Second

I wanted to tell you more about Better Bible right - you know how I have gone through the whole bible and rewritten it, explaining the stories book by book. As I mentioned yesterday, I love the idea of turning this into a stand up show and inevitably will do (within the next 5 years. I work slow), but in the meantime I really want to do a complimentary podcast called “Better Bible: Held Accountable”. Dead simple idea - my episodes are definitely wrong. Each take on each book will be down to me misquoting, misunderstanding, making wild leaps of logic that simply don’t work, or just forcing a joke so hard that it perverts the meaning of the stories. I really want to sit down with some experts. Have then listen to my shows and essentially, tell me off. The idea of a show which involves a genuine scholar endlessly saying “what the fuck were you thinking here?” And me having to dead sheepishly go all:

“Sorry. I … I thought I was being funny”

“Oh, I see. Think you’re the big ‘I Am’ because you record a few episodes saying that an old book is irrelevant. Think you’re a smarty pants do you for mocking something important to loads of people”

“No. I’m … I’m sorry”

That would end up being an outstanding show. Problem is, as you’ll pick up quickly if you haven’t already - that involves working with others and where ever possible, I try to avoid that simply because I cannot dictate how others work. And you know people right? They are the worst!

On a slightly more charitable note - imagine approaching a proper professional who is no doubt dead busy and saying “can you help me with this idea? No I can’t pay you. No I can’t use bullshit like ‘exposure’ either because I am just me. And here’s hours of podcast you have to listen to you homework”

Seems a bit too much to ask doesn’t it.

That exposure payment thing is irritating isn’t it. Reminds me of when I entered some comedy competition years back called “stand up hero” or “super star stand up” some utter nonsense like that. It was a competition that was put on by Jongleurs (dead now - but used to be a comedy club by pricks for pricks) and sponsored by The Sun (sadly not yet dead - it currently is a newspaper by pricks for pricks). I should have known it wasn’t for me. But I am nothing if not a glutten for punishment, so I rocked up on the day - 8 fucking hours we were there! About a million comics. Open spots, TV people, good and shite ones. All of us doing about 3 minutes in front of a judge panel of - I shit you not - the head lady of jongleurs, Rick Wakeman and her from ‘Ello ‘Ello who did the whole “listen carefully I shall say this only once”. Which I think you’ll agree, is the strangest panel of judges you have ever heard of.

So I go up, do a turn and have to listen to the prog rock free mason from fucking Yes, critique my set and stare at a woman who I was finding out, in real time, wasn’t actually french before fucking off the stage and being interviewed by some ‘journalist’ from the Sun.

This whole day was tedious and getting through to the next round only seemed to make matters worse, as the next round was advertised as a ‘Comedy Boot Camp’ which - right, was the worst comedy experience of my life. We each were sat at tables with another comic, had to go up and do the opening 30 seconds of our standard set (me and my buddy were whispering with nerves that we didn’t have a standard 30 second opener - and if anything, the first 30 seconds involve getting to the mic, having a look around and contemplating the best way to start.). They went on to try and get us to mould out sets into the ‘Standard comedy formula’ that they wanted us to adopt (open with something like “I know what you’re thinking, I look like they child of famous person A and famous person B”, the joungleurs crowd would lose their mind at such self deprecating formulaic bullshit. To this day, any comic who opens with a variant of this I distrust immensely, as should you). A few of us exchanged a couple emails saying this was bullshit, we should all drop out.

I marched up to the head of jongleurs and told her I was dropping out as this opportunity wasn’t for me and seemed to undermine any sense of integrity I may have had. I left, feeling elated. NO ONE ELSE DID! They stayed, they toed the line, they are now all extremely successful.

What the fuck has any of that got to do with exposure?

Anyway - Better Bible. Let’s see what tangent io find tomorrow!