fish pie.

completely lacking in inspiration for the blog today i'm afraid.

so i'll tell you about the pie i just ate.

first up, it was bloody lovely.

sainsbury's taste the difference fish pie with salmon, smoked haddock and king prawn.

now they didn't skimp on the haddock either, some lovely bits of haddock in there. a lot of fish pies will just whack a load of salmon in and hope for the best. this one had the haddock to salmon ratio pretty much spot on.

if we're nitpicking, it was stretching it slightly to dub these prawns "king prawns". i think we both know they were just regular prawns. but no problem with that, they were after all tasty, and provided a welcome bit of texture to each mouthful.

veg came in the form of some spinach concealed within the maris piper mash, as i think we all suspected it would.

i'm not the kind of animal who'll just sit there and destroy a pie on its own, so i accessorised with some brocolli on the side.

the pie came in at a mean 12.2g fat (calm down guys, only 6.6g of it saturates), 1.92g of salt and a round 381 calories. what? it's nearly christmas.

the important thing to remember here, was that this was oven cooked from chilled in only 25 minutes.

need i say more?

human for a day.

well, our day off yesterday was bloody lovely.

we got up after a respectable lie-in and gave the flat a much needed clean, so we can now see surfaces again and that odd smell in the kitchen seems to have gone.

while the others went off to do rod is god i went to see 'bad musical' at the gilded balloon, which was bloody great. i love the guys that made it, they're called the trap and they did a series of parodies of worthy plays years ago called 'bad play' and they've made a very welcome return to the fringe with their latest show. great performances, sublime touches and just a very funny hour.

i then went off in search of some vegetables. i ended up in pizza express but the thought was there, and it was at least nice to be eating something that wasn't battered.

in the evening i saw joel dommett at the pleasance courtyard and it was another brilliant show. for the second year running he has made such an uplifting and properly funny hour of comedy look absolutely effortless.

i couldn't have asked for two better shows on my day off, and with my spirits raised and the freedom of not having to do our show that night i headed home for an early night happy, and almost human again.

day off!

it's our day off today.

a much needed chance to clean the flat, eat some proper food, go and see some shows and not worry about ours at all.

we had a late one last night, the highlight of which was getting paul absolutely battered in a drinking game with tom from the noise next door, as part of their 24 hour fringe adventure.

the game was to come up with jokes based on topics the audience suggested, and the least funny joke meant the designated member of each team (for LNGF it was paul) had to down a drink. there were five in total. from memory they were: a pint of beer, a neat gin, a goldschläger, a tequila and a red wine. now, given we're a sketch act not famed for our improvisational skill and we were up against the noise next door who do this for a living... we held our own pretty well, thanks to a combination of paul's terrible puns and the noise next door's tiredness. in the end everyone had to down all their drinks anyway so we all won. or in a more accurate sense, lost.

we must say huge congratulations to them - incredibly they still haven't finished. i believe it ends at 7pm tonight. i just walked past a couple of them and they looked... well, like they'd been up for over thirty hours wandering around edinburgh doing ridiculous tasks....

well done boys.

busy day

'ello.

bit of a busy day today.

we had the last of our internet shopping delivered this morning so the next two weeks will be an exercise in rationing the mince and -bizarrely- baby corn we seem to have stocked up on.

we're seeing some shows this afternoon, then doing the chortle fast fringe at 6.40 which is always a fleeting but fun gig. today's lineup includes ed gamble, jigsaw, piff the magic dragon and john shuttleworth so should be a cracker.

we'll probably do a bit of flyering around the courtyard before our own show at 10pm.  then we're off to do a thing for the noise next door's 24 hour fringe adventure which you can read more about here.

after that we'll probably get dangerously drunk as it's our day off tomorrow.

should be good.

in the absence of any relevant picture, here's a photo of us having been tarred and feathered.

almost half-way

well we're nearly at the half-way point and the familiar mid-fringe slump is threatening to rear its head. not a slump in the show thankfully, which is running smoothly again after some technical blips, but you just get to the point about half-way through when you start to miss home and loved ones and feel like you've been here a lot longer than you have.

check that out for a depressing start to a blog, eh? 

it will pass quickly i'm sure; we have our day off on tuesday and we're hoping that after the olympics finishes tonight the number of visitors to the fringe will start to creep up again as tourists make their way from london to edinburgh. 

it's funny, we really didn't expect the olympics to have any real effect on fringe sales, but numbers this year have been noticeably lower across the board, so hopefully that will change after this weekend.

UPDATE: just read this article by richard herring about the lower audience numbers this year. worth a read.

last night i managed to escape the fried food and hot dogs of the fringe for one night only, when i went out for a posh meal. so more to invite jealousy than anything else, (but also cos the blog hasn't contained enough pictures this year) here's what i ate...

that's just a bit of roe deer with some skirlie, on a bed of beetroot and pea purée, topped with blackberries... 

chill out.

back on track.

we seem to have overcome the tech issues and the show is running as we want it to again. it's such a relief and means the enjoyment of the show has come flooding back and we're all having fun onstage again.

we had a busy day yesterday rammed full of gigs: we did five in total including our own show and rod is god, and squeezed in some shows as well: sammy j (another great new show), trevor noah (just brilliant stand-up), totally tom (such funny, effortless performers) and i saw an excellent show i'd like to particularly recommend...

it's a clowning physical comedy called waiting for stanley at assembly roxy at 3.45. if you're up for taking a chance on something a bit different, this show is the thing. it's performed perfectly, is funny, moving and the staging and moments of puppetry and physical theatre are so clever and inventive the hour really does fly by. i can't recommend it highly enough.

one final tip - the beta males are doing a late show tonight and again on 17th & 18th called midnight movie theatre and it's a really fun, unique show. we're appearing in it briefly again tonight with a whole host of great performers so if you find yourself in the pleasance courtyard around midnight looking for something completely different, come and check it out!

flippin' tech

well, we had another tech issues-affected show last night i'm afraid to say.

it was less serious than wednesday's disaster but still affected ours and inevitably the audience's enjoyment of some of the show, which is a shame. we're trying not to get too down about it, which in turn will make this blog less depressing reading... but it is a bit dispiriting when a show that you've put a year's work into is undone by factors beyond your control.

still, things could be a lot worse and now we've hopefully identified what the problem was that was causing the issues, the show should run smoothly from now on. keep everything crossed for us please!

and it's not all bad... the weather these last few days has been fantastic and there's a new nando's in the centre of edinburgh that we are making excellent use of.

we've also seen some brilliant shows, here's one we'd particularly recommend. john peel's shed, the smash hit from comedy connoisseurs show and tell is up here for a limited run so if you haven't seen it, you must. tickets are almost all gone so move fast! it's a really lovely storytelling show all about one man's passion for british radio. funny, nostalgic, moving and accompanied by a great soundtrack.

i'm off to see ed eales-white's solo character show again today because it's that good. if you haven't seen it yet- you're missing out. character comedy done brilliantly by an instinctively great performer. what more could you want? it's on every day at 5.45 in the pleasance courtyard's baby grand.

speaking of good shows i'm about to trump the lot of you by going to see daniel kitson tonight. that's the way to end a day at the fringe in style.

the nightmare show.

it happens every run. the night where it all goes wrong. well, last night we had it. or at least, we hope that's it.

this year our show is very reliant (arguably too reliant...) on technical elements, and last night the tech decided not to play.

the computer that we run the show off (the lighting, sound and video cues all come from one computer) had gremlins that we couldn't fix which meant having to stumble through the video elements of the show, and apologise to the audience a lot.

fortunately, we've been rehearsing a song that we could do in emergencies if such a cock-up did happen. unfortunately, that song is only a few minutes long and we needed a bit more than that to try and fix things. we filled a bit more time by singing our bestiality rap from last year while lee and the technicians scrambled to get things up and running again.

eventually we got through to the end of the show thanks to a wonderfully supportive and patient sold out crowd who appreciated what we were going through, and were willing us to get through it, which i think we just about did with our reputations in tact.

as a result we've spent all of today working with a computer expert trying to identify and fix the problem. we think even if we can't completely fix it today, we can work out a version of the show that won't be too affected. but fingers crossed we'll be able to sort it in time for tonight.

we must say a huge thank you not only to last night's audience but also to our venue staff who were amazing and completely calm in a crisis. jo and her team have gone out of their way to help us sort the situation and came in early today to give us some extra tech time in the venue. we're very grateful to them all.

right, we're on our way back to the venue shortly to finish re-teching things. wish us luck.

p.s. next year i swear to god... we're making a show with no tech. just sketches and blackouts...
if only.

a good sit down.

only one piece of news worth reporting today.

when in the missoni hotel for an interview we discovered the comfiest armchair in the world. 

so we each sat in it. it was lovely. 

really lovely.

i sometimes worry we're too rock n' roll.

metatarsehole.

i'm injured.

clearly the fringe gods were not happy with my decision to try to stay healthy and active this month and a day after going for a fairly long run in the gym, my foot is in considerable pain when i walk.

it's very annoying, particularly as we gimps aren't famed for our sympathy towards each other when one of us is in pain. "have you tried manning up?" is hardly an NHS prescription. speaking of which, i have of course been looking up the symptoms on NHS direct and have narrowed it down to: tendon strain, trapped nerve, or a slow heart attack.

the upshot is i've had to stay in resting the foot all day so it doesn't affect the show tonight. it's frustrating as a) it's sunny in edinburgh today and b) it's 2for1 day so it's normally a great day to get out and see shows.

still, in slightly happier news the 2for1 thing means tonight and tomorrow's shows will be full audiences which always makes the show that bit more fun. oh, and i had my first culinary fringe institution last night in the form of chips with salt n' sauce. mmm.

hung. over.

urgh. we feel awful.

we had our street team (our lovely flyerers) drinks last night. a great night but it ended in brooks bar at five this morning debating with mark watson about the best way to eat baked beans. it was one of those nights.

we had to be up at a reasonable hour today too, to record a song for an E4 podcast at the udderbelly. to say it was a weird gig would be putting it pretty mildly. there was a great lineup (sean hughes, susan calman, sarah kendall etc) but the acts had to be interviewed chat show style and not only was it confusingly recorded out of sequence, but most of the questions were about cows (the udderbelly connection, which explains the whole "podcalf" name) so it was hard to tell who was more confused; the acts or the audience.

we were just there to record our bestiality song which has a pretty high expletives-per-minute hit ratio, which makes performing it in front of a twelve year-old boy in the front row awkward at best.

still, we did the gig and then my hangover really started to kick in. it was one of those slow-burners where you wake up thinking you're ok, then two hours later my face was sweating. my face. not even a city restaurant fry-up could save me and i stumbled over to the pleasance courtyard to record what must have been one of the most bumbling, incomprehensible and uninspiring interviews i've ever done, live on radio. i can only apologise to anyone who hears it. not my finest hour.

fortunately, i did see a good show to pick me up: matthew crosby's latest standup offering, which was great. it's a really warm, relaxed, but very funny show and he's such a natural performer the hour flies by. really worth seeing.

just time for a red bull and a pizza to get me through to tonight's show then an early night for me i think.

oh, i've done something to my foot. it started hurting when i was walking around today. any ideas, anyone?

Now then. Baggles here.

So one week in and it finally feels like we’re at the Fringe; 2AM is considered an early night, between-show boredom in the Pleasance Courtyard has led to the consumption of countless plastic hotdogs, and of course, the 8 o’ clock hour has been devoted each night to that erstwhile Gimp Fight pastime: flyering.  This being our fourth Edinburgh Festival as a group, many people assume that we shouldn’t have to promote our own show any more, thanks to the great work of our flyering team, but we still like getting out in the Courtyard ourselves with a gimp in tow and talking to people.  A cynic might describe this as “getting the brand out there”, but we just see it as a unique way to meet comedy goers before the show.

Granted, as a group of men approaching 30, being led around a public place on a dog lead and behind a mask, hearing “bring out the gimp” for the seventeenth time that evening can feel ever so slightly humiliating.  But it is genuinely good fun too, and from time to time elicits the most amazing responses.  Steve, or Director Gimp as he prefers to be known, reminded us the other day of the time he asked a guy at the Courtyard bar if he would like to “stroke a gimp”, to which the broad Scottish reply came “Is he a Lithuanian?!”

We saw the Three Englishmen yesterday, who are on at 5.40pm in the Pleasance Dome, and they gave a genuinely funny and inventive hour, as they always do.  Between us we also saw our favourite double act McNeil and Pamphilon doing what they do best, and Ed Eales-White's show Champions, which was brilliant.  Character comedy at its best.  All three shows are highly recommended by the gimps.

Right, pasta’s ready, so I’d better wrap this up.  It’s ten to eight, which can only mean one thing: Gimping awaits…

that's more like it

phew. the show went much better last night. the panic that we've created a totally unsuitable show seems to have subsided and we basically just did it better. the changes we made after the first night seemed to work and crucially we invested in some microphone tape so the mics stay on our faces now, rather than flying off every time you remove a wig. which is a bonus.

one big change though, is we have reluctantly decided to cut one of our more 'controversial' sketches. it's a real shame as it's always gone down well in london and in our pre-edinburgh previews. it would get a big laugh, then gasps of shock and horror from the audience at what they'd just laughed at, which is absolutely our favourite reaction. good comedy should be challenging, and the sketch in question probably went as close to the bone as we've ever gone but was still justifiable, which is always our benchmark with the 'darker' material.

however the last two nights, in front of a couple of hundred people in our previews, it has bombed. not just bombed, it's actually killed all the goodwill we'd worked up until that stage of the show. the audience just have not gone for it at all and it's meant it being a real battle to try to win them back after that sketch. unfortunately, that sacrifices too much so with heavy hearts we've decided to cut it. i stand by it as one of the funniest and most "LNGF" sketches we've done, it's just one of those things. i heard a great quote about cutting material because of the reaction, which was "sometimes you test your audience, and sometimes they don't pass. that isn't your fault."

a few more tweaks of the show to work on now, then we're all off for a productive day. matt and paul will be heading off to do lee's play rod is god at the pleasance dome at 4pm, while i'm going off to the gym (as i attempt to remain human and vaguely proactive this fringe) then i'm off to see some shows.

here's a few bits of press we've done which may be of interest: we picked our favourite moments in comedy for chortle's perfect playlist, recommended some of our favourite places to go in edinburgh for such small portions, and here's an interview about the show we did with the sun.

david.

the dreaded first night...

first nights are always hard. you spend all day stressing about it and no matter how much preparation you do it will never go perfectly. it was after all the first time we've run through the show in the venue. to be fair, nothing major went wrong last night, just lots of niggly things that we can do better (microphones falling off, messed up costume changes, a few technical gremlins) but all stuff that can be fixed.

every year we seem to come off stage after the first preview a bit shell-shocked and wondering if we've created the right show at all! luckily these are the moments when steve, our director, picks us up (not literally) and points out that it's usually little adjustments, rather than a complete re-write, that'll make a big difference, and he's right.

so today we went through the show and worked out what we need to do over the next couple of previews to iron out these things and get the show to a place that we're happy with.

we should say we had a lovely, very warm audience who were willing us on from the start and were very patient with the bits that we didn't quite get right. so thank you, we do appreciate it.

after the show one drink became two, three, four, then jagerbombs started flowing and before we knew it we were in Scotmid at 4am buying rustlers burgers and in matt's case... a victoria sponge.

nothing changes.

We're back.

back in edinburgh, back with a new show, and back frantically making last minute changes, finishing the technical elements and desperately trying to get the show ready before we open tonight.

on monday we had our seven-hour tech rehearsal, which went reasonably well- still wasn't enough to fit in an actual run of the show- but the lighting and microphones were working well, so even if we forget our lines, don't make a single costume change in time, or are just generally not very funny... it will look and sound lovely. so that's something.

we then went for a late curry with steve, our director. we asked him how long he was planning to stay up in edinburgh for and he said he'll be here "until the show's not shit". let's hope he's not getting the 12:00 return on 28th august with the rest of us then. we'll see...

today we had a shit load of jobs to do before we open tomorrow: film & edit lots of 'gimp stings' (the short interstitial gimp-based videos we play between sketches), buy some chairs and a table we need for the show, and re-paint our floor cloth. the chairs and table meant a trip to IKEA, a peculiar place to be the day before the fringe starts but there we go.

my (david) room in the flat we're staying in has everything you'd expect from a bedroom... except a mirror. clearly i'm far too vain to imagine not seeing my own face for a full month so i thought i'd pick one up while we were there. quickly this important furtinure buying mission became a frivolous quest to find me the best mirror for the best price. i don't think matt and paul weren't convinced this was the best use of our time. still, check out this bad boy- and only a tenner!

we spent the afternoon getting the rest of the jobs done until tizzle our unsung technical hero cooked us what regular readers of this blog will remember is one of the three stable meals we eat while we're up here: chilli (the other two being curry and spag bol).

there's still a bit of work to be done before we open but we think we're in a better position than we have been in previous years, so we're naively optimistic about how the first night's going to go. i think we've worked harder on this show than any other we've done so we really hope people like it, we're very proud of it.

it's worth saying, if you'd like to see our show this year, we're on every day (except 14th) at the pleasance courtyard, in a venue called the forth, at 10pm. tickets can be booked here.

spread the word. the gimps are back in town.

david.
LNGF.