Hermione, Ron & Harry - note the top quality jumper on Ron

Yesterday I had my first ever screen test.  I was awful and yet still better than most of the cast in Harry Potter.  It was a strange, strange experience.  I’ve never been attacked by lots of cats at once but I’m fairly sure the feeling would be similar.   When I left the flat with my hands stuck in a claw like grip.

The film has been written and is being directed by Tim who plays music in Katerwaul and makes coffee in Kilau.  The part I was going for is a man who gets fucked over by a woman and goes proper mental.  There’s also a bit of time travel.  I’m fairly sure if I get the part I’ll probably humiliate myself.  And there’ll probably be nudity and I’ll have to get my cock out and show it to hunners of people.  Still, it was interesting to do something a bit different.  Good to push myself.

Went to see Harry Potter at about half eleven last night and got there as the trailers were starting.  Because there were four of us and not four empty seats anywhere in the proper cinema we had to sit in the special seats at the front.  Thankfully my eyes are quite far apart and I was able to take the whole thing in.  It was a really underwhelming film.  It looks beautiful, possibly the most beautiful of all the Potter films, the music is superb and Ron Weasley has some very good knitwear.  It doesn’t really run very smoothly and is annoyingly different from the book.  But it does set up the final two films.  Much the same way that the sixth book is a little underwhelming but sets up book seven.

The beginning of this book is where the Minister of Magic appears to the Prime Minister.  I remember when I used to work for Anne Begg MP and she came up in the draw for PMQs.  We were desperately trying to think a question and because Half Blood Prince had come out this week I suggested we ask about it.  So she did.  Here’s the Hansard of her question and Tony Blair’s reply.

Q8. [13349]

Miss Anne Begg (Aberdeen, South)

(Lab): Now that the summer recess is almost upon us, will my right hon. Friend have time to do what millions of people did this weekend and read the new Harry Potter novel by Scotland’s most successful writer? What would he say to people who have been critical of those books, especially as they have done more to improve literacy and children’s enjoyment of reading than even this Government’s excellent education policies and everything that I did in 19 years as an English teacher?

The Prime Minister: The Harry Potter brief in my file is somewhat thin, which only shows that my officials’ sense of importance is not what it should be. I was told by someone, however, that in the first chapter of the new book the Minister of Magic comes out of a picture to confront the Prime Minister. I am still searching for the Minister.

That was actually asked in Parliament!  And I had something to do with it.  Oooh, the reaction was awful.  The Times, The Guardian, The Daily Mail and the Evening Express all had a go.  I think it was then that I knew I wasn’t going to be a West Wing style advisor for any senior politician.  The closest I ever got was writing jokes for Wendy Alexander for about two weeks.

After fourteen months my beautiful radio show has finally been axed.  In fairness I always knew it was coming.  Original 106 had a requirement to provide specialist music programming for two years after its set up.  So I thought I had until October this year until the bosses could finally give me the boot.  However Ofcom changed the rules last week and I was told that last Sunday was to be my last show.  Actually, I was told that the Sunday before was to be my last show but the bosses were very kind and changed their minds and said I could have a farewell show.

In the end I managed to get a whole heap of bands to come up to the station and perform for me.  An adbridged version of the last show can be found here http://www.originalfm.com/podcastaudio/524657/252.mp3

I think Amy Sawers and Kathryn Sawers singing 17 could easily be my favourite bit of a session ever.

Anyway, now that I am unemployed comedian, broadcaster and writer without a main source of income I have decided to update my blog more and grow a beard.  I will grow this beard firstly because I have never grown a beard before and I want to see what it looks like and secondly it seems like the sort of thing people who want to do cool things in the media should do between jobs.

This is week 1:

Apparently you have to give it four to six weeks.  And then I should fufill another childhood ambition and look like Captain Haddock from Tintin.  I may have to nip past John Menzies and pick up some black felt tip pens to colour the random bare patches before then.

A delighted Laura Marling receiving the news that her album is my no. 1 of 2008

Pointless and hack I know, but I am currently compiling my top ten albums of 2008 for my show on Sunday.  So far I have a top 9 but am unsure which one should get my top 10 place.  Of course all this will change before Sunday.  Being the creepy obsessive I am Laura Marling will probably still be no 1.

1. Laura Marling – Alas, I Cannot Swim
2. Cajun Dance Party – Colourful Life
3. Sigur Ros – Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust
4. Operator Please – Yes Yes Vindictive
5. Ida Maria – Fortress Around My Heart
6. The Hold Steady – Stay Positive
7. Sons & Daughters – This Gift
8. White Denim – Workout Holiday
9. Randy Newman – Harps and Angels
10.

The others that are being considered are…

Band of Horses, Elbow, Oasis, Raconteurs, Sonny J, Bon Iver, Friendly Fires, Futureheads, Twilight Sad, James, Neil Diamond, Martha Wainwright, Seasick Steve, Noah And The Whale, Ladyhawke, Johnny Flynn, Frank Turner, The Aliens, Mystery Jets, Travis, Gnarls Barkley, MGMT, Born Ruffians, Rufus Does Judy, Vampire Weekend, Twilight Sad, Lightspeed Champion, Jim Jones Revue, Tapes N Tapes, Flight of the Conchords, Okkervil River, Jenny Lewis, Walkmen
I can’t include EPs and I’m fairly sure that there are some really obvious names that I’ve left out.  Any suggestions much appreciated.

Q have already done their top 50 here

….haven’t updated this in a while. It’s sort of like a tamagotchi or a child (I’d imagine) in that the novelty soon wears off and you really can’t be bothered. But for some unknown reason I am awake at 5:55 on a Friday morning and have been for the last two hours. Having got bored of poking and prodding my girlfriend’s sleeping face and having resisted the temptation to draw on her I thought now would be the ideal time to update my blog.

It’s been strange in that I had more gigs last week than I did in the whole of October. I had a rather beautiful weekend at the Stand in Glasgow. Normally I’m not that big a fan of the Glasgow Stand as it’s generally full of Glaswegians. They tend to be quite a hard audience. Well they are for a middle class, Aberdonian ponce like myself. Except last week the Glasgow audiences were really rather perfect. I did new stuff and it got a nice reaction. The other acts (Henning Wehn, Ron Vaudrey and Antony Murray) were brilliant and it was the best back stage atmosphere I’ve experienced at a gig.

I can remember at one point looking at Antony, who was on before me, performing to a crowd of 250 odd and all I could think was why the hell would you do that? Then as soon as I buzzed off stage after I remembered why. Really is no feeling on earth like it all.

On the Thursday night there was a huge Daily Mail staff party in the audience, and do you know what? They were proper lovely. Not at all dickish. I didn’t even have to do my Princess Diana/Gypsy/illegal immigrant material.

Then on Monday I had nothing. My first proper day off in over a week and a half and I felt awful. I had a huge comedown from the gigs and just felt really depressed. In a way it reminded me of the orchestra trips I used to go on with school. You’d spend a week playing music with friends and having a good laugh and then you’d come back to normal life and it’d be dull, not even black and white. That’s seriously how I felt at the start of this week. What a tool.

Mark Gatiss of the League of Gentleman and Doctor Who was in town on Wednesday and I got to interview him in front of a live audience. That was fun. I don’t think I ballsed it up. Maybe I could have been a bit more confident but it was quite good to hear an audience react to my questions and the answers given by the interviewee. I really hope I get the chance to do more stuff like that. For the record he’s not going to be the new Doctor Who and he wouldn’t say if he knew who it would be.

There were two proper old ladies who sat in the front row that hadn’t read the book and just turned up for something to do who talked throughout the entire thing because they couldn’t hear properly. There’s something quite fun about saying ‘fuck’ and talking about man to man bum sex in front of pensioners. I’d recommend it.

By the way, I write these in wordpress and then Facebook cleverly picks them up and reproduces them. Except it forgets to add spaces and makes me look like even more of an illiterate fuck wit than I actually am. Just wanted to get across that it’s not my fault.

The Attic Lights were in session for me last week and apparently they’ve been chosen by Channel 5 to play the theme tune for the new series of Minder. I asked them and they were only too happy to play it for me. Have a listen below as it sounds superb.

Minder Theme Tune by the Attic Lights

Hmm, haven’t updated this for a while.

It’s been a strange few weeks.  I’m slipping further and further into poverty.  Well, as long you accept my definition of poverty as being in a house with heating and food but not being able to justify spending an hour in Starbuck’s every day reading the Guardian.

I’ve just got to face up to the fact that I need to get a job.   I do feel like a bit of a failure.  I think it was right to leave my last job.  I had stopped caring about it as much as I should have done and that wasn’t fair to boss who had been very good to me.  And living the life of a care free artist has been fun.  But I seriously have no money.  I’ll take anything.  Waiting on tables, working in a shop or temping in an office.  The only stipulation is that I don’t have to wear a hat.  I’ve spent enough years in jobs with hats.  In fact  I think I may still have both the KFC and Burger King hats at home.  Perhaps I could ebay them to some young people as hilarious retro festival wear.

What has been reassuring is speaking to other people who do the same kind of thing as me who are also having to supplement it with real work.  It’s nice to know other people aren’t doing well. 

Anyway, I’ve just updated my Myspace profile with the gigs I’ve got booked between now and Christmas and I’d thought I’d share them here.

The most exciting one is on the 19th of November where I’m interviewing writer and League Of Gentleman member Mark Gatiss in front of an audience.  It’s a new thing to do which is always good fun and I can pretend I’m Parky.

This should have appeared a few weeks back, but for whatever reason didn’t.

Did you know that there exists a 27 club? Club is perhaps the loosest term, because it is more a collection of musicians who die at the age of 27. I can’t imagine having much fun at a club full of dead musicians. Really I’ve been to plenty of clubs where there are lots of living musicians and not had fun.

Anyway inside this club you would find the corpses of Brian Jones from the Rolling Stones, Kurt Cobain from Nirvana, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison of the Doors. All of them dead, some from mysterious circumstances, but all have died at the age of 27. Don’t believe me? Have a look at Wikipedia – the 27 Club even has its own page.

The reason this is bothering me is because I turned 27 last week, which I’m sure probably is of no concern to most Evening Express readers. Until I was 27 all I had to bother me and make me feel like I’m wasting my life were the successful people younger than me like Brittney Spears. Now that I’m 27 I suddenly realised that if I died, in possibly mysterious circumstances, all I’d leave behind were some online columns for the Evening, a couple of very funny YouTube videos, two chapters of a children’s book and 47 editions of my really rather fantastic free to download podcast (www.originalfm.com/sunday-showcase-on-original-106-640406).

How does that compare to the back catalogue of Hendrix or Morrison? Robert Johnson, who pretty much invented modern music died when he was 27, admittedly he did sell his soul to the devil at some rural Mississippi crossroads at midnight so he could have mastery of the guitar. The only crossroads I’ve ever waited at at midnight was the one George Street and Hutcheon Street. And even then all I was waiting for was the Green Man so I could go to the bakers. Had the devil been there he could have had my soul for some stovies.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m not sure if I done enough with my life. When my dad was 27 he was already married, mortgaged and had had me. I’m nowhere near marriage, don’t earn nearly enough to buy a house and have trouble feeding and watering myself.

The world has almost ended twice since I started this column. Once when the Large Hadron Collider was switched on and again now where we do seem only another bank collapse away from scratching each other’s eyes out for a loaf of bread. I think it’s a safe bet to say that in the next wee while the world is going to be taken over by robots built by mad men and in fairness I don’t expect to live. I’m not very good at fighting and no one cares enough about me to share their bin scraps. I’m going to spend the remaining time we have on the earth finishing my book. Granted there’ll be nobody around to read it but still it’s a legacy of sorts.

In a wee addendum to this posting I was talking about the 27 club with Producer Dave yesterday and he said, ‘at least if you were to kill yourself it would be understandable, unlike Kurt Cobain’.  Cheered me right up.

Aye, so I go and write a blog saying my column hasnae appeared on the Evening Express website and that it’s causing me to go and sit in a corner and cry.  Should probably have checked the website before I posted.

Anyway, if you want to read 450 words slagging off some celebs it’s up here http://www.eveningexpress.co.uk/Article.aspx/906359?UserKey=

Haven’t been updating the blog as much as I should.  Sorry. 

I’ve spent the last two weeks feeling very sorry for myself.  I had a job interview for a job I didn’t really want.  Because I couldn’t really care I was much more relaxed and confident in the interview than I probably would have been had I wanted the job.  Then when I got the call to come in for a second interview I thought, ‘You know, actually, this could be quite good.  I’d quite like this job’.  Which is probably why I didn’t get the job.  That and they asked me questions that I didn’t have answers to.

Secondly, it’s been a quiet month for stand up.  I’ve got plenty of gigs from November to the end of January but I’ve only had one this month - and it was on Thursday to seven people.  I mean they were seven very nice people and they laughed in all the right places but it would have been nice if the audience had hit double figures.

Thirdly there’s the radio station.  Cutbacks all round mean that I’ve lost a shift which means I’m losing money and is forcing my hand to go and get a proper job.  Also, one of my comedy chums came on my Saturday breakfast show last week and said something which almost got me the sack.  I kept my job but said comedy chum is never to be allowed on air or indeed mentioned on the station again. 

Fourthly my Evening Express Column hasn’t appeared for the last two weeks.  My editor keeps asking me to send it in but it hasn’t gone online.  I’m not sure if much is going to happen there.  Hopefully it will.

I knew when I quit my lovely, well paying job to become a freelance ‘light entertainer’ that things might be tough but Christ, this is a bit much.  I have this reoccurring nightmare where I end up back doing the same job in KFC I was doing as a 16 year old spotty child.  I can’t do it.  I just can’t do another job where I have to wear a hat.

That plus the miserable hideous weather and the impending end of the world has just left me a bit down.  Still, I’m sure something will come along which will make me cheer the fuck up.

Perhaps it’ll be this afternoon when the fantastic Punch and The Apostles come and do a wee session for me.  You probably haven’t heard of them but they are another Scottish band destined for great things.  Have a listen.

http://www.myspace.com/punchandtheapostles

…really are one of the best bands in Scotland just now, and this video shows why…

This is very good.  Simple without being over long.

We don’t really do anything like this in the UK.  Satire or topical comedy seems to be restricted to panel shows where comedians are asked questions they can answer with jokes, or rather snidey, smug sketches.  We don’t really have a Daily Show or a Colbert Report or an Onion.  I genuinely don’t know why but it seems a shame that we don’t.