Day One of Malcolm Hardee Week – and only one bit of genital exposure

The first ever Malcolm Hardee Week at the Edinburgh Fringe has started and yesterday was a strange old day.

For most of the day, things went well.

I saw the funniest show so far at the Fringe – Johnny Sorrow’s The Bob Blackman Appreciation Society, which made me laugh-out-loud – a rare thing (television production experience, luv).

Having lost two helpers who were no longer coming to Edinburgh as planned, I had offers of help from several sources.

Ever-enthusiastic science-comedy star Helen Keen of Radio 4‘s It Is Rocket Science!) may be able to help me Wednesday to Friday, as can my chum Dr Sophia Khan, formerly of NASA and Harvard and assistant professor of Astrophysics at Shanghai University (Helen’s co-star in last year’s Fringe science comedy show Starstruck!)

From Thursday, I will also have Sophia’s chum Dr Andrew Bunker, former Head of Astronomy at the Anglo-Australian Observatory in Oz and now Reader in Astrophysics at Oxford University.

With help like this, surely there will be no problem keeping pasta in the air during Wednesday and Thursday’s spaghetti-juggle contests. Indeed, we should surely be able to get the cooked and aerodynamic strands into low Earth orbit.

On Friday, at the Malcolm Hardee Awards Show – really a two-hour anarchic variety show – I have also been offered help by comic Gill Smith who inspired the original Malcolm Hardee Cunning Stunt Award with a cracking Fringe publicity stunt in 2008 – she sent me an e-mail nominating herself for the main Malcolm Hardee Award and saying that, by doing so, she would be justified in putting Malcolm Hardee Award Nominee on her posters.

OCD is a wonderful thing.

Last night’s first Malcolm Hardee Week event went well: it was allegedly a debate on the proposition that “Comedians are psychopathic masochists with a death wish”. I think it went well, anyway. It was due to run from 6.15 to 7.00pm but over-ran by an hour to 8.00pm with no walk-outs when panelist Bob Slayer (whose show followed ours) decided that everyone was enjoying themselves so much, we should just carry on and the continuation of our show would become his hour-long show for the night.

That is what large amounts of drinking can lead to.

As I said, I do not think there were any walk-outs; in fact, of course, the audience swelled.

There was, surprisingly, only one incident of genital exposure during the show – when Paul Provenza did a Malcolm Hardee impression – and there were some interesting, if unprintable stories told in the over-run.

Scotsman critic and ITV Show Me The Funny judge Kate Copstick told a story I can’t possibly repeat about the origin of the Mrs Merton character – and a story about one promoter’s reaction to Kunt and the Gang’s current ‘Cockgate’ stunt at the Edinburgh Fringe, which was more Godfather anecdote than comedy story.

And comedienne Janey Godley told a true tale about Jerry Sadowitz performing in her pub in the East End of Glasgow to an audience which included real-life (now dead) Glasgow godfather Arthur Thompson. The largely-English audience I think missed a detail about Arthur Thompson which Janey mentioned in passing and which I do not think is generally known. Though true, I am most certainly not going to repeat it.

Thompson died in 1993, but I think waking up to a severed horse’s head might still be a possibility.

So yesterday – apart from the distant possibilities of horses’ heads and crucifixion on a wooden tenement floor – was good.

With Miss Behave now very sadly unable to compere Friday night’s two-hour Malcolm Hardee Awards Show at The Counting House because of her meningitis, Scott Capurro and New Comedy Act of the Year 2011 winner David Mills have stepped in to the breach by agreeing to be co-comperes. Scott even cancelled a party on Friday night so he could do the gig.

He told me that, after the first gig he played for Malcolm Hardee, as an American new to the London circuit, he was given his money in a brown envelope. When he got home, he found there was £20 less in the envelope than Malcolm had promised.

“Well, of course there was,” his comedian friends told him. “It’s Malcolm.”

It is extraordinary but true that Malcolm was always – and remains – held in such high esteem by his fellow comedians.

How often was the sentence uttered, “Well, it’s just Malcolm being Malcolm, isn’t it…” ?

But the one bad bit of news yesterday late afternoon was that Rab C.Nesbitt creator Ian Pattison cannot be on the panel of tonight’s 6.15pm Malcolm Hardee comedy debate at The Hive – allegedly on the proposition “Racist or sexist jokes? It doesn’t matter if they’re funny!” – because Ian has injured his back in Glasgow and cannot get to Edinburgh.

So, at the moment, the panel are Viz magazine creator Simon Donald, BBC TV One Show presenter Hardeep Singh Kohli and Laughing Cows‘ international compere Maureen Younger plus A.N.Other.

It was a bit of a downer when I heard that Ian cannot join us.

But yesterday ended well when I was told that the wonderful Doktor CocaColaMcDonalds has had a son called Oscar… the first Malcolm Hardee Award winner to have an Oscar…

What Sells Tickets?

(This blog originally appeared in What’s On Stage)

Well, whenever I’ve seen an Edinburgh Fringe presentation, the simplified version is that the Fringe Office claim their research shows posters don’t get bums on seats (but do impress the media if the posters are gigantic), flyers can get some bums on seats especially if the flyerer is the performer or the performer’s daughter/son/close personal friend… and most people decide what to go see on the basis of what they read in the Fringe Programme.

But now there’s new technology.

The recent show Keen & Khan: Starstruck! played only three nights, got no media publicity yet was full to the each night (on the last night, overflowing). What seemed to have happened was that there was extensive Tweeting about it, especially among scientific Twitter groups, the specific target audience.

Scots comedian and author Janey Godley, who has blogged very successfully since 2004 and who now, like several others, has started to distribute free podcasts via iTunes… has also now brought out a free Nokia app so that people can read her blog, watch her YouTube videos and download the podcasts on their Nokia phones.

Within three years, I suspect live internet streaming of some of the less tightly-scripted Fringe shows may start to have an impact on ticket sales. If you have a heavily or totally improvised show, then streaming the show every night may not dissuade people for putting bums on seats but actually be more likely to whet a potential audience’s appetite to see the live, real thing.

Of 5-star reviews and sticking spring vegetables up the nose

(This blog originally appeared in What’s On Stage)

Saturday was a day of the good, the bad and the lovely. It started with my comedy chum Janey Godley getting a 5-star review for her stage show The Godley Hour from the Daily Mirror. It ended with me getting my car stuck in a 45-degree-sloped unevenly-cobbled alleyway with rough, uneven stone walls. It took me an hour and a half to get out.

In between was my science chum (Doctor of Astrophysics) Sophia Khan arriving with her mum for her (that’s Sophia’s) three free science-based shows Keen & Khan: Starstruck! with comedian Helen Keen (complementing Helen’s 4-star show It Is Rocket Science! V2).

Sophia claims she’s an ordinary person doing a nerdy job but “ordinary” might be a slight linguistic error. She has worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Goddard Space Flight Center, at Harvard University and for the Japanese Space Agency and is currently Assistant Professor of Astrophysics at Shanghai University; she is only 31. Ever enterprising, she decided to go to the ‘Meet The Media’ event at Fringe Central which, depending on your view, is either a speed-dating event for desperate students with bemused media people sitting at tables facing long queues like some movie about penniless immigrants being processed when they landed in New York in 1903. Or Britain’s Got Talent crossed with a Serbian concentration camp before the barbed wire arrives.

We can but hope the photo The Times took of Sophia looking through a circular window in a doorway to represent a spaceship porthole looks more Alpha Centaurian.

Later, Sophia, her mum, elfin stand-up Laura Lexx and I went off to see Lewis Schaffer’s show Free Until Famous. Lewis has been trying-out and tweaking this show since November last year – usually performing two shows per week, sometimes four… in a Soho basement… to an extraordinary mix of locals, international passers-by and students.

But, on Saturday night, he explained that, earlier in the day, another comic had suggested he shouldn’t bother to even try to keep to a scripted show and should just go with the flow. Lewis obviously took this very much to heart, as he pretty-much made the whole hour-long show up as be went along. I know his show in it’s various configurations quite well. As far as I could see, he made up 90% of Saturday night’s show, mostly built round three Australian, German and American punters and his near-encyclopaedic knowledge of trivia. Lewis is a walking Wikipedia and ‘unpredictable’ is an understatement in describing his shows.

The London Is Funny website, re-naming itself Edinburgh Is Funny for the month, listed him as one of the Fringe’s 50 Must-See Shows… their description “Outspoken and vulnerable New York comic Lewis Schaffer offends as many as he tickles” is pretty spot-on.

Then came the unfortunate car-stuck-down-the-alleyway-for-90-minutes scenario which I can’t bear to think of again.

And, even later that night, I found myself driving round the busy streets of Edinburgh at 2.00m, looking for medicine – Vicks and headache tablets – for a friend of my comedy chum Janey Godley’s who appears to have taken to stuffing spring vegetables up her nose for medicinal reasons. Don’t ask. I have no explanation of this.

But then, to really round off the day, Janey Godley suddenly discovered she had got ANOTHER 5-star review.

That’s the Fringe for you: people getting 5-star reviews while others stick spring vegetables up their nose.