Thursday 17 February 2011

Compere The...

... No. I can't do it. That is one bad joke too far.

I'm doing my first ever compere gig on Monday (21st) at the Jericho Tavern. I'm looking forward to it. I've often wondered if I would be any good at this kind of thing, and someone has decided to put their night in my hands. Pressure? Sure, but how else will we find the answer to this question?

I guess the closest I've ever come to compereing is when me and my best friend from primary/middle school David Savage used to make our own tapes. We would do various things like come up with stories we would act out. Or news items, which consisted of children's author Sheila Lavelle trying to read out the news while Bill Murray tried to have sex with her. We were about 7 or 8 years old when we first did this particular story. It was a recurring theme of our tapes.
We would also do our own version of Top of the Pops, in which I would be the presenter and David would perform. It was a little bit like 'Whose Line Is It Anyway?' in that I would come up with an artist and song title off the top of my head and David would have to perform it. The one that sticks in my mind is when I came up with the idea of Cliff Richard singing a song called 'The Vomiting Song.' Well, what really comes to mind is when I made David be Cliff Richard do 'The Vomiting Song II,' the first lyric of which went 'The vomiting is getting worse and the people are dying.' I'm not entirely sure why I remember that as well as I do, but I do. I wonder if I still have those tapes somewhere?

Anyway, we stopped making those tapes about seventeen or eighteen years ago now, so I haven't done any compereing since then. I'm kind of nervous about it, but excited too. I'm actually really looking forward to it. It's a three act gig and I'm gonna be doing about five minutes of poetry and rambling before each act, so it should be pretty fun. Not too long for people who've turned up for a gig to get bored (a problem I've had doing music gigs before), but enough time for me to do my thing and (hopefully) make an impact.

I'll let you know how it goes.

UPDATE (24/2/11, 11:54am): It went really quite phenomenally badly. I sort of don't want to write about it tho.

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