Yesterday morning, I got up early to see two editions of Rufus Hound's Teenage Diaries being recorded at the Drill Hall. Sheila Hancock read from the diary she'd kept during her six-week holiday in France as a fourteen year old girl, telling us about some incredibly life-changing moments which I found rather heart-warming. Victoria Coren then told us about her teenage obsessions with boys and her weight, as well as the strange way in which she, at the time, dismissed the media career of her adolescence as commonplace and boring. I think if I'd known the teenage Victoria Coren, I'd've fucking loathed her, but I would have probably still tried it on with her.
Much later on in the day, I trundled off to Battersea Arts Centre to see a preview of Daniel Kitson's Edinburgh show, "It's Always Right Now Until It's Later". It was, in a word, mind-blowing. I have no idea what I thought Kitson would be like (this was my first time seeing him perform), but I'm glad I approached him with a mind empty of expectations or I might have been disappointed.
If you're planning on seeing Kitson's Edinburgh show at some point and don't want to be 'spoiled', I suggest you scroll to the end of this post, where I start talking vaguely about some telly.
With this show, he was taking a story-telling approach, but it wasn't really comedy. It wasn't a funny story; it was a story with some jokes. I got the feeling that his main aim really wasn't to make everyone piss themselves with laughter.
Let me try to explain. In this show, he tells the stories of two people, and the only way in which they are in any way connected is by one, insignificant moment where they brushed each other on a bus. The show is about, well, life: how even the most insignificant of events can mean something to someone, even if in the grand scheme of things it means absolutely nothing. Obviously, what with it being a preview (he'd told us he only finished writing the show yesterday morning), it was a bit messy in places where he forgot his words or ran out of steam and had to consult his script. Having said that, it was still marvellously, cleverly put together - cross-cutting between the two timelines with seemingly-irrelevant but interesting tangents - and I'm sure that when he finally can deliver it properly for Edinburgh it will be much less of a slog.
A note on the set, which I fucking adored: the stage was completely plain expect for the several light-bulbs hanging from the ceiling at various heights. They were all lit throughout the show, but whenever Kitson zoned in on a particular moment (he told the stories by jumping back and forth between the timelines of each character, jumping backwards and forwards in their lives, focusing on a different, important moment with every scene change to paint clearer pictures of these people), one particular light-blub would shine brighter to symbolise said moment's sudden significance. When he wasn't sitting on the chair, reading from the script the bits he couldn't quite deliver from memory, he would walk to the part of the stage with the brightest light-blub and talk at it, like a comedian might talk to an audience member in the front row.
If you're seeing him in Edinburgh, you will not be disappointed, but you may leave the venue with the feeling I had last night - a sort of heavy melancholy I couldn't really understand. The show makes you think.
'Spoilers' end here.
Today I have a day-off from live comedy, so I've had the chance to catch up on Monday's Rev and yesterday's That Mitchell & Webb Look.
A note on the former: I think it is becoming one of my favourite sitcoms of all time. It's definitely not laugh-out-loud funny, but that's because it doesn't want to be. Instead, it's cosy, and it's sweet, and the characters seem like real people with real lives (as opposed to the larger-than-life types typical of, say, The Vicar of Dibley). It's wonderful.
A note on the latter: do you remember Series 3, boys? Do you? What happened? Why have you gone back to being of a similar quality to the first two series
