Hmm, I’ve been rather bad at updating this recently. Sorry to anyone who is expecting more comment from me. It’s partly due to being busy with real life, applying for jobs, and bits and pieces of mine and Cara’s writing.
Also, I was a bit worried that my blog was going to be a bit ‘Mitchell and Webb’ heavy as I had a review of Magicians to post up, I wanted to review Peep Show Series 4, and That Mitchell And Webb Sound has started a new series recently on Radio 4. Plus there was my recent comment on the BAFTAs.
So as a result I did nothing 
Instead I’m writing a blog on the reason why I didn’t write a blog in the first place. Clever huh?
In other comedy related stuff the Tim Minchin fan site is up and running, as is the rather wonderful forum , good work Linzi/Lyndsey/Linzy etc etc.
I’m also getting simultaneously giddy and frustrated at the pre-Edinburgh excitement- I’ve been browsing Chortle’s listings and basically wanting to see everything, sadly due to potential life and work commitments I’m not even sure I’ll go this year.
Which is a shame as there is one event I would give my right arm to be able to go to and that is ‘Mark Watson’s 24 Hour Jamboree To Save The Planet‘. For the past couple of years the stand-up comedian, novelist and seemingly all round nice bloke Mark Watson has been performing marathon shows (24 hour or 36 hours) and this year he has taken the concept of, as you might have guessed from the title, ‘Saving the Planet’. He set up ‘Crap At The Environment‘ as a mySpace venture, enabling people who were concerned about saving the environment, but were actually a bit crap at doing it- not excluding himself.
With another comedian/performer this concept might seem a bit contrived, and there’s nothing I hate more than contrived ideas which are either blatantly money-making or, what is worse, just plain lazy. For example, following Dave Gorman’s success with firstly The Dave Gorman Collection and then Googlewhack Adventure his friend, one-time flat-mate, producer and occasional co-writer Danny Wallace brought out Join Me which was about him starting a cult by accident, and the subsequent collective of people that formed to perform ‘Random Acts Of Kindness’.
Fair enough, I bought the book, and joined up myself. It was a genuine story of how this idea had started and spiralled almost out of control. The book looked retrospectively at the early stages of ‘Join Me’ and was also a ‘work-in-progress’ of sorts as he still had new ‘joinees’. Like Dave Gorman’s books…it was compelling because it was REAL. He hadn’t set out getting people to ‘join’ so that he could write a book about it. However his next offering Yes Man where he vowed to say ‘yes’ more in his life just smacked of laziness- he already knew the concept of ‘project comedy’ worked. But without that spark of genuine sacrifice, pain and personal involvement that infused Dave Gorman’s books…it seems rather flat and futile.
Of course Danny Wallace is far from being the main offender of this type of entertainment, I’m just pulling an example from the comedy-world. There are plenty of worse (or rather better) examples in light entertainment- basically any ‘reality’ TV show. You can almost hear the producers saying ‘how can we make it real?’ When the secret I’d like to let them in on is- you don’t make something real…it’s either real or it’s not- as soon as you add the word make into the equation it all becomes false and therefore uninteresting.
So how am I going to relate all this back to Mark Watson? Well as I said the concept for his show- getting people involved in order to create a show out of the project could seem as contrived as Danny Wallace’s Yes Man after all he is technically setting up a project to create a show. Though somehow the involvement Mark has with the project , the sincerity and enthusiasm he seems to invest in it (he blogs about his own attempts at being crap at the environment) and the fact that he approaches it with more of an attitude of ‘come along for the ride’ rather than a cynical ‘look what I’ve done to try and be entertaining’ mean that rather than contrived it seems a real comedy ’shared experience’. Oh and with the format of his marathon shows he actually pushes the boundaries of comedy performance, which is a rare thing these days.
And if this all seems a bit much, the man does regular stand up too. Here he is at the Melbourne Comedy Festival 2007 oh and he’s a bit of an amateur magician as well 
