Those of you who move in my circles will know I spent yesterday freaking out about my comedy improv show last night. Those of you who follow me on Twitter will know I spent yesterday freaking out about my comedy improv show last night. I think it was a fairly open forum of fear. As usual it was completely unfounded, and I managed to make it through the show.

One of my favourite things about improv is that if you fuck it up then it’s funny. This means when you walk out under the hot lights for the first game -Die Story – and you jabber nonsense and the audience laughs at you and shouts ‘DIE’ you’ve won. Once that first game was out of the way I felt a lot more at home on the stage. I love every part of it, I like the performance, I like the fact that at times I make jokes that I can hear individual people laugh at, I like sitting out of particular games and watching how my Improv pals take to it like a duck to water.

The next game I played was Chain Murder which is like a mime version of Chinese whispers crossed with Cluedo. Four people play. Three people leave the room. The remaining person is given an occupation, a room in a house and a murder weapon by the audience. One person is brought back into the room and the first person has to mine the occupation, room and murder weapon to the second player. The whole time you can’t use words but can talk in gibberish if it helps. Once player two feels he knows what has been mimed to him he has to perform for person three but using different actions to what he has seen in order to purvey what he believes he has seen. I was the second person in and worked out all three. Somewhere between my interpretation and the end of the line it went wrong but it doesn’t matter, because the audience get a laugh out of it. There’s something incredibly rewarding about miming the occupation; gaenocologist, in front of sixty people.

The next game I played was Props where one at a time we got up, took a prop from a table at the back of the stage and used it in a way that wasn’t it’s intended purpose. A giant lollipop becomes a guitar or a tennis racket. A green wig becomes a radioactive Santa beard or wild pubes. It took me a while to snap to attention. The scary thing about Props is that you are on your own, and trying to put across something you literally threw together in seconds. There’s nobody to back you up, you just have to hope that it’s as funny in your head as it is to the audience, and if it isn’t brilliant, you fucked up, and they laughed. It took a while but I came up with a few good ones. I momentarily got caught up watching the way my friends manipulated the props at hand to use them for any number of other things.

The last game I played was Key Words where the audience write down phrases and sentences and we pick them at random from a glass and then have to justify it in the scene we are performing. There were just two of us in, and the audience chose to set it in a library which was brilliant for the game. It meant that any random sentence we pulled out could be justified as being a quote from a book or a title, it flowed really nicely. I even managed to pull out my girlfriend’s suggestion. I then sat back to watch the rest of the show. I was spent.

What I love about improv is the way different things can be interpreted. It’s a wonderful example of the differences between people. Some of the suggestions we were given last night would become a performance that you could never write, it’s stream of consciousness, it flows. I like watching people perform because I try to chain together how they got to that point, it’s interesting to see where someone’s mind goes when they open up. I am very much looking forward to the next course of workshops, and the next show, regardless of how much self imposed suffering I’ll deal with beforehand. I’d like to thank everyone who was there last night. Without an audience it’s just ten people running round in circles making dick and fart jokes so the fact we have family and friends happy to give up an evening to us is wonderful. Without the other ‘players’ I would have been a floor bound jabbering wreck. Without Jonny nobody would have had a clue what we were doing or where we were going (thank god for that clipboard) and without Lee none of us would be able to get up and do it. Thank you.

Oh Andrew with your gentle face.
Oh Andrew your hair is nice, you look so tousled, want a cuddle?
I probably shouldn’t have seen The Amazing Spiderman this week, it’s done weird things to my mind tank. Today I am briefly going to outline why Garfield is such a flipping dreamboat.

It feels as if he has been on the slow burn, as far as I know Spiderman was his first lead role. Scratch that, he was the male lead in Never Let Me Go right? Although he appeared in a couple of big budget pictures it doesn’t feel like he was thrown in your face as the new poster boy (like for example Zac Efron was).

The fact is that Garfield not only holds his own as Spiderman, one of the big American franchises, he also makes you forget that anyone else has done it. That’s the mark of a good actor. While I’d hope in time to see a bit more range in him what we are seeing is a brilliant emerging actor.

I think his poster will be on my wall for years to come. That might be a joke.

Last night I decided that I wasn’t going to rush about trying to prepare things for a deadline entirely of my own fantasy, I decided I wasn’t going to go for a run, I decided I wasn’t going to waste hours on the Internet, I just wanted to get some munchies and watch a film with my brother.
Turn on. Tune in. Drop out.

The film in question was See No Evil, Hear No Evil which somehow young ‘EdWood’ as he insists on spelling his name had never seen before. We packed our coffee table with Pringooooals (the Euro 2012 promo packs of Pringles), milkshake, Cornettos, Jaffa Cakes and for some reason sushi.

During the film I realised that it is rare for me to let go like that, to not make any plans, or any attempt to organise or tidy things and it was down time, it was resting, it was really nice. In the chaos of our lives it is hard for Ed and I to spend any time so 97 minutes watching a film together is exactly the kind of thing required. For anyone who hasn’t seen the film it’s a brilliantly ridiculous comedy starring Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor. They witness a murder however Pryor is blind and Wilder is deaf and they are forced to set out on one of the greatest and sweetest buddy films of the decade to prove their innocence.

I think what I’m trying to say is that it isn’t the end of the world if you have a night off, work can wait, just take two hours to yourself, find something to make you laugh and find someone you can share that with. It’s one of the few things we’ve got.

I recently rewatched The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus, the 2009 Terry Gilliam film which halted production due to the untimely death of its leading man Heath Ledger. They later decided to tweak the story and got Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell to play Tony in varying depths of other worlds. It’s an enjoyable yet somewhat disjointed film that gives a glimpse of what Ledger could have done had he completed the film.

I’ve been a fan since 10 Things I Hate About You which at first I dismissed as nonsensical 90’s romantic comedy which seemed to be doing the rounds at the time. It was only when a close friend told me that I was really missing out that I watched it, and appreciated the work that had gone into twisting The Taming Of The Shrew and taking it to an American high school. After that I kept an eye on Heath Ledger through Monsters Ball, Ned Kelly and A Knights Tale.

He seemed to come from the same school of acting as Johnny Depp, it was as though he had other objectives and acting was the means of getting to it. He was a rock and roll actor. It shone through in his performances in Lords of Dogtown, Casanova and I’m Not There. There was something rebellious and yet something wholesome and likeable about him at the same time.

It’s just a shame that we have a finite collection of his work now, but what a body of work to call your own.