Bit late notice (only confirmed this morning) and a bit far away, but my next gig is tomorrow at The Adelaide Pub, Teddington, TW11 0AU at 8pm. It’s two minutes away from Teddington Station (exit at the ticket office side).

I’ve got some more gigs coming up in April, and I’ll post the details here soon.

Plenty of comedy is about rejection, so I suppose I should look on the bright side of me dropping out of the Laughing Horse Arbitrary New Act of the Year Competition in the first round – it provides plenty of fuel for my comedy fire.

I was a bit annoyed by it really. I’d watched a different heat the day before, and they’d put through six out of fourteen acts into the second round. So I thought I had a pretty good chance.

I was on about half-way through the second half and was pretty pleased with my performance – plenty of big laughs, definitely up there with the best ones in that round, or so I thought. And if they let through about half of the acts, it should be in the bag.

Well they say pride comes before a fall. I discovered this remains true even if the pride is strictly internal.

I was rather shocked when they announced that they were going to put through three people instead of two – I was expecting about double that, based on the previous evening. But then I was a fool to expect any rationality in a comedy competition. The whims of the judges and organisers were against me this time. Oh well.

It’s not the first time I’ve experienced a comedy rejection, and it certainly won’t be the last. Here are a couple of previous rejections (admittedly from quite a while back):

“Only a few of the lines made me laugh”. Thanks “HP”. That’s surely better going than a lot of BBC sitcoms. Not that I’m still bitter about this letter, eight years on.

Hmm, I’m pretty sure “Recommendation: Writer shows promise” must have been the lowest level of comedy rating as well. Surely they wouldn’t have the balls to say “clearly no talent whatsoever”?

This one was at least a bit more helpful – it told me in a bit more detail just how my sitcom was crap. And to be fair, it was really, really crap.

Apparently that guy from Hat Trick, Pete Atkin, used to do musical collaborations with Clive James, and was the voice of a minor character in the Wallace and Gromit film. Ho hum – probably no need to write in to Comedy Connections just yet. One day I hope to have somewhat less tenuous links with the comedy world. But if I’m going to get there I’m going to have to face a hell of a lot more rejection first.

I have three gigs coming up at different venues, so please come along if you can: 

Thursday 24th January: The Whoopie Cushion, Camden
The Camden Tup, 2-4 Greenland Place, NW1 0AP
Doors open 8pm, show starts 8.30pm.

Sunday 27th January: Laughing Horse, Richmond – first heat of the Laughing Horse New Act of the Year competition
The Britannia, 5 Brewers Lane, TW9 1HH
Doors open 8pm, show starts 8.30pm.

Monday 11th February: Electric Mouse Big Ben, Westminster
Red Lion Pub, 48 Parliament Street, SW1A 2NH
Doors open 7.30pm, show starts 8pm.

If you only come to one of these, come along to the Laughing Horse and vote for me (unless you think I was shit).

Here’s a video of my first stand-up set, “Sleep”, seen here performed in Chalk Farm as part of the end-of-course showcase.

Thanks to Andy Lydon for filming this and Neil Cremin for editing.

I’m in this week’s Time Out – it’s always nice to see my name in print.

Unfortunately they’ve got the venue wrong, so I hope my hordes of fans don’t have difficulty finding out where I’m performing tomorrow.