©Warner Brothers

The show last night was the lead review in the paper which meant that I had to write 500 words, the longest review I have written (to my knowledge without checking) and as such I was up far too late last night. Before the show I had a pint of Guinness and during the interval I had a glass of red wine and as only a moderate drinker this duo of drinks somehow affected my concentration. I had put in a late night writing session the night before and followed that by spending the day in court so I was flagging by the time I got round to trying to turn my notes into action. Reviews have to be in by nine o’clock in the morning to go online so I’m guessing that most of us write them before bed. The trouble is that by the time I’d finished my concentration was suffering to the point that I accidentally deleted the first draft version (slightly longer, I deliberately send an ‘online version’ and a ‘print version’ to avoid too much interference from scissor happy sub-editors) so I could only send in the final 500 word one.

At the back of my mind until Monday was the fact that I might not even be writing reviews for the paper anymore. Somebody had told me that they had heard about them getting rid of me as a result of my tweeting about the James Blunt support act competition being fixed. As nobody had told me about it I just assumed that someone was shit-stirring but decided to deal with it in a subtle manner. Rather than email to ask if it was true and why wasn’t I told, which would have made me look needy, I waited until Monday to email to ask for the word counts. I was informed of the wordage for yesterday’s Calamity Jane review and tomorrow’s Tom Stade gig at Glee, and no mention was made of the tweets. It wouldn’t have been right anyway to dump me for that as I wasn’t representing the paper at the time.

In my tiredness I had made a couple of errors, in particular using the same word or a variant twice in the same sentence which I’m glad was picked up on. There’s always a bit of editing going on for some reason, but I was amused by the fact that my reference to the wedding scene finale had been removed so as not to spoil the ending. Given that the musical is based on a film that came out in 1953 I would go so far as to assume that if you haven’t seen it or don’t know the ending, you probably don’t want to.

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