Elfin comedian Laura Lexx gets bigger ideas after meeting the real Santa Claus

At the University of Kent, you can study Stand-Up Comedy. My natural tendency would be to think this is a right load of old wank if it were not for the fact they seem to have produced some rather good rising comedy performers.

There is (in alphabetical order) Tiernan Douieb, Jimmy McGhie, The Noise Next Door and Pappy’s.

And then, out of alphabetical order, there is elfin Laura Lexx. I call her ‘elfin’ because she actually did for a period literally work as an elf in Lapland as part of the Father Christmas industry. I have seen the photos. She is low on height but high on energy. Which is just as well – not just for elfing around in Lapland.

All the way through July, Laura is promoting a month of London previews for other people’s Edinburgh Fringe shows at the Glassblower in Soho, with a line-up which includes Bridget Christie, Phil Nichol and Paul Sinha.

Then she takes off her promoter hat and she’s off to Edinburgh for the Fringe where she’s in both the Comedy and the Theatre sections – performing, producing, writing and directing.

She’s performing daily as part of the improvised comedy game show Quiz in My Pants at the Opium venue

She’s performing and directing the cast in her own straight play Ink (about the 7/7 London terrorist bombings and the media) at the Kiwi Bar.

And she has also done the very neat trick of spotting a new way to finance Edinburgh Fringe shows via wedidthis.org where people who want to support the Arts in a positive way can donate money to the month’s chosen projects. If you reach your target within the month, you get the money donated. If you don’t reach your target, the promised donations made so far are not collected.

At the time of writing this blog, she has another fortnight to raise £175 to cover some of her Edinburgh costs. The donations page is here.

I wonder if anyone would fork out money to cover my modest and artistically-vital publicity costs for Malcolm Hardee Week at the Fringe.

Or maybe I should get work after the Fringe as a Father Christmas clone in Lapland. I would need a wig, I could grow the beard, but I would need no padding.

Oh, to be an elf…

The vagaries of life with a talented dead performance artist stroke comedian

After a morning involved in the intricacies of the English legal system – even with my shit-hot media solicitor who combines a fearsome reputation with a sense of humour and a love of Jonathan Swift – you need something different.

And I got that this afternoon.

Last month, I blogged about the death of performance artist cum comedian Ian Hinchliffe whose life is to be celebrated this Saturday (2nd July) at Beaconsfield arts studio in London.

The six-hour event – which I suspect may stray somewhere along the way into the area of a 1960s-style Happening – is being called Ian Hinchliffe: The Memorial and will probably (one can never be too certain about these things) start with a performance by Tony Green at 2.00pm.

The whole caboodle – music, comedy, art and mayhem will include a fully-restored screening of bizarre 1979 film The Poppy Seed Affair and should finish by 8.00pm

A generation ago, probably around 1990/1991, I was persuaded by the late, great Malcolm Hardee to go with him to see Ian Hinchliffe and Tony Green perform at a now long-forgotten comedy night called T’others at The Ship in Kennington, South London. I shot a video of part of the evening, but could not remember what was on it.

It has been twenty years, I have a shit memory and I had never used the video anywhere nor had I seen it since, largely because I have no way of watching the outdated Video-8 format it is on.

So, last week, I got the tape transferred by the redoubtable Stanley’s in Wardour Street, Soho, and it does indeed show Ian and Tony performing with glimpsed shots of Malcolm sitting in the audience and – no surprise here – going to the bar for a drink.

This afternoon, I gave two clips of Ian Hinchliffe’s performance to man-about-the-arts Roger Ely who seemed remarkably coherent for someone who only returned home yesterday, sleepless, from Glastonbury with a deep cut on his finger from accidentally stubbing his forefinger on an open razor in pitch darkness, very sore legs which never did get used to being pulled out of the mud for three days and tales of a great performance by B.B.King and the glory that was and still is The Crazy World of Arthur Brown.

Roger is organising Ian Hinchliffe: The Memorial which is a brave, if not foolhardy, thing for him to do.

But, then, he is not short on bravery. In earlier days, Roger did share a house with Ian Hinchliffe for a couple of years and was only slightly nonplussed when Ian pushed him out of a car at 70 mph. Such are the vagaries of life with a talented performance artist stroke comedian.

Saturday should be an experience.