Up And Running

The weather hasn't been great yet... and yesterday morning I switched on breakfast TV to see the presenters getting very excited about the royal family and One Direction so it did feel for a moment as if we'd travelled ten thousand miles and yet hadn't travelled at all.

But, this really is an amazing festival and the audiences are fantastic. And my venue - The Forum - has a camp charm that I really like.


We had technical problems on the first night - the microphone, which had been fine all through our tech set-up time suddenly decided to sound as if it had been dropped in a chip fryer so the first five minutes were spent with the audience struggling to hear me. But they made that struggle and stayed with the show. I guess it knocked me out of my rhythm a bit because as well as thinking about how I've rephrased this bit and changed that slide etc etc I was also thinking I-hope-someone's-trying-to-bloody-fix-this. Not the most relaxed start to things but once it was fixed the show soon went through the gears and I had a great time.

I get kind of lost in this show. There are occasions when we're setting up and someone will ask me to do a particular bit of it so that they can see how it's going to work... and I never really know how to do it because there are no words in my head. But an audience changes things and that night, when I get to that bit, all the words are there.

One down. Plenty more to come.