The crowdfunding campaign hasn't raised so much as a penny (at the time of writing this, maybe there will be a surge on the last day having taken it to the wire) because people have misunderstood my intentions altogether. For this reason there are several projects that aren't going to come to life this year but as I said on my birthday, this year hasn't gone too badly. As long as all my current meetings and planning goes ahead I will finish 2016 by directing a play, which is pretty fucking cool. Another silver cloud is that although there won't be a vinyl version of last year's kazoo album there will be a compilation album of live tracks from The Random Saturday Sessions to buy on those fashionable cassettes, it's the future. I will start publicising the cassette launch gig once I have dealt with the small matter of running a stage at this year's Hockley Hustle again. It's nice to be so busy after a shaky start to the year and it feels quite grown up to be breaking up for Christmas by giving a talk about Charles Dickens. If I pull my finger out I should get my film finished too because I have had to put that on hold due to road surfacing works ruining one of my shots.
This all got me to realising that there's still plenty left that I want to do, whether on a large scale or independently. I used to think that I had to do everything when I was young but while I have always been creative I never really knew what it was I wanted to do. Comedy was always what I gravitated towards and maybe the reason I didn't gain the confidence to have a proper go at stand up was that I was too young when I tried it and therefore didn't have the life experience needed to write comedy. When I compere at gigs I always throw jokes in and I am good at interacting with an audience, but I don't think I could write a decent set. Now that I know there are things I am good at I don't want to be pinned down to one specific area which is why as much as I enjoyed radio (and would do it again in a heartbeat) I wasn't happy at the way it took me away from nearly every other avenue. That could of course be because I was doing so much, at the peak of my radio work I was doing two shows a week of live radio at a total of five hours, which is harder than it appears because of all the planning, and recording another hour to send to the station in America I worked for. With doing the podcast I am not beholden to any of the conventions of radio and can record it when I want, and it can be as long as I want to make it. At the moment I have acquired the discipline to record several shows at once in order to have episodes banked, this sacrifice of a few hours enables me to have a less stressful weekend as it removes the need for any sort of deadline.
When I was young I wanted to be rich and famous but I am glad that it didn't happen in a way. The rich part might have been nice but what if I had become so well known for something (at one time I wanted to be a children's television presenter and even auditioned for Blue Peter) that I wasn't able to experiment in the more conceptual art/time wasting bollocks side of things? It is a pretty wonderful thing to be able to have an idea and fly with it not caring a jot if anyone likes it or gets it, I think not getting it is a problem as people think I'm being serious when I'm actually being ridiculous and ridiculous when I'm actually being serious. Perhaps I should hold up signs saying 'serious' or 'ridiculous' so that people understand, or would they think that someone trying to do something while holding up a sign saying 'serious' was in itself quite ridiculous. I can't wait until I'm dead and people realise what a genius I am/was*, but it will be too late for me to use it to my advantage.
(*I might have looked like I was being serious when I wrote that, but I was being ridiculous, or was I? It is confusing, no wonder nobody understands).
My blog about clowns earlier this week set me thinking about wanting to do something along those lines, not be a clown myself but create something with clowns as a theme. I do have a comedy sketch written involving clowns that hasn't been made yet (hit the PayPal donate button at the top of the page if you are curious) but that is more circus related than simply using clowns. Some kind of photo project maybe, or something using women as clowns, that to me would be so sexy. It takes all sorts. On the Internet there are photographs of women dressed and made up as erotic clowns, so someone told me, it isn't as if I intentionally Googled 'sexy naked female clowns' and if you think I did then you're wrong.
Seriously though, there are things that interest me in different areas of entertainment. Puppets for example, either the hand and rod technique used in The Muppet Show or marionettes. Thanks to cheap cameras and the ease of uploading there's also the possibility of making something tangible using hand or even finger puppets. When it comes to puppets though, the one thing that I really would like to do something with is Punch and Judy. I know that there are arguments against Punch and Judy these days because of the fact that he hits his wife and child, although I haven't seen a Punch and Judy show for a very long time so for all I know they might have changed the story. Children today are possibly more sophisticated with their computer games and Snapchat but before all that modern shit engulfs them shouldn't they be exposed to as much old fashioned entertainment as possible, the circus too for that matter. I have somewhere in my files a synopsis for a modern day dark comedy drama with Punch and Judy as the central characters who have now split up. Not wishing to go into detail with this as I don't want it stolen like some of my other ideas, but if you could see your way clear to a donation using the above button then maybe it could happen.
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The latest episode of The Random Saturday Sessions is here.
Thank you in advance for donating using the PayPal button at the top of this page. It all goes towards creating podcasts, sketches, documentaries, films and more, all of which I will make available for free in return for your generosity.
