Will Work For Lunch

I realised that I am a hugely contradictory person yesterday. No I'm not. Ha. That was failed joke number one of today's blog. I received a text offering me a gig I've done before for a lot less money, and I turned it down on principal. Then I spent five hours in a radio studio working for nothing but a free lunch. Admittedly, the sandwiches were from Pret, so that's pretty damn fancy and they had a whole bowl of M&M's. Peanut and chocolate mixed together. Oh yes. They didn't fuck about. So I'm turning down money and turning up a free lunch. Turning up isn't the right term is it? In fact, if I'd sat there and turned up all the bowls, most people would have just got annoyed. 'Why are you spilling all the M&M's on the floor?' I would have answered that by saying 'I have a nut allergy and I feel your mixing of the two is discriminatory.' That's 'cos I think of everything like a slick mo' fo'.


The major difference is that the gig isn't great and would have been a lot of hard work for less dosh, whereas I would have happily spent ages in that studio yesterday as we improvised a three act play based entirely on audience suggestions, because improv is fun. You know how much fun it is? Well take fun, times it by super fun, add three times fun and not only do you get the answer but you sound like the most irritating of children's presenters. Thanks to some rather odd tweets and posts from the people listening, myself, Brendan Dempsey, John Voce and Nadia Kamil acted out a story about a troupe of four people - a kleptomaniac psychic, a necrophiliac that loves Gary Glitter, a birdwatcher arsonist and the secretary to the Queen who only has three days to live - travelling through time to make Margaret Thatcher go to war as an 11 year old so she'd never be PM. This was all instructed by Jesus who was a PE teacher and later resurrected as Michael Jackson. What I have just typed, out of context, would probably be enough to get me admitted to a special home. As it is, improv entirely allows all of these things and we get given M&M's to do it. Its one of my fave things about comedy in general. If a man stood on a street corner shouting at passers by that he made a horse from things he found in his room, he'd be classed as a loon. Whereas I can do the same and get paid for it. Take that loon on the street. You've chosen the wrong outlet for your verbal spoutings! (HERE IS THE HORSE I MADE BTW - )


I will post the play up on my website when I get the audio files, but unless I can put up all the suggestions it will just seem nuts. With any luck, as it was broadcast live, some lovely commissioning people will have been listening and we can try it again. I shall cross fingers, toes, eyes and all other crossable bits in hope. This will make it difficult to see or get anywhere, but that is the risk I'm willing to take. In fact I have just tried these things all at once and it means you sit in a position giving your centre of gravity an odd placing, making you wobble much like a weeble. The only exception is that they don't fall down, whereas I sort of rolled over onto my right side and was unable to untangle myself for a minute or so. It did not help that my eyes were all blurry from being crossed either. I'll just stick with hope then.


I have a preview today, so I will be mostly pretending to write that. It is July, its the time to pretend to write, up until the last week where I panic so much that I actually write. That's how it works, thems the rules. I wish I could write it today and I'm really really going to. I'm restricting myself to only checking emails once an hour, and Twitter and Facebook. So far I've checked them every five minutes under the assumption that the hour will start after that check. I'm tempted to switch off the internet for the rest of the day but I know this will just lead me to panic about what I might be getting sent and therefore not write my show at all. I wanted to, to coin an expression from the lovely Grania Maguire, 'take my show for a walk'. The problem with this is, over the last few days, I've been running a fair bit and also done quite a large amount of walking. Look at healthy Tiernan I hear you cry. I swear you always cry, and I'm not going to tell you stop anymore as that will probably cause more crying. So yes, healthwise good, but feet wise bad. This isn't really the forum for foot gripes but there are more small painful bubbles on my feet than if I were to buy drugs in a large blister pack. Yep, a blister jokes. Take that fiends! Seriously though, walking has become a tad difficult today which doesn't make a lot of sense to me as Nike Air bubbles were meant to help with foot comfort. Either way, I shall be lying down to write today, with my feet in the air. Now all I need to do is not snoozzzzzzzzz.................................................