My thanks to Barry for taking the time to comment a couple of days ago that I should give you advance warning of upcoming gigs so that you can come and see me deliver these poorly conceived Pathetic Lot ideas in a live environment. I’d like for people to come along too, but the problem is I don’t really mention gigs here unless they’ve gone amusingly badly (see Monday) or have a direct link to this dear Blog. Also, I don’t know where the people that read this site are. I know that some of you are in Canada, America, the Far East. And I rarely appear in Ontario.
The idea for the long term is to get a proper website together which can contain all this sort of information, but for the time being it’s tricky. If you live in the North West of England then why not come to Bollington, which is somewhere in Cheshire, where I’ll be appearing this Friday (27th) at the Bollington Arts Centre, Wellington Road. This might be quite an interesting show to come and watch because I’m due to speak for half an hour and if YOU can find half an hour of amusing material within the achieves of this site you’re a better person than me. No, there’ll be lots of old material too. Show starts at 8pm.
Then on Sunday (29th) I’m at The Comedy Store in Manchester trying out some new Pathetic Lot stuff.
See, if I were to do this all the time it would look showy and rubbish. Also, if I were to publish a list of upcoming dates I’d only incur your wrath eventually because the dates change, or get cancelled, or I get a cold and bail out, and if I forgot to tell you… I want to keep you on side.
The idea is to take a show to Edinburgh this August and that will mean previews, specifically in Liverpool. I plan to book The Unity Theatre for a night and have any Pathetic Lot reader willing to waste five pounds come along. It would be great to be able to sell two nights. To this end, I need each and every one of you to tell three hundred people each about this site and force them to like it. As Noel Edmonds might say; “Deal or no deal?�
It seems grossly hedonistic to even talk about the ‘readership’ of this Blog as if it’s a proper publication, but it does continue to grow and that’s interesting and rewarding. It was four, now it’s six. Actually, the numbers are high but I’m not sure exactly what at the moment. I’ll ask the evil genius who runs the Liverpool Echo’s Blogs, Steve, about this. Any comedian is always looking for ways to get a group of, if not fans, then supporters together and this is as good a way of doing it as any. I do like the idea of meeting readers at gigs, although of course it will be bizarre to meet a stranger and have them say “So how’s your friend? She was ill on March 5th. Is she feeling better?�
The worse and also best case scenario is to get some Blog-wise heckles. There’s me on stage “So I was on a plane last week and couldn’t help but notice…� A voice from the back “No you weren’t. You were at home. If you’d have gone anywhere by plane I would have known. Liar! Booooo!�
I don’t do material like that anyway; the whole “So I was driving here tonight when I…�, “So I just split up with my girlfriend…�. “So this guy comes up to me yesterday…�, “So I got a phone call yesterday from…� I mean, give the audience some CREDIT. They know you’re lying. It’s better to tell the truth because it’s funnier. Or, at the very least, say “So I got a phone call about four months ago…� because that’s when it happened or you came up with the material.
Comedy aside, if you do feel like freaking me out by sidling up and telling my confused round face a fact about my life, why not come to The Dry Bar on Oldham Street in Manchester on Tuesday 2nd February where my favourite singer, Lizzie Nunnery, will be performing at a night called Acoustic Revolution and selling copies of her new EP. A word of warning though, if you see me chatting casually with Lizzie that’s because I know her and am in showbiz, you are not permitted to do the same or you’ll be beaten senseless by security or her boyfriend.
I hope that answers your question, Barry.
My car’s been on the blink for a while and recently the battery’s stopped charging so today it was my dull duty to get a new one installed. You’d think that would be easy enough but it ended up taking up a ludicrous percentage of what should have been a busy and productive day.
The garage itself is a five minute walk from my flat, so I went up there and explained that I couldn’t start my car and didn’t have another vehicle to jump start it from. I’d rather hoped that, seeing I was at the bottom of the road, they might have said “Okay, we’ll run down there with you and jump it.� But they didn’t, and couldn’t get anyone out until tomorrow. As I was leaving, I had the idea that I could simply borrow a battery from them, carry it down, jump my car, and drive it back to have a new battery installed.
I carried a battery down but no joy, my car was completely dead. So I carried the battery back, rather over estimating my own strength and endurance, and was then told that someone could come out after all – in ten minutes. So I sat in reception and played Pub Pool 3D on my mobile phone. My record so far is; Played 279 games. Won 167. Disturbingly, my total game time is now 1 day, 3 hours, 45 minutes.
I’ll never get that day back.
I waited forty minutes in their reception before asking what was going on? I was irritated both because I’d wasted a lot of my afternoon and also lost four consecutive games on Pub Pool 3D which had seen me slip down the fictional leader board.
Eventually, after a total of 50 minutes wait, I got a lift with a mechanic the four hundred yards to my car and we, rather he, set about getting it going. Not that there was a rush – oh no. He was very pleasant and competent but insisted on telling me how my car was his favourite model of car, and how his Dad owns the same model. But did you know that his Dad’s car was a press version and was tweaked to perform better? No? Did you know they can drive from Dumfries to Liverpool in one hour and a half in it? No? I do – I know all this.
Got the new battery installed and the car started and so I drove back to the garage to sort out the paper work that took an extraordinary amount of time. I made the mistake of asking for two bulbs too because my break light’s gone – and that took a further twenty minutes of typing, printing out invoices, and signatures. Imagine going into a newsagents to buy a banana and having to sign a pile of contracts before you could eat it.
I was amazed that they added a further £35 to the bill for the call-out charge. It was at the bottom of the road! It made no odds if they came to me or I came to them! I walked there and back with a car battery! A Larry David moment.
By the way, if you know of a good mechanic that will tune a car well in the Liverpool area, please let me know. There are two ways of doing this, either fill out the comments form below, or bellow out the name of the garage when I’m about to get to a punch line at an important gig. I’ll leave it up to you.
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