Category: Blog Post
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Gig #59 – The one where I tried to start incest in the audience.
So Sam, how was the gig tonight? Well, to be honest both strange and good. Strange and good? Come on, don’t be coy, tell all. Okay, so I did the storytelling set tonight. The one that’s artistically very clever but ultimately a bit of a lazy cop out?
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Giggidy, Giddidy, Gee…
Sometimes you do a gig, a gig you expected to be amazing, a gig you thought would lift you on to a higher emotion, artistic and comedic level, where you prepared new material that was crafted, analysed, road tested and developed to near perfection, and then you perform it to an audience who you think…
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50 Gigs In
It’s 10 past midnight and I can’t sleep. This I suspect may be for one of two reasons. The first is that I woke up at midday today and as a consequence my body thinks that it’s 9pm, the second is that it is from the adrenaline of doing my fifty third (I think) gig.
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Who am I? Being a brand
“Who am I?” I’ve had a few conversations with both new comedians and theatre companies recently about marketing themselves to increase bookings and profile.
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A tale of three gigs
It’s inevitable over the course of doing something that you will have moments of great highs, moments of great lows and long periods of bumbling around in the middle desperate to achieve the former and avoid the latter.
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Gig Report #43: Bottletop Comedy
When I was around gigs 5 – 15 I went through a stage of recording how each gig had progressed – inspired by the brilliant Ste Price. I lost touch a bit and became a little more infrequent, mostly because I felt for a while I plateaued at a certain level – enough to be…
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Charity Ordeals & reaching 40
Just a quick post tonight after I reached two milestones in my comedy career. Firstly I just did my first charity gig. To be honest I’d heard a lot about charity gigs being often the worst and hardest gigs to do and approached this one (Help the Heroes) with a degree of trepidation.
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‘Tree’ by Daniel Kitson
I always find it very interesting in how artists, be them comedians, playwrights, actors or musicians progress over time. I think about the changes that maturity brings – Ben Folds moved from aggressive geek piano rock to a mature writer of occasionally sentimental ballads, while the Red Hot Chili Peppers went from cock rock funk…
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Me and the NHS
This is an article written for York Theatre Royal’s blog for Floating but I thought I’d share it on here too… Whenever I speak to people about Floating there are always two questions they ask. The first is a fascination about where the idea to write the play came from, how it was inspired, what planted the seed…
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Three gigs
I’ve not written about stand-up and how my gigging has been going for a while so I thought I’d write some of what I’ve been doing for you my avid readers. I say avid readers in the broadest sense, I have google analytics so know where you live and who you are (apart from the…
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Edinburgh 2013
A quick note about some of the shows I’ve seen this festival with a short review – please do not regard these as definitive, every show is worth seeing and this is almost entirely subjective.
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Fourteen things I learnt at university (circa 7 years ago)
I realized this week that I am closing in on 8 years since I left university. Not a massive milestone but one that was highlighted to me on my friend Neal’s stag weekend. As we were stood there in the rain, vomit coating the bottom of our trousers, me drenched and shitfaced laughing at the…
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An open letter to my 16 year old self.
Dear Sam, This must be a bit strange getting a letter from your future self – I imagine you’re wondering about all the cool shit you’ll be getting up to in the next 12 years. Maybe you’re imagining I’ve just got back from my high flying executive job going from my office at the World…
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A prolonged silence…
It’s been a while since I last wrote a blog post. It’s not that I haven’t tried, I have, god I’ve tried. I’ve pulled my laptop towards me in a semi-seductive manner and whispered into its USB port, “now… it’s blogging time.” . I’ve then switched on iplayer, just for a second, to check, well, check…
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An Edinburgh Hour – Part 2
Hello and welcome back. This is my attempt to put some rough ideas down for new material and potentially a new show. It’s really really VERY rough stuff… The finished article will be slicker, more coherent, funnier, more poignant and generally just less shit. But if you don’t hate this then do stay tuned. So far the…
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An Edinburgh Hour…
Last week I got a bad review. A very bad review. I know what you’re thinking, “I bet it wasn’t that bad“, “i bet you startled them with you linguistic ability, surprised them with wit and poignancy“, maybe, just maybe you’re thinking, “I bet he’s being modest and at worst it is a mixed review“.…
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Arts Marketing: Now What? (Part 1)
I’ve not written a post about arts marketing for a while so, as I find myself on box office in a quiet moment I thought I’d pop down some thoughts I’ve been having recently. If you work in marketing you may disagree with them – then again I could be about to provide a moment…
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Kitson and Kirk
This week has been pretty good so far. I say pretty good, I mean on the one hand I’ve enjoyed it, I’ve had some great experiences and seen some great work, but at the same time and perhaps paradoxically as a direct result of those very same great experiences I have felt an overwhelming sense…