My first “Just the Yoghurt” gig tonight , which was alas fairly sparsely attended. It’s a bit of a secret gig, as I’ve made the ultimate decision to do it very late and I don’t think many people know it is happening. Also my own show isn’t selling out this week (there aren’t many people around and I got a respectable 120 tonight, but everyone is suffering), so I didn’t have the audience overflow that I had hoped for.
The idea is to for the show to be something of an endurance exercise and an exploration of the theatre of tedium and I hoped to eke the material out to an hour at least. I have managed to make it last 50 minutes at gigs before, but this is usually because it is getting a mixture of love and hatred from the divided audience, which I have then been able to play with and discuss. With only around 20 people in the room, most of whom were gamely laughing through most of it, it was hard to conjure up the passion and the fury that would be necessary to make the experience last.
But it was by no means a disaster: I was only a little disappointed at the turn out. A man in the audience made a good point that no-one has ever done before. As I described the fantasy scenario where I sleep overnight in a yoghurt pajama and then wake up in the morning and lick the yoghurt off like a cat would, he commented, “But you have already said that you don’t eat yoghurt at breakfast time.” Of course I should have come back and said that the whole cat/pajama thing is imagined and that I don’t do it, but instead I said that I hadn’t said I would be eating the yoghurt, just that I was licking it off and that then I would spit the yoghurt into a bowl, which I would then eat at lunchtime. That shut him up. And will doubtless go into the routine tomorrow.
I gamely ad-libbed some new bits, but even so, had pretty much run the idea into the ground at the 50 minute mark. I explained that it would have done better if there had been some dissent and asked the audience to recommend this show to people they didnÂ’t particularly like, who they knew would not enjoy it. I would ask you to do the same. There are two more extended shows (Thursday and Saturday) so do spread the word about them to anyone up here. With a few more punters I think itÂ’s something that could really catch fire.
I was weary today after too many beers and that didnÂ’t help, but kept off the silly arse-juice tonight and went to bed relatively early, so hopefully tomorrow will be a more energetic and imaginative performance. Hopefully I can make it up to an hour of tedium. ItÂ’s what Edinburgh is all about.
