Some More Shit I Can't Afford

A wishlist

If You're Gonna Spend Weeks Doing Something, You Might As Well Show Off At The End

Hello.

In 2011 I wrote a couple of papers for University. One was about the way British newspapers write about stand-up comedy, and the other one was about the usefullness of the term "cultural industries" when thinking about comedy practitioners at the Edinburgh Fringe. I've wanted to do something with these two essays for a while, cause they're quite long, and I think they're quite good.

I haven't got round to it really, so here they are if you're interested.


It Isn't Just A Joke: The artistry of stand-up and the British press





An Assessment of the Value of the term "Cultural Industries" in Reference to Comedic Practice at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe
 

lush. x

Leeds Inspired

You may not know this, but along with Natasha Rosenthall, I am one of the two organisers of Laughter Lines | Leeds Comedy Festival. The launch of the festival is just one week away so it's all hands on deck in terms of putting in place our final promotional drive. Natasha and I are two 23 year-old Leeds Uni graduates, and so we don't have an endless amount of experience when it comes to putting on city-wide events of this scale. What I do believe however is that we have the know-how to stage a fantastic event and anything lost due to our lack of experience we more than make up for with the enthusiasm and passion we share for both live comedy and the city.

John Barran's recent eulogy to the Leeds Guide in Issue 7 of The Leeds Debacle was both a fantastic tribute to an organisation heavily routed in the Leeds community and a sad reminder of how damaging this current period of austerity can be. I arrived as a student in 2007, a wide-eyed 19 year-old Southern-fairy. At the time, Leeds struck me as a city with a real spring in its step and this seems to have continued despite the inevitable economic knock-backs that this decade has seen. This is something no doubt bolstered by the fantastic roster of independent businesses and hidden treasures that really have the city's interests at heart. Places like Jumbo Records, Hyde Park Picture House, Brudenell Social Club, and Seven Arts are fantastic for Leeds, and it seems as though the community really values them (as much as they value us).

And here we are trying to kick-start our own piece of new creative enterprise, whilst stand-up comedy dominates our TV screens. The current television stand-up comedy boom has gone hand-in-hand with the collective belt-tightening that has gone on across the arts. Stand-up comedy is traditionally cheap to put on and this has led to producers clamoring to televise the latest live stand-up sensation. Yet, there is something slightly soulless and ubiquitious about a lot of the stand-up regularly broadcast into our living rooms.

For us, this festival is about filling a cultural gap as opposed to a commerical one. It was our goal when programming this year's event to stage the kinds of shows that can't be seen every night of the week in any city around the country, and a big part of that was putting together a roster of the best venues our city has to offer. We're really pleased to have been able to spread our shows across Leeds and have performances in rooms that don't typically see comedy. Natasha and I spent a long time chatting about what shows would offer a broad programme. Comedy Club 4 Kids (Carriageworks | 28th April | 4pm) is just one of our shows that could be a fantastic way of widening the reach of the festival, and taking brilliant comedy beyond the stereotypical boozey Saturday night out, providing we get the audiences that is.

A few friends have commented that Laughter Lines | Leeds Comedy Festival is very much an alternative comedy festival, and you can call a lot of our programming alternative, but staging a festival with some of the most exciting and dynamic live acts around is likely to head down a slightly alternative route, and we're thrilled about the range of performers we have put together. We have selected acts that offer a balance of both variety and appeal, but what's important to remember is that a huge part of our future success is the level of trust our audience places in us to select some of the best new comedy around. We need to earn that trust, and this year's festival is about doing precisely that.

It would be wonderful if, over the next few years, we can become an organisation that the people of Leeds really value and hold in high esteem. We held our first festival last year as part of a student project, and just as Leicester Comedy Festival started in 1994 as a student event and went on to become the country's largest comedy festival, who knows what the future holds for Laughter Lines | Leeds Comedy Festival?

www.laughterlines.org

A Welcome Break... or just a pain in the dick?

There is something wonderfully dystopian about the modern British service station; an awkward amalgamation of cultural influence, function, desire and convenience dumped on the road side. Motorway services are rarely presented with any attempt whatsoever to 'naturalise' the complex or fit the development within the context of the surrounding geography, and in that way I find them both deplorable and fascinatingly beautiful. Motorways have been slapped across rural Britain for the past 53 years, and the accompanying service stations have been put there with the same sense of crass obnoxiousness: "fuck you nature, we've won this round".

Obviously, the invention of the service station was not what God intended for our species. The presentation of a shining McDonald's mere metres from a field of grazing cattle seems slightly crude. And yet, such is the apathy with which we endure long distance road travel we rarely question the route that the British service station has taken over the last 20 years. The romanticism of the days-long American road trip is not something we share in the UK. This is partly due to the fact the we don't have days-long road travel built into our cultural psyche, but most significantly the American Highway network cuts through some breathtaking scenery, something that our M-roads tend not to show off as well as our winding country lanes. Just as much as we aren't purveyors of the classic American road trip, there is little evidence for our own take on the classic American truck stop either. Our Motorways are characterised by a sense of acceptance and resignation, and our complicity in the way service stations have come to operate is representative of that depression.

The general perception is that our motorway services operate on an ad hoc basis, but I'm not so sure. There is no doubt that road users are attracted to food, petrol and toilets, but you only need to glance over at the Time Crisis and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic game machines, along with the coin-operated massage chair, to know that these places are working on a whole other level. Even the word 'services' is a slightly disquieting allude to the notion that there is some sense of requirement involved in much of what they offer. If anything, we're servicing them. The British motorway service station has become a fiscal vice, and most of us are clamped in.

Service station businesses have managed to create an atmosphere where we feel like we have no control over the retailer-customer relationship, almost as if you hadn't been planning on buying that Now! 79 CD or the Seal cassette until you absent mindedly wondered towards the back of WHSmith. Whether it is the extortionately priced food, the casual trickery (they only sell Walkers Grab Bags) that prompts that extortion, or the weird products you don't find anywhere else (the chewable toothbrush that comes out of the vending machine), customers clearly feel somewhat bound by the commercial options available to them. There is a strange dynamic between the freedom that motorways afford us and that feeling of imprisonment whilst travelling on them that is key to the service station experience.

For the most part, British services seem to be fairly unique despite their ubiquitousness. French services are less 'services', more holes in the ground where you can shit, South African services are more venues for car jackings, and Thai services are more often than not someone's house. Granted, American roads are full of characterless fast-food franchises and petrol chains, but besides from Albion where else do you get that delightful little package of newsagent, coffee bar, burger shop, and sterilised collective seating area all in one building?

In some ways the magic of the modern British service station is that it is a classless place. As I mentioned, most of us are brought there out of a requirement for toilet, petrol and food, and there is something brilliant and wholly non-discriminatory about a bunch of people collectively acting on their 21st Century hunter-gatherer instincts. And yet, whilst rich and poor, black and white, gay and straight, all stand there at the urinal staring at either the 'Road Angel' poster or the poster that tries to coerce you into buying a personalised number-plate (both situated perfectly at eye level) the service station is not the venue to tackle modern Britain's inherent classism. With the fairly-recent abundance of M&S Food outlets now partnering the Burger Kings and Little Chefs, there is an extent to which despite the apparent classlessness, service stations are silent assassins when it comes to enforcing our cultural behaviour. You don't even get to see the nervous intake of breath when the Cornelius-Herringbone's from Lemington-Spa are forced to eat their dinner in KFC any more. The fact that you can now buy smoked salmon from a lot of services is both a blessing and a curse... daaarrrling.

One services I recently went to on my way to Leeds allowed you to order either your KFC or your BK from a computer screen that sent a message straight to the kitchen. Your number comes up on the display at the counter, and then you go collect without having to utter a word, save the embarrassment of a home counties accent 2 hours north of London.

Its clear that I have an ambivalent relationship towards service stations. I don't like the way that they encourage us to operate, and yet they're a really weird construct and we never question it and I find that inherently funny. Some of the bizarre goods sold by the 'everything' shops they have at service stations (the shops that do newspapers, Ginsters, books, CDs, etc) seem to go unchallenged. They sell clothing. They sell camping stools. They sell hula-hoops. They sell cuddly toys of the size the Generation Game would be proud. Who stops at Watford Gap services and thinks "ahh... really need a new fleece".

I have a sneaky suspicion this is something I'll never really understand until I'm a stressed Dad, off on a camping holiday, turning to my lady and saying "Shit! Darling, I've forgotten everything". Until then, "fucking weird!".