Dave Gorman warms-ups, Nicholas Parsons is sorry & Omid Djalili laughs

Dave Gorman warms to the difficulty of warm-up

Yesterday, I blogged about a distinctly un-enjoyable TV pilot show I went to see at the BBC. I mentioned the warm-up man. There was some reaction to this.

Comedian Dave Gorman commented:

“I think it’s always been a mixed bag. Some recordings are fun to attend and some are more like hostage situations. I was in a studio audience 20 years ago where it was not unlike the one you describe here and I’ve been in others more recently that have been great.

“Warm-up’s a hugely difficult (and hugely underrated) skill. A lot of brilliant acts make for lousy warm-ups. Some know they can’t do it and steer well clear. Others think they can… but the only way of finding out is to do it. Nothing about the circuit – not even the most fluid of compering – tells who can or can’t.

“Some shows fly under their own steam and the warm-up really only has to do a set at the top of the show. In other shows where there are set changes and/or multiple takes, the warm-up might well end up performing more than everyone else involved put together.”

Jake Betancourt-Laverde, who studies TV Production at the University of Westminster (where I studied it) Tweeted:

“Sounds very similar to the two times I saw Mock the Week being recorded. Genuinely the most depressing experience I’ve ever had at a comedy show.”

Comedian Tiernan Douieb picked up on this and asked: “Yet you went twice???”

Jake explained: “Second time I was a VIP! I got free wine and wotsits after!” but later he told me,  “Mock The Week was akin to a battery farm for laughter. Three soulless hours of one liners.”

More upliftingly, Toby Martin Tweeted:

“This reminds me of something that once happened to me. A couple of years ago I travelled the breadth of the country to see a recording of Just a Minute, which I’d grown up listening to and adored. After queuing with my brother for an hour, we were turned away as the available seats had been taken up by those who had apparently queued since lunch time.

“In a haze of mindless ire I fired off an angry e-mail to BBC customer services, knowing full well that I would only receive a courtesy e-mail reminding me that the Terms & Conditions on my tickets covered just such an eventuality… and roughly two weeks later I DID receive said e-mail.

The lovely Nicholas Parsons is forever not for Just a Minute

“Then, about a fortnight later and having forgotten about the whole sorry episode, I received the following voicemail on my phone: Hello Toby, this is Nicholas Parsons. I’ve been given your e-mail that you sent a little while ago to the BBC and would like to apologise profusely for the inconvenience you were caused. I would like to invite you to the next recording of Just a Minute as my personal guest.

“Needless to say, I was suitably stunned and glowed with pride a few weeks later as I took my specially reserved seat right at the front of the auditorium in Broadcasting House.

“The episode filled me with even more adulation for Nicholas Parsons, who took the time to meet me afterwards… but I haven’t bothered attending any more BBC recordings since!”

I have to say I, too, have a great deal of admiration for Nicholas Parsons. I met him fleetingly when he was presenting Sale of The Century at Anglia TV and he seemed very very decent – an impression strengthened when my comedy chum Janey Godley published her jaw-droppingly shocking autobiography Handstands in the Dark. She told me:

“Nicholas called me up to say he read my book on holiday and it equally traumatised and entertained him – what a man! He says he will never forget the holiday as everywhere he looked he saw a wee ‘Janey’ walking about in his head and he wanted to hug me. He has always been supportive of anyone new who comes on Just a Minute – makes us feel nurtured.”

Another comedian who read my blog yesterday was Omid Djalili. He commented:

“During a recording of my BBC show in 2009, the audience left after an hour. It was OK though – I recorded my own laughter 167 times and found I achieved many a nuance in the laugh track.”

Comedians. What can you do with ’em?

How Set List marketing and Sarah Palin made comic Rich Hall soar last night

There seem to be comedy improvisation shows all over London at the moment. If comedy is the new rock ’n’ roll, then I guess improvisation is like the occasional fad for long guitar riffs.

I have mentioned in a previous blog that, when I was a student (around the time Louis XIV was on the throne of France), I saw Keith Johnstone’s seminal weekly Theatre Machine in Hampstead.

I have also blogged before about the comedy improvisation show Set List, when it was the sleeper comedy hit at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe.

It started small but gathered extraordinary word-of-mouth, especially among performers and, despite venue and time changes which would have scuppered other Fringe shows, it very quickly had full houses and ‘Name’ comics lining up, desperate to perform and – just as important – to be seen to perform. It was a show with prestige among comedians.

Last night, ending a run at the Soho Theatre in London, Set List had a packed audience, up for anything, full of anticipation at attending an ‘event’.

You know you are onto a winner if your first-on-the-bill is the wonderful Rich Hall, your final act Andrew Maxwell has ploughed through Saturday night London traffic from a performance in Greenwich to take part in your show and, when a billed act drops out, you can get a last-minute stand-in of the calibre of Dave Gorman.

Quite how this ‘hot ticket’ feeling happens is almost always beyond comprehension.

Of course, it helps that the man behind Set List is Paul Provenza director of the cult comedy industry documentary The Aristocrats, (who flew over from Los Angeles to attend the last few shows) and that his man on British soil is the well-connected comic Matt Kirshen, but there is also very shrewd marketing going on.

The sense of anticipation last night (in an audience who had overwhelmingly not seen Set List before) was built-up partly by its late start – there’s nothing like being stuck in an over-crowded entrance hallway filled with chatty Guardian readers for 20 minutes to build a sense of up-market expectation – but also by an on-stage screen which, as the room filled up, was flashing rave quotes about the show from publications and, surprisingly, one from the excellent rising comic Diane Spencer.

There are currently bigger comedy names than Diane Spencer, but I suspect the Set List originators have rightly thought, “She is likely to become very successful,” and are getting into her good books early.

Shrewd marketing. If the punters recognise her name, they give themselves a pat on the back for having their fingers on the pulse. If that is physically possible.

All improvisation shows are, by their nature, a variable ride, but the (justified) self-aggrandisement of Set List works wonders. You are left in no doubt from the flyers, pre-show build-up and great sales technique of compere Matt Kirshen that you are attending an ‘event’ of some importance and that you are a superior punter for having chosen to be there.

Of course, it also helps that, unlike most improvisation shows which have built-in safety-nets of pre-prepared arcs and relationships, Set List is genuinely improvised by the comics and often savagely exposes comedians who are falling back on their own old material or who cannot link the six bizarre topic titles they are given.

If they perform six little separate routines based round the six given phrases, it does not work. They look like open-spot beginners.

But, if they can knit the six unconnected Set List topics together with one or more ongoing subject threads, then they can soar – as Rich Hall did last night with Alaska, grisly bears and Sarah Palin working wonders for him.

He triumphed, but I think the reason top comedians want to perform on Set List is really because it is creatively dangerous. The risk of falling off the comedy high-wire is greater because the performers are not in as much control as in a normal stand-up act and, as I have written before in this blog, I think comedians are a bunch of masochists with an urge to fail.

Mr Methane: the man who put the art into fart-a-dart on blowing not sucking

Yesterday, I blogged about Bob Slayer and Mr Methane’s predilection for including darts in their stage shows: Bob Slayer encourages people to throw darts at him and Mr Methane – the world’s only professionally performing flatulist – a farter to you and me  – blows darts out of his bottom to burst balloons attached to the heads of audience members.

Bob Slayer now tells me the current showbiz obsession with darts goes further than I knew:

“Dave Gorman,” he tells me, “is a big fan of darts and carries his ‘arrows’ everywhere in case he has time to kill and can nip into a boozer to chuck them at a board.”

Mr Methane, meanwhile, has been telling me how his fart-a-dart routine started.

“It was when I was touring with Bobby Davro back in the 1990s,” he tells me. “Bobby used to tell me that any show needs a good start, an at-least average middle and a memorable finish.

“I figured that farting a dart into a large balloon attached on top of someone’s head in a William Tell manner would provide that finish. But, at first, I could not figure out the correct type of dart, in terms of weight and velocity etc.

“I was using 2.2 air rifle darts and they were too heavy so, consequently, they were too slow and did not straighten up enough to impact the balloon properly. Then, one day, a Japanese TV show wanted me to ‘Fart The Dart’ into a balloon, so they studied my equipment and also videos of me farting a dart. Then they did what the Japanese do best – they improved the design and solved the problem

“When I arrived in Tokyo, I was ceremonially presented with a custom-made, MK2 balloon-piercing darts kit and we had a test run followed by green tea and sushi. Needless to say, the test run and the recording were both successful and, on taking the darts home with me to the UK, I took a leaf from the post-war Japanese Engineering Handbook and I ‘back engineered’ the product to unravel the manufacturing secrets of the darts so I could construct them myself.

“It is always a very tense moment during a live stage show when I fart-a-dart, as I like to burst the balloon first time. I suppose it is similar to the emotions that an England football player feels during the penalty shoot-out at the end of an England v Germany game in the World Cup when the pressure is really is on.

“I think my own worst time for nerves was during the semi-finals of the TV show Das Supertalent (Germany’s Got Talent).

“I was representing the United Kingdom on Germany’s No 1 prime time Saturday night entertainment show, so I had my nation’s and Her Majesty’s honour to uphold and – because it was going out live – there could be no room for any mistakes.

“The relief when I nailed the balloon first time was immense.

“It is all in the technique…

“I find it is best to grip the end of the blow pipe with your sphincter muscle in the same way you would use your lips if blowing a dart with your mouth.

“You have to be very careful not to discharge even the slightest amount of air from your colon once you are gripping the blowpipe with your buttocks and going for the countdown otherwise the dart will rise up and fall out the end with no velocity.

“Once you count zero, you blow-off big time and, hopefully, it will be a bulls-eye.

“The time lapse between the dart leaving the blowpipe and piercing the balloon in reality is very short but, for me, lying there on my back with my legs up in the air, it seems to be in slow motion, rather like events appear to be when you in a car accident or similar.

“On a Health & Safety note, I have a small filter at the end of the blowpipe which touches my bottom. This is like a filter-tip of dart-farting and is there for safety reasons – to stop the dart going any further in an inward direction, for obvious reasons.

“When farting a dart, it is important not to suck but to blow.”

This comic cross between a dating website and Time Out listings magazine

Yesterday, I read Jon Kudlick’s article on the Chortle comedy website explaining why he was quitting his life as a stand-up comic after four years.

“Basically,” he says, “stand-up is not compatible with being married and having a family to support. And the vast majority of the comics I’ve met on the professional circuit are divorced or single.”

My experience of comedians also brings me to he conclusion that stand-up is not ideally compatible with a relationship because most comedians are barking mad and could provide a good psychiatric researcher with original material for a period at least as long as Ken Dodd’s career.

An hour after reading Jon Kudlick’s piece, an unsolicited e-mail plopped into my InBox from DoingSomething.co.uk

How this new dating site got my address or why is a mystery to me. But they offered “a three month trial period” if I used the code “haha” when I joined. Their selling line was: “Lots of comedy happenings in the next few months in London. You could do a lot worse than taking someone new to some comedy…” and they plugged five upcoming comedy events including Dave Gorman’s Screen Guild at Hoxton Hall, one of the current Heroes of Alternative Comedy gigs organised by Bob Slayer and – just generally – the Soho Theatre.

If these are paid-for ads, they could be on to a winner – half dating site/half Time Out. And, given Jon Kudlick’s assertion that most comedians are not in a steady relationship, targeting anyone connected with the comedy world seems a shrewd marketing idea.

Yes, I did sign up for the site, partly because I am a Scot brought up among Jews and it was free, partly because I wanted to see what was on the site and partly because I can also see three months blogging potential in it.

If you look like Katharine Ross in The Graduate or Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid – and you win the lottery – do get in touch.

It must be bizarrely difficult to start a dating site from scratch and they seem to be offering free three-month trials to all and sundry. There seem to be plenty of twentysomethings on it, but people in that age range barely need a dating site. In my age range (well, the one I put in to test it out) there was just one single woman in the whole of the UK suitable for me. And I put in anyone anywhere. She is interested in baking. That’s a start. Maybe not.

I may stay on the site for three months and see what happens. If you scour the site for me, THIS what my profile picture looks like.