There is a lush green field outside my window. Every day people in high-visibility jackets do something official very slowly on the horizon with clipboards, walkie-talkies and a measuring stick. They are anonymous day-glo blobs. I have no idea if they are doing a good thing or a bad thing. Planning a wildlife sanctuary or an industrial landfill site.
There’s probably a bit of tedium, a bit of banter and late-afternoon excitement about what the ‘missus’ has got planned for tea. There’s even the possibility that one says to the other over the walkie-talkie,
“I’ve started a bit of deep-sea diving on the weekends. You should come along. It’s jolly good fun.”
Then one of them might reply, “P*** off, you pillock.”
These people are also in my head. They are my ideas, my internal editors and my critics. They are a nightmare. Why can’t they just agree on something? I want to confiscate their walkie-talkies and throw mud in their faces. Do they even know what they are doing themselves?
This particular brand of rage and paranoia is helped along by the pressure I am placing on myself to achieve certain immediate goals combined with my fluctuating abilities as a comic. I think an old school report explains it best, “Samantha swings between being brilliant to barely satisfactory.”
The immediate goals I have set myself are entirely dictated by the fact that us new comics are in the midst of Competition Season. My fluctuating abilities are dictated by a self-*perpetrated force I have yet to identify and when I do, boy am I going to have words.
(*I had to look up how to spell ‘perpetrated’ at www.dictionary.com and interestingly enough the example phrase it chose to demonstrate the use of this word is as follows, ‘Who perpetrated this so called comedy?’ Coincidence? I don’t think so.)
Competition Season is a bit like Shooting Season, in that one gets the feeling that these fine specimens are reared solely for the purpose of blasting out of the sky with a 12-bore moments after take-off. No doubt flushed out from the long grass by our friends with the walkie-talkies.
I think I am quite competitive by nature, although I have never competed in anything other than an egg and spoon race.
There are a dozen or so competitions, some with cash prizes, some not. Some of them though, capable of accelerating your career and making you feel worthy of their accolade… perhaps. There are so many new acts on the circuit at the moment that one of the more ‘senior’ of the competitions had 661 entrants this year. I didn’t enter that one because at the time of registration I remembered how it felt not to win the egg and spoon race. A few weeks later though I had forgotten what it felt like and entered three other competitions. The last of which is next week. I am so fickle it hurts.
Statistically, each year these competitions are won by good comics who just happen to be men. Last night I competed in one designed specifically for women only. I had placed a lot of importance, too much importance, on doing well in this competition. I had spent the year working towards this day. It had become a beacon marking out the trajectory of my comedy career. The goal was to qualify through to the next stage of the competition, not to take over the world. Although a little megalomania would probably do my on-stage persona the world of good. I had even lost sleep over this day.
I just happen to be too complicated to adopt the Que Sera Sera attitude that would make this season easier to endure. ‘Surely, you do not have to enter these competitions if it creates such a breach of peace?’ asks the walkie-talkie in my head.
I have a response to that and it is set to the soundtrack of the Flight of the Bumble Bee. Picture if you will, a bee. It is buzzing around the house, banging its head against the windows. You tell the bee to find its way to the open window but it just keeps banging its head on the invisible barrier. Thump, thump goes Mr Bumble. You get a glass and a CD case to help glide the bee into the glass so you can rescue it. You don’t rescue the bee though. You trap one of its legs between the glass edge and the CD and render it helpless. You damage the bee. The bee you wanted to help is now without a leg. It’s your fault. You hurt the bee. You bee hurter.
I am the bee. The frenetic and desperate bee who just wants to survive at any cost. I am also the rescuer. The well-intentioned rescuer. It doesn’t matter whether I enter or not, I still hurt myself.
There were 16 contestants in my heat at last night’s competition. Some of them confirmed peoples’ worst fears of what to expect from a female comic. At times I had to return to the green room because the material was so unsavoury I couldn‘t listen. Luckily, there were 8 acts of quality.
At competitions, audiences take a while to get into the swing of it, depending on a number of factors which is why going on first is always the dreaded slot, unless you are a strong opening act. I went on first. I had a ‘barely satisfactory’ gig.
I’m wondering when the men in their high visibility jackets will be back in the field. I think it would be nice if they levelled the field and painted a 100 metre race track so that I could invite some friends over for an egg and spoon race and we could forget about comedy and the walkie-talkies in my head could be turned off, just for a little while.
