by David O’Doherty (who has just won the if.comedy award).

All good fun, if somewhat bizarre. My rating: 6/10

Dan Antopolski’s Penetrating Gaze
at Underbelly.

Dan Antopolski is back after a few years’ absence in which he has become a parent. This was the theme that dominated, but it didn’t prevent him from randomly flitting between various topics. His jokes are so clever and quick he can sometimes be halfway through the next one before you’ve worked it out, and I think this is probably why he seemes to divide audiences. I think he’s an absolute genius, yet some reviewers (and some audiences I’ve seen at Antopolski gigs) just don’t seem to get him.

Fest, for example, only give him two stars:

“Unfortunately the fact that he’s “a family man these days” is the show’s only discernible theme … the increasingly sweaty comic raises few laughs from a tepid audience bemused, rather than amused, by his seemingly pointless anecdotes … Antopolski conducts bizarre €œconversations€ with himself in the guise of his heavily-accented Slavic cousin. Whilst these lengthy episodes add variety to an otherwise tedious monologue, they become increasingly muddled and near-impossible to follow as Antopolski himself loses track of which voice he’s speaking in. Similarly, while his raps about sandwiches, racism and babies are well-delivered, the lyrics are simply unfunny.”

The bit about losing track of what voice he’s speaking in – that’s supposed to be the joke. This reviewer must be one of the 50% of people who bafflingly just don’t seem to get Dan Antopolski – you can tell from the phrases like “bemused”, “near-impossible to follow” and the sweepingly arrogant “simply unfunny”. Maybe if you’re simple, it is unfunny.

Fortunately, Chortle agrees with me, giving this show four stars.

“There€™s a strong sense of cheeky fun running through this, with Antopolski clearly enjoying every minute, happy just to be entertaining himself; if the audience come along too, then it€™s a bonus.”

In the show I saw, Antopolski himself pointed out the crapness of the review he got in The Scotsman, which was fooled into believing that he was re-hashing material from 2002. Which all quite nicely goes to illustrate how reviews are so subjective as to be almost completely worthless. You can’t tell from a low star rating if the show is bad, or if the reviewer just doesn’t like the same kind of comedy as you. Or is unable to be able to identify half of the jokes in the first place.

Still, I think Antopolski is great, and if, on the strength of this recommendation, you go to see his show and don’t like it, then not only have you failed to understand Dan Antopolski, you have failed in life. But it’s all just my opinion of course, because that’s all reviews are. My rating: 9/10

Reginald D. Hunter: No Country for Grown Men
at Pleasance Grand

The Pleasance Grand is the largest comedy venue I went to in Edinburgh, and it definitely changes the atmosphere. I much prefer a smaller space for comedy, but Reginald D. Hunter (website is a bit out of date) coped well, addressing the issue at the start of the show.

He makes some very interesting and intelligently argued points about the infantilisation of modern men – possibly too much for the Chortle reviewer, who seems to want more punchlines, giving the show three stars:

“These jokes are good, but the rate€™s slow, with so much time spent on expounding his opinions, which aren€™t always compelling enough to deserve such a big chunk of proceedings.”

I don’t think the gag rate is important – in fact, Hunter’s ability to keep an entire audience listening silently for ages, before delivering the ultimate punchline, is what makes him so special. It’s rare to find a comedian who can keep us all interested in what he’s saying without needing to deliver a gag every twenty seconds.

My rating: 7/10

Faultless & Torrance: The Three Musketeers
at Underbelly

I know half of this duo from the stand-up course I did last year, so I’ll invoke my rule about not reviewing people I know. But I will say that it was really good fun and really, really silly. There is quite a nice review of it by The Stage.

Rob Deering: Boobs 2008
at Underbelly

You can’t help but love Rob Deering, with his big silly face and guitar, and in recent years his exciting technological contraption that lets him accompany himself by recording a few bars and then looping it, allowing him to build up a complete multi-tracked song.

It wasn’t the ideal venue though – a dark cellar that was too big and had a dripping ceiling. The audience was surprisingly small and quite quiet to start with. It took a while to get everyone going, but things had warmed up by the second half.

For a change I will completely agree with the review in Fest:

“The dank interior of the Baby Belly caves doesn’t really help the atmosphere either, despite its stoney grandeur. The leaky roof and musty odours, left festering for hundreds of years, simply don’t complement the sunshine-and-smiles image that Deering’s stage persona emits. This isn’t poor comedy, however; it’s just nothing new from a comedian that many Fringe audiences have seen before and, while it might please ardent fans, it’s not likely to win Deering any new devotees.”

My rating: 7/10

That’s it for part 3. I’ve now reviewed 12 shows, so there are 8 left. Until next time…

Here’s part two of my reviews of the shows I saw at Edinburgh, in chronological order. You can find part 1 here.

Just to clarify, since I’m not a proper reviewer, thankfully I don’t have to care about making these reviews particularly detailed, or coming up with a long and contrived treatise on the premise of each show. So these reviews are brief, but probably not very helpful.

Richard Herring: The Headmaster’s Son
at Underbelly

Richard Herring has done an Edinburgh show every year for a very long time. I thought it was a lot stronger than the show I saw a couple of years ago, “Menage à un” – and I thought that one was pretty good. For a show that’s all about growing up and the relationship with one’s father, I thought the best gag was about paedophilia.

A five star review from Chortle, and for a change I agree with it all.

My rating: A*

Elizabeth and Raleigh: Late But Live
at Underbelly’s Pasture

This is a new play written by Stewart Lee. It has a website here. It’s really very silly indeed. Simon Munnery plays a pasty-faced, scruffy Queen Elizabeth I, and Miles Jupp takes on the role of Sir Walter Raleigh.

The Chortle review gives it 3 stars and seems to think they were taking it all too seriously. The Times was even harsher with a 2 star review, but does tell us “Owen Lewis’s production will surely loosen up as the month progresses”. I thought the best bits were when Munnery and Jupp tried valiantly not to crack up, so the reviewers were probably watching very early performances.

It’s not exactly high theatre – in fact it’s all rather sixth form – and it starts off a bit slowly, until Elizabeth enters through the middle of the audience, throwing money. Munnery’s ridiculous facial expressions were worth the price of admission alone, and this is a good fun hour that’s just completely bonkers.

My rating: 1603/2671 (= approx 6/10)

We Need Answers
at Pleasance Dome.

Mark Watson hosts this late-night game show, with Alex Horne in control of some silly PowerPoint animations and sound effects. Tim Key reads the questions, but for the most part seemed completely pointless. He seemed to be enjoying himself, which is all very well, but he did little to entertain anybody else. Also I found his beard and glasses inexplicably annoying, probably because it looked like he was trying to be Daniel Kitson, when he clearly wasn’t. Maybe I’m being too harsh on Tim Key. Maybe I just wasn’t seeing him showing off his full potential. But I’ve Googled him and I still can’t work out what the point of him is.

Anyway, “We Need Answers” is a game show where contestants have to answer questions that have been sent in that day to AQA, the text-a-question-and-they’ll-answer-it-for-a-quid service. We got a free book of the best AQA questions and answers as we went in. It made me wonder why the hell I had to pay to see this show, given all the references to fucking AQA everywhere. Maybe I could have texted in and asked. Maybe I could have texted AQA to ask what the point of Tim Key was as well.

The contestants were Richard Herring. who we’d seen mere hours earlier in his own show, and Kirsten Schaal, who played the fan in Flight of the Conchords. It was a closely fought match, and at one point they each had to erect a tent, though I don’t think at any point that had been a question that was texted in to AQA. It also seemed a bit dangerous with them erecting the poles in a confined space. I don’t know what they would have done if they’d taken someone’s eye out. Maybe they’d have texted AQA.

All in all it was a bit too much of comedy love-in for me. It was entertaining enough but I wasn’t in any hurry to go back to see the subsequent rounds of the competition.

My rating: 3/10

Daniel Kitson: 66a Church Road – A Lament Made of Memories and Kept in Suitcases
at Traverse Theatre.

Daniel Kitson is a genius and without a doubt my favourite comedian. I saw him doing stand-up at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre earlier this year, where he spoke for a while about moving out of his flat in Crystal Palace. In this new one-man theatre show in Edinburgh, he fills in the details.

It’s basically a love story, with the flat fleshed out just a though it were a human character, warts and all. Kitson sits in the middle of the stage, surrounded by suitcases. At various points, the suitcases light up to reveal miniature dioramas of parts of his flat. It’s captivating, brilliantly written stuff. I can’t find a single review with a bad point to say about it – not this one, this one, this one, this one or this one. An excellent, amazing, fantastic show, and we seem to have a consensus. How can Kitson possibly follow this up? Maybe AQA knows?

My rating: 66/66

That’ll do for part 2. That’s 7 shows reviewed, 13 left to do, so stay tuned.