First

After a mere 5 years of sitting upon a website I believe I have found out what to do with it. Let’s all act like its 1999 and indulge me a daily (ish) blog of various projects,  ideas, musings and shit like that which is cynically put together with the sole purpose of being able to generate material to use at a later date. You know, like exactly what Richard Herring did with ‘Warming Up’. Except this one is different as I have chosen to name the blog “Ambition Exceeds Talent”. Which is better.

Let’s begin with a brief rundown of the projects I am currently working on/planning on working on and we shall take it from there.

Cage Fight: We’re gearing up to start recording the second round of this one in the next couple weeks and I must say, I’m genuinely excited. This silly little project has turned into quite the adventure and has led us to befriending another Cage podcast (somewhere in Florida I think). This is definitely more of the way I’m hoping to push the show. Turn it into a veritable melting pot of other shows that are constantly befriending or be-enemying us. Oh, and if anyone knows Nick Cage, have him give me a call please.

Another Here: We are starting to get ourselves ready for the second series of this which I genuinely reckon should take the RPG world by storm as the show is ace, the content is endless and unlike your favourite RPG show, nothing atrocious will come out about the people involved in this one! As well as the base show, I would quite like to have a world of shows under the “Another Here” banner. Basically, I see everything we do on that show as a long form interview to work for Bully Pullpit Games.

Fucking Countries: Right - now this silly idea has been percolating for about 10 years. It has gone through a few changes and I’ve landed on this: instead of simply going through each country on the planet and chatting about it, I have limited it to merely going through the flags. Before I have started writing and researching this one - I’m going to predict that it will be extremely simple with absolutely no chance of controversy what so ever. Oh yeah, and I think I’ll change the title to a moderately less antagonistic one.

Stories We Told: This is intended to be under the “Another Here” banner. Essentially I wanted to take the RPG’s we played and write short stories inspired by our games, record them as tiny little radio plays. Do enough to fill 10 half hour episodes and put them out. I had this idea ages ago and have been arrogantly claiming it’ll start to be released in August. At the time of writing this - no episodes have been completed. How hard can it be to knock out 5 hours of short stories? Let’s see what happens shall we.

Better Bible: This is all recorded and scheduled for release. Should be finished by the end of July. And as much as I have considered moving on to the Apocrypha or other religious books, I think the next stage will be to convert the 66 episodes or whatever it is, into a stand up show. Which reminds me -

Stand Up: I’ve just moved countries and really want to find out where are all the gigs are so I can jump on them. But seems like, as I currently don’t know anyone this will take ages unless I start this other project

Gregory Networks: Which would be an interview podcast, where I speak to everyone I can find in the comedy industry round these parts. The promoters, the famous, the open spots, the venue owners, the reviewers. Again, to cynically get my name into all their heads. This show could go either way, but I reckon it would end up being dead fun and lead to -

Stand Up: As we were saying, I haven’t done any stand up in a few years. Itching to get back on stage, but accept that my first few times may well be shit. So in an effort to account for this, I have been compiling painfully tight 5, 10, 15 & 20 min sets based on the past 10 years or so of material. Feels almost like cheating, but it’ll be a fun start. But what were we talking about? oh yeah!

Better Bible: So turn it into a stand up show. That show would be tight as hell and fucking amazing. Also, it might finally satisfy my bible itch so I can move onto ANYTHING ELSE!

But I think that’s largely all the podcast plans. Other active projects include a couple of plays, a musical, a wonderful idea about dog conspiracy’s that I’m not sure what to do with. Maybe a musical, a play, a series of YA books or a comic. Each of these possible avenues are full of their very own specific problems. But it is a cracking idea that I believe deserves to exist in some format or other (deserves to exist. It does not need to exist). I was tempted to have a go at a crowd sourced musical with the idea. And not only because that’s a beautifully lazy way to pretend to be creative. The thought process goes like this: I would split the plot into 20 song titles. Write a few paragraphs mapping what has to happen and be addressed - do a straight to camera video of myself to post on TikTok just reading it and asking people to convert the thing into a song. Hoping that 1: people watch and join in, 2: they all start working together to create something special, 3: everyone is tricked into thinking that this still counts as my idea so when crediting it as “written by Gregory Akerman and the DVC” I will get away with it. You see, the collection of strangers who would pretty much be writing it for me would be referred to as the Diabolical Villain Consortium (DVC) which will make it seem fun (as oppose to simply feeling like they are being cheated).

Problem is that in order for this to be successful, you need a following. Tricky. But fuck all the other plans. I love that idea!

So yeah, loads of plans and lets travel along together and see just how much of this I get done. Place your bets!