January 28, 2008
SAVE THE RHINO (& MY EGO)
I’m glad last week’s over. I spent most of it feeling thoroughly deflated. Mentally that is. Physically I look and feel as if I’ve had a compressed air pump shoved up me.
Last Monday’s Save The Rhino gig at The Comedy Store went well and a good time was had by all. I’d asked to be first on as I was keen to get back home early, but it was fun seeing people like Tom Basden, Dan Clark, & Noel Fielding backstage before the gig and after I’d done my 10 minutes of Famous Guy (which went down fine I thought) I decided to hang out and keep chatting as well as catching the other performers (including Paul Kerensa, Jack Whitehall, Vicky Frango and MC John Fothergill, all very good indeed). I’ve been sat in my nutty room doing radio bits and pieces and going slightly mental for the last few weeks so it was great to get out and see some nice people. Thanks to all of you who came along. It was very good meeting those of you who said hello.
Here’s a pic of Famous Guy in off duty gear (taken by Alex Sudea). Usually I would do this character dressed in a flight suit, as if he’d just come from the set of one of his exciting films (you’ll see a clip in my MeeBOX pilot, transmission date still pending) but I wanted to try out some new bits for which his regular clothes would be more appropriate. In the end I ran out of time and ended up doing the usual stuff.
In this pic, Tom Basden and his guitar, backstage at The Comedy Store. Noel in background revising. If you haven’t properly investigated Tom’s sometime comedy family ‘Cowards’, you really should. They’re the real deal.
Here we see the charming Paul Kerensa, Dan Clark (who has his own series coming up on BBC3), Adam Buxton (who wishes he had his own series on BBC3) Noel Fielding (who practically owns BBC3) & the ludicrously young and talented Jack Whitehall.
Despite all the rhino saving fun and bonhomie I woke up the next day feeling inexplicably blue. During the afternoon my agent called to say I’d been bumped from Thank God You’re Here, the ITV improv show on which I was due to appear last weekend (Saturday 26th Jan). There was a clause in my contract for the show saying I shouldn’t discuss my appearance as it was supposed to be a surprise for the audience or something but it turned out I was listed as a guest on their website for a couple of weeks before I was due to appear and was there still on the weekend.
My Ma left a message saying she’d seen I was going to be on the prog and was very excited as she ‘d watched it before and thought I’d be good. I was excited too! I think I might have done a decent job! Someone at ITV didn’t agree and I was booted in favour of bigger names. The people from the production company were very nice about it indeed but it’s always hard in these situations not to feel like a kind of pathetic loser. I spent much of last week trying not to imagine someone from ITV bursting into the production offices and yelling, as if in a scene from Moving Wallpaper: “you booked Adam Buxton?! I had to fucking Google him to remind myself who the fuck he fucking is!! Did you see him on Have I Got News For You?! We don’t want people to instantly fall asleep for fucks sake! Get me Vernon Kaye immediately!” SLAM! (That’s them storming out in my mind). I had to phone my Ma and break the news.
I spent the rest of last week trawling through our first 10 or so 6 Music shows to find stuff we might include in a possible extra podcast in addition to specially recorded bits (which was how we did our Xfm podcasts). That did nothing to lift my spirits. I hate listening to myself unedited! Part of the reason we did the Xfm podcasts was so we could have something that wasn’t just unedited chunks of rambly crap, which is fine if it’s in the context of a live show with music and all, but not so great for a podcast. There’s a totally different feel to stuff that Joe and I do when it’s not a live show and we can be more offhand safe in the knowledge that the really worthless bits can be chopped (more for my benefit than Joe’s who’s much happier off the cuff than I). However now that the 6 Music podcast is out there (the condensed version of our Saturday morning can be found here) it seems a little superfluous to have another one. We’ll see.
To compound my state of self absorbed mania I spent far too long on my Net Piracy song for last week’s Song Wars. At one point it was well over 3 and a half minutes and I was way too into it! It was my Smile! I have to confess I was pleased with my final song and I cycled into town for our 6 Music show on Saturday morning feeling upbeat. However, I’m ashamed to say my merciless drubbing for the previous week’s Instructional Songs For Children got to me and I’m afraid lost it a little bit. Of course the thing to do in the face of a humiliating defeat is to buck up your ideas and plough on (this is jolly Britain after all!!!) but I suddenly had a vision of myself a few months from now having done nothing but try in vain to beat Joe at Song Wars. My wife would have left me and taken the children, the BBC would have laughed off the idea of commissioning a show from me and I’d be sat in a room rocking back and forth listening to my Frozen Meatballs song over and over and wondering why no one had voted for me. And I’d look like…
So as of this week Song Wars is on sabbatical. But the weekend still had one more ego bruising biff to deliver. When I got home and checked my e-mails I saw that I’d been sent a link for a review of the Rhino gig by Evening Standard comedy critic Bruce Dessau. You can read it here. He seemed to have mentioned every performer that night except me! What was that all about?! Thanks James from London for pointing out the fact below the review (I appreciate it even if you’re my Mum or my agent masquerading as an audience member) but it wasn’t enough to stop me e-mailing Mr Dessau to ask if there was a special reason he blanked me…
I hasten to add that I would never think to question or complain about a shitty review but in my post-bump paranoid state, I was just genuinely curious to establish whether it was an oversight or a more pointed omission. He would have had every right to ignore me but he replied very quickly explaining that his main aim that night was to review Noel Fielding and had only mentioned a few of the other acts in passing. He pointed out that I was not the only person he hadn’t mentioned as well, which on closer inspection was true. Of course it’s a shame he didn’t think enough of Famous Guy include a reference to it, but that’s entirely his prerogative. I’m just lucky he didn’t blacklist me for e-mailing him like a total psychopath. Jesus, what a week.
I’m hoping this one will be a little jollier (as long as nothing I’ve written here gets me into trouble somehow!) I’m very much looking forward to BUG 05 on Thursday. I’m very glad to say it’s sold out so apologies if you were unable to get tickets, but if there had only been 6 people there I think they would have witnessed a full scale ego collapse of the sort normally reserved for Amy Winehouse gigs, except without the amazing talent.
Pipples!
Love Adam, 28th January 2008
PS. Halfway through series 2 of Battlestar Galactica and it’s getting good now. I’ve already had death threats after calling it ‘fracking rubbish’ on the show last weekend. It’s just Mary McDonnell’s brave, sad smile I can’t handle. Still at least she’s done for. Hang on a second, what’s Baltar doing with that half Cylon, half human blood?! No you moron, no! Oh Christs. She’s smiling her brave sad smile again…