Talk To Rex

– Edinburgh for pies, Australia for swimming. Not the other way round.

– Drink Singapore Sling in Raffles, not on the plane.

– Poseidon is a crappy film, but will scare the shit out of you on a turbulant flight.

Sorry, I’ve been very quiet on the internet recently. If you’re wondering why, the New York Times has all the answers.

I am very tired. But I think it’s been worth it – aside from impressing American reporters (and a few British ones too) I have seen the following memorable sights:

– Norman Pace picking his nose with my flyer.

– Jimmy Carr in a bright pink t-shirt, as if to say “look at me! I’m Jimmy Carr, in a bright pink t-shirt!” (the words “walking target” spring to mind).

– Sue Perkins. Who proved quite how wonderful she is when she recognised me from our brief radio interview, chatted to me about the agonies of being a solo Fringe performer, and offered me free tickets to her show. Which was bloody brilliant. (Lucy Porter’s was not.)

– The Dresden Dolls, very very close up in the Spiegeltent. They’re still fantastic.

– Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest; overlong, underwritten, completely lacking in wit and devoid of any of the qualities of the first film. One star.

In amongst generally useful advice, mini flashbacks to Buffy episodes, and what she had to lunch, you get occasional gems. Half way through reading her post on refreshing joke forms, I honestly thought I wouldn’t laugh at any of the jokes. They were all so old, or somewhat clunky.

And then she pulled out the last one, and I’m sorry, I laughed out loud. People around me are looking askance (but not very askance; they know me quite well). There’s something very carefully played about the last line, which makes it funnier than the joke itself deserves. Great.

I hope that some of what I write induces similar reactions. The best I’ve come so far to myself was in naming a character in my film Sheffield, on a whim, and then discovering a whole vein of Sheffield jokes that I’d never have thought of otherwise. But maybe that one’s just me.

I accidentally freaked out a co-worker today by, in the middle of a rather complicated discussion about why one of our friends shouldn’t try to date teenagers, saying “good evening sports racers, today is scratch the side of the face off a girl you like day”.

Not enough people watch Ze Frank.

I’m not sure which I’m more angry about: that spammers have found a way round my spam filter, or that the way round is to use chunks of Dan Brown writing. I have now read more Dan Brown accidentally than I managed even while deliberately reading The Da Vinci Code in a moment of stupidity (in my defense, I did skip to the next page whenever I got too annoyed with his poor characterisation, shoddy grasp of mathematics, history and geography, or mutilation of the English language; I think I completed two pages).

I now need to write a bad writing filter.

Blonde at the station
Begging for tigers’ winter.
Has night framed her day?

Somebody came up to me in the Fringe performer’s area today and said “it’s James, isn’t it?”

I recalled being flyered by him about a week and a half ago and having a brief discussion about nipples, but I didn’t think I’d given him my name. “Yes,” I replied, rather uncertainly.

“I thought so,” he beamed. “I’m reading your book!”

“Really?” I said, astonished.

“Yes, I’m really enjoying it!” (He actually did say that.) “Our producer bought it because she hadn’t done Edinburgh before, and – well – I recognised you!”

I knew it was a good idea to fill the book with pictures of myself.

Oh, that I had more time to blog about my frolics at the Fringe. I might even be able to relate the story which led to me declaring “Pond, will you stop pimping Adam!”

Okay, it’s quite simple really, Pond was offering a random girl a large sum of money (in cash) to sleep with Adam Kay, who was so scared that he very convincingly made a sustained pretence at being gay.

It really has been incredibly hard work all round – yes! unbelievable, doing a one-man show for the entire Fringe is hard work…! But it seems to be going well and thanks to a timely review my audiences are on the up. And last night I sang probably the most unexpected improvised love song of my career.

If you haven’t seen the show, what happens is this: I take one audience member and, in character, go on a “speed date” with them, which climaxes with a love song made up on the spot based on what they have told me.

Sometimes people try to be funny and tell me things that aren’t strictly true. This usually makes my life difficult.

So when a woman got up on stage last night and told me what she did was artificial insemination, my heart sank and I thought “not another…”

Only, when I looked at her, she seemed to have an honest and quite serious face. She was a middle-aged woman with children in the audience and, after a little probing, gave me quite a detailed description of how to artificially inseminate a cow.

Turns out she was telling the truth after all.

So I sang her a love song about artificial insemination, in which I managed to rhyme the word “impinge” with “syringe”.

It was a good show.

According to today’s Herald, the reason that musical comedians are a perennial fixture at the Fringe is that “the hour-long format allows them time to indulge their latent rock-star ambitions.”

Yeah, alright.

Assuming I actually make it up to Edinburgh tomorrow, I’m a little concerned that I’ll have to deal with James’ racist past. Are people going to assume I’m racist? Am I going to have to apologise?

This is particularly important because on Monday we’re on Radio Scotland (again, in James’ case), and I can’t help feeling that it will come up. I reckon I have three options:

Claim it only applies to men

The section in question is the rules of The Fit Scotsman Contest, a game that James and some other people who like Scotsmen, or at least men, played while we were performing An Extremely Memorable Emergency. Although the actual sentence talks about ‘Scottish people’, that has to be taken in context.

Not go

I could just not turn up. I missed an interview with Edinburgh Evening News because I’d been up all night fixing stuff for work after what I can only describe as a power girder (in that it was twenty foot long and the width of my leg) blew up. Given the current plot to overthrow the government by refusing to let people take anything on plane journeys that might while away the tedium, I think I could come up with a pretty good excuse for simply not showing.

Lie

“I never saw that. It must have been inserted by the copy editor.”

It’s probably not a good idea to go with the first option, because we’re being interviewed by two men. I assume they’re Scottish, it being the Scottish national radio station. The second option might annoy James as he’s already flat out publicising and performing his own show.

By the way, no matter what Ken Smith of The Herald writes, the description of Scots as irredeemably ugly doesn’t come under “fleeting amorous relationships” – it’s not even in the index as such, although frankly now it’s been pointed out I can’t believe we didn’t put that in. It would fit well next to “Fit Scotsman contest”.