Yesterday’s show was great, a really lovely audience and having not drunk much the day before I put in a clear-headed and fairly sharp performance. Perfect way to start the day.
Obviously I’d had a cold and unpleasant shower before this point but this is now as much part of my routine as the banana I eat half way through handing out flyers.
I write this blog with two options on my mind:
» Read more: Edfringe day 7: Can everyone just turn their taps off?
Monday is traditionally a slow day at the Fringe and so I wasn’t expecting as many people as the last couple of days. Despite this I still had a good turnout, everyone was able to get a seat but there were only a couple spare…
I’ve now settled in to the routine of writing a blog about yesterday when I get up, struggling with the shower (although some effort yesterday afternoon could have improved this situation), flyering and then going on to do my show…
I started my day with problems with the shower and spent ages getting clean (there is a definite pattern emerging here…) and headed out to flyer. We have some friends in town coming to see the show, I met up with one of them just before going to the venue to setup.
I had loads of technical problems while a full house waited wonderfully patiently and I scrabbled around in cables trying to make things work. Eventually after a few heart-stopping moments of thinking my sampler wasn’t working and with a bit of help I got enough things working to do the show…
I hadn’t done any flyering so far this year, my belief is that most people coming to see a free show decide on the same day that they’re going to come. I hit the street not long after 10am and headed for the Royal Mile, as is usual at this time of day it was clear that people handing out flyers outnumbered those looking for a show to see.
However my Remote Control Centre (RCC or Ruth to those that know her) got in touch to say there was already a queue at the Half-Price Hut and with its proximity to my venue I headed there to dish out some printed copies of my face. I spoke to quite a few people including some girls who were here for a hen weekend and the mood in general was pleasant and relaxed…
The first day was all about getting here, we got up pretty early (half 6) to get on the road targeting a mid-afternoon arrival in Edinburgh and despite actually missing the turn for Edinburgh the journey was easy enough.
As ever our flat is on the top floor (who exactly has access to ground floor and first floor flats here?) around an endless spiral stone staircase and one that I consider ample training for the 10k run I’m planning to do this Autumn. Getting the case up was certainly a struggle.
So tomorrow I’m doing my last pre-Edinburgh preview in Limehouse at Jamboree where I filmed the video scenes for the show. It should be fun as it’s a gathering of friends and friends of friends with some music and drinking thrown in for good measure. A goodbye to London until September…
» Read more: Nearly time, last London preview, Fresh Air, Lovefringe code
A couple of weeks ago a review for my second night at Brighton Fringe Festival was posted and I’m delighted to say Three Weeks gave me 4/5 (this counts as ‘Very Good’) for the Saturday night performance. This was definitely the best gig I did of the 3 so it’s nice to have had a reviewer in on that night.
Here’s the review:
Dressed in a lab coat, and with the affable demeanour of an over-eager science teacher, Jim Bowes charts his obsessions since the age of five. And ‘charts’ is a highly appropriate word: his time-line is illustrated with bar graphs, flow diagrams and pie charts on a well-crafted and brilliantly applied slide-show. Via Lionel Richie, Vanilla Ice and others, we arrive at the show’s centrepiece: his current obsession, to appear at all twelve of Edinburgh’s festivals. There is the potential, perhaps once he is a little closer to achieving his goal, for Jim’s show to rival Dave Gorman’s fixated autobiographical quests. But until then Jim is sufficiently jocular, and has enough spot-on one-liners, to make this a wonderfully enjoyable hour’s entertainment.
» Read more: Brighton 4/5 Review, Edinburgh update, London previews
You know when you’ve made a set of plans that leave you pretty busy but you can just about do everything and then someone adds something extra and you’re left thinking…shit how am I going to do all this stuff?!
That’s kind of how the summer has started for me and I’m also going to use it as my excuse for no blog since May! This is my review of my shows at Brighton Fringe…
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