Writer's Block

I'm exhausted and all I've really done this evening is watch football. The fact that big Manchester United still have the ability to make me so nervous is something I'm deeply ashamed of. Still, I was nonetheless delighted by United overturning a first leg deficit to beat Manchester City 3-1 on the night and 4-3 on aggregate with a dramatic late goal from the in form Wayne Rooney. The second half was brilliant to watch. I'm in the middle of a busy week by my standards. On Monday night I headed over to Camden Town to see Alkaline Trio's gig at the Underworld. It was a pleasure to see them in such a small venue and it was comfortably the best of the three gigs I've seen from them, with a good mix of material from all their studio albums. From the sound of the three new songs the band played, they're going back to their melodic punk roots with their upcoming record, This Addiction. It's out next month and I'm looking forward to hearing it. However, I...

My mundane numbering system for blog posts that have no particular subject has returned. Hooray. I am currently listening to Status Quo on Spotify, for no other reason than I'm amused by the idea of someone doing a massive stand up show and coming on to 'Whatever You Want'. People have apparently fought and died in world wars for my right to do this. I have a better Spotify recommendation in the form of 'My Dinosaur Life', the new album from the pop-punk band Motion City Soundtrack. I first saw the band in 2004 and they've been a regular fixture in my gig calendar and on my MP3 player ever since. They've deservedly grown hugely in popularity since then and their major label debut is a belter with some great pop songs. In making a resolution to blog a lot more, I had forgotten that quite often there aren't enough things in my life worth writing about. It's alright for Richard Herring, with his constant work and minor celebrity status. Speaking of Herr...

I've been falling back into my old bad habits with not updating this blog, I'll try and get back on track. Monday saw my first gig of the year at Goldsmiths University. It was a strong bill with George Ryegold, Gareth Morinan and Nina Conti with Ian Smith compering. Ian is in his final year at Goldsmiths and is struggling to balance the demands of his course with writing material for the gigs on a fortnightly basis. This showed to an extent, but he's a very talented act who I'm confident will go on to bigger and better things. It was the first time I had seen George Ryegold (essentially a character performed byToby Williams) who by all accounts had a strong debut show at last year's Edinburgh Fringe. The act is that of a doctor turned stand up comedian who describes a variety of ailments in excruciating detail. He perhaps wasn't the best act to breathe life into a 60 odd crowd who were initially subdued, but his use of language was fantastic. Describing defecati...

Amongst my ever growing list of new year's resolutions is to read a lot more. Mainly to read more novels, although I tend to favour biographies and autobiographies. I prefer real life stories to fiction. For Christmas, my parents bought me Jo Brand's autobiography Look Back in Hunger. The gift was a humorous reference to the fact that Steve Bennett of Chortle.co.uk had said in his review of the Chortle Student Comedy Award Final 2008 that I ' could be the male Jo Brand'. I respect Steve's opinion on comedy greatly and the remainder of his comments about my act were reasonable and fair. However, I was stung by the comparison and remember walking around Edinburgh seething over it for the rest of the day. As may have already become apparent, I do not like Jo Brand and felt that being compared to her in 2008 was a pretty negative thing. Her stand up is a triumph of personality over writing talent. She certainly has no problem making her presence felt, but she has nothin...

I've taken the opportunity this weekend to catch up on some films I've been meaning to watch. My Virgin+ recording of Run Fat Boy Run cut out 35 minutes before the end, which I saw as an act of kindness. A truly dreadful film with a plotline that is impossible to care about featuring a great deal of idiotic slapstick. Mercifully Be Kind Rewind was much better.The story focuses on Mike (Mos Def), who is left in charge of the titular VHS rental shop (which will be demolished unless $60,000 can be found) while the owner Mr Fletcher (Danny Glover) leaves town to celebrate the life of the famous pianist Fats Waller, who according to him lived on the site of Be Kind Rewind in Passaic, New Jersey. While he is gone, Mike's friend Jerry (Jack Black delivering a typical performance as an enthusiastic manboy) inadvertantly erases all the tapes having become magnetised after attempting to sabotage a power plant. I have to concede that my disbelief needed a considerable period of suspen...

Another quiet day indoors today, mainly looking at job stuff on the internet and attempting to take Sunderland to Premier League glory on FIFA 2009 on the Wii. There's still a lot of snow on the ground and not an awful lot of motivation for going outside. Fortunately the rest of my family successfully made it off on their respective journeys and thus I am home alone. This afternoon despite being tired of the London gig scene I procured a ticket to see one of my favourite bands Alkaline Trio play an intimate show at the Camden Underworld on 25th January. The gig sold out in four minutes and managing to get a ticket for an event so heavily in demand is always a nice feeling. They've evolved over the years from being a brilliantly angsty, miserable punk band (their debut record Goddamnit! is the best example of this, listen to it on Spotify if you have it) into a sort of goth rock outfit and have continued to produce really good albums. Anyway, it's something to look forward t...

Snow has returned to Kent (and seemingly everywhere else in Britain). With it comes a depressing reminder of age and responsibility. When you're a child, snow is one of the most wonderful things in the world. It means days off school, snowballs, snowmen and all those brilliant things. When the snow came in in my penultimate term at Royal Holloway last year, it still technically meant all of those things (albeit being excused from a two hour seminar that I'd later have to make up rather than a day off). But one of the reasons why snow was so enjoyable was because it was rare. I think there was a period of about seven years when it didn't snow in this area of Kent at all. But now I'm out in the real world, or at least trying to be, more than a day or so of moderate snow becomes a sizable inconvenience. When I see snow for the first time in a while now, I think 'Ah, that looks nice' followed soon after by 'I want it to go now'. The experience just before ...

Forgive me for that absolutely atrocious title. On Saturday, I went to see Sherlock Holmes in Cardiff. I had seen the trailer for the film back in June and it looked so bad that it was funny. It seemed almost like the pastiches of films that Dead Ringers and shows of that ilk used to perform, where fairly innocuous stories from the past were given the Hollywood treatment with over the top violence, sex and glamour. But I was intrigued and so elected to give it a try. I'd put a spoiler alert before launching into this review but for my supreme confidence that no-one is reading this. I hope at some point I am proved wrong, but in the meantime I shall spoil away to my heart's content. I'm not a big fan of Guy Richie or the gangster genre his films have focused on in the past and the movie has the same sort of jerkily shot, rapid fire action sequences he's used previously. These are occasionally entertaining and sometimes utterly ludicrous, such as one that culminates with ...

I decided to go to Pontypridd to see out 2009 and see in the new year in a decision that my friend Richard Strange (a Welshman himself) described on Facebook as being 'profoundly odd'. It is in a sense difficult to disagree but I enjoyed hanging out with some of my friends. There was unsurprisingly little to do there on New Year's Day so we stayed in and watched a considerable amount of television. David Tennant's final episode of Dr Who was hotly anticipated, though not by me it has to be said. I am a casual Dr Who watcher at best and am pretty bemused by the fanaticism that surrounds the show. Credit where it's due though, they've done well to successfully resurrect the franchise. I enjoyed the second half of 'The End of Time' more than the first which was pretty baffling and difficult to follow and the performance of Bernard Cribbins as Wilfred Mott was a particular highlight. The fact that the Doctor seems able to get out of whatever scrape he gets i...

Happy New Year everyone. I have mixed feelings about 2009. I was pleased to graduate from Royal Holloway with a 2:1 in Modern History and Politics and go back to New York for a few days. The Big Apple didn't feel as exciting as it did when I first visited four years ago, although perhaps that's not surprising. Since graduating, I have struggled a bit with the post university challenge of becoming an actual human being and remain unemployed. Fingers crossed there will be better things to come this year in that and a few other departments. On the stand up comedy front, the highlights were performing at the Pier Theatre in Bournemouth and making the semi-finals of the Laughing Horse New Act of the Year competition. Unfortunately the semi final gig came in the week when my dissertation was due in and that contributed to a poor performance, exacerbated by the quality of the acts on the same bill. I'm looking forward to giving Laughing Horse another go with my heat at The Cricket...