Dreadful Nonsense

Just back in from what was quite a good night at the comedy club. Most of the acts did really well, and the audience were a really lovely, enthusiastic bunch - probably driven by the fact that Friday is a Bank Holiday and therefore the weekend starts tomorrow. Wednesday is therefore the new Thursday this week.

But then we had a really odd altercation in the pub afterwards with the act that had headlined, Neil Delamare. We popped along afterwards with the MC, who I'm not going to the trouble of naming because he probably googles his own name day and night in the hope that someone will have acknowledged his existence and I'm not giving him that kind of encouragement. Oh, go on then, it was Evil Andrew Stanley. Anyway, Evil Andrew Stanley kindly introduced me to the headline act, Mr Neil Delamare, with the words "This is Sharon. She's the one that gave you that really bad review."

Now. I've read and re-read that review since meeting Evil Andrew Stanley, because he's gleefully managed to bring it up in conversation every single time I've met him since. And I do remember that one show - one out of over eighty shows I saw at the festival last year - because it stuck out in my mind as one of the worst shows I saw at the Festival. It was one of the worst because the room was suffocatingly hot, the acts were incredibly lack lustre and un-arsed about the whole show, and the audience were all dead in their seats. This does not make for a good show, and in this case reflects badly on everyone but is the fault of no one - Edinburgh venues are notoriously hot, lacking in air conditioning and atmosphere in equal parts, and the heat builds up during the day so that evening audiences get the worst of the deal.

Even so. For more than just the one comment quoted in the review, I felt that Neil's take on the night in question probably wasn't the best direction to be going in, considering that three quarters of the audience were in fact English. I'm not English. My family aren't English. I am not a raging republican, nor am I a raging loyalist. But I'm still offended when someone starts their act by slagging off the majority of the people in the audience for something that started over 800 years ago, and something that is still ridiculously defining the mindset of a nation that really needs to move on from here. For me, Irish or Scottish comics telling anti-English jokes is just as lazy as someone calling Jewish people tight with money, explaining that cats/dogs or men/women are very different, or listing off the names of sweets from the 1970s that are no longer available to buy.

I've been taken to account over reviews that I've written before, obviously. I've been writing reviews for 4 years professionally, and a lot longer for school/college/free papers. I'm well able to fight my corner, and only ever write what I believe to be true. Therefore it's not difficult for me to justify any and everything I've written in the past. What really annoyed me tonight, and no harm to Neil for taking me by surprise, was the really odd way he was arguing his point. I honestly didn't understand at all where he was coming from, or what he was talking about. And when he kept saying "Do you know what I mean?" I couldn't do anything but nod, because to get him to explain it to me for a fourth time would have been insulting to him and too draining for me.

And, reading over that review again for the 1,000th time, I feel he got off lightly. Look what I said about the second act, for god's sake.

Ridiculously, myself and Mrs Bishop instead upped sticks and left to catch the last night bus, which we missed by a matter of moments. I hate having arguments with people, and I hate even more frustrating half-arguments that go nowhere and leave neither party satisfied.

But anyway. My point in this post was:
1. To put Neil Delamare's name up a number of times, so that Neil Delamare could find this post and therefore email me via the address on the left hand side of the page so that he could properly explain his position and I could properly answer him, without the difficult medium of a pub, the lateness of the evening and my inability to form coherent sentences.
2. To let everyone else know that I'm off to Galway tomorrow morning and won't be back until Tuesday, at which time I will back date posts and give Mrs Bishop something else to do with her work day.

Good night, and have a lovely Easter.

This entry was posted on 08 April 2004 at 1:34 am. 0 comments

Dreadful Nonsense

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