Screeeeeeeeeeeeeenings.
Well here we are.
I hope you’re holding up alright in what is, any way you slice it, a real shit* storm of a situation.
Personally, I’ve spent the last couple of months, worrying, video calling, avoiding the news, making some pots, reading the news, making courgette pickle, panicking, making rhubarb jam, video calling, managing my engagement with the news, seeing a gold finch, making a sourdough starter, video calling, feeling weird and forgetting why, riding up an absolute piece of a hill, making a sourdough finisher**, accidentally kicking a football into my neighbours garden at the age of 42, video calling, sleeping erratically, hearing (but not seeing) an actual effing Woodpecker and also - editing together a film of my 2009 Edinburgh Festival show – The Interminable Suicide of Gregory Church. .
I initially wrote The Interminable Suicide of Gregory Church for the 2009 Edinburgh Festival and performed it at the Traverse Theatre most days at 10.15pm. Over the course of that run, celebrity columnist Stewart Lee walked out *** and Newscaster Jeremy Paxman visibly failed to stay awake.
I really liked the show, it was a storytelling show and comfortably my best up until that point, It was deceptively simple but satisfyingly complicated, it was funny and sad, there was a bit of mystery in it and, i thought, when i did it right, it was quite exhilarating.
I next performed the show in January of 2011 at St Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, New York (no big deal). They built me a little square of 200 raked seats in the middle of a huge warehouse and it was, to be completely honest, a pretty magical time. During that run art house musician types, Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson slept soundly in the second row for ninety minutes.
I then toured the show to Australia, during which run, I am proud to say, not one cultural touchstone fell asleep or left, at pace, to defecate.
After that I brought the show back to the UK and toured it about for a few more months. At some point in that time, I contacted Chris Evans at Go Faster Stripe**** about the possibility of filming the show. It was the longest tour I’d ever done. I was proud of the show. It seemed worth trying to make a decent record of it.
Anyway, we emailed a bit, I lost my nerve and found my nerve and had my doubts and made big statements about ownership and whether I wanted to put it out and if so, then how and then we filmed it, on the 11th May 2011, at the Tobacco Factory Theatre in Bristol in the round with eight cameras.
Chris had agreed that if I didn’t like the edit, we wouldn’t put it out, he would forward me all the footage and the various sound recordings and if I wanted to have a crack at editing it myself, I could.
Well here we are – the best part of a decade and the early parts of a pandemic later – and I have just about got it finished. So, next week, from Monday the 18th, I’m going to introduce it and screen it, online.
Now, I’m doing this in what may strike you as a needlessly contrary way and, lets be honest, it could well be but it’s also, I think, a pretty fun and exciting way to do it. So here are the details.
- I am going to introduce (this bit will be live) and then screen the show at 9pm every night, Monday to Friday and at 11am on Saturday and Sunday.
- There will be three screenings a day – 9pm in the UK, 9pm in Melbourne and 9pm in New York. And then at the weekend – 11am in the UK, 11am in Melbourne and 11am in New York.
- You can view the screenings from anywhere in the world, you don’t have to be local to the specific time zone – which is to say – you could feasibly watch the Melbourne screenings in London and the New York screenings in Melbourne and so on.
- The capacity of each screening will be limited according to the number of seats in the venue at which I performed this show in those places. So -
UK- Tobacco Factory Theatre, Bristol - 356 seats
MELBOURNE - Fairfax Studio, Arts Centre, Melbourne – 376 seats
NEW YORK – St Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn – 200 seats.
- Tickets will cost £5 (or local equivalent)
- All the money will go to The Angel Comedy Micro Bursary Fund – This is a new initiative being operated by Angel Comedy to support comedians who have lost work during the lockdown and throughout this ongoing, circuit decimating, diary clearing, livelihood buggering mess.*****
- Tickets will go on sale at 12 noon on Friday May 15th.
- Melbourne tickets go on sale at Noon in Melbourne, New York tickets go on sale at Noon in New York and UK tickets go on sale at Noon in the UK.
- You can buy tickets here - https://www.citizenticket.co.uk/organiser/daniel-kitson/
- You will need to create a citizen ticket account, in order to get your ticket. It will be emailed to you as soon as you complete the purchase. There will be a button that says "Access Online Event". This button will be activated on the day of the screening, 30 minutes before the Start Time on your ticket. When you click on it, you will receive a link and a password - you click on the link and you enter the password and that's you in.
And that’s it.
I am both pretty excited and a bit scared, to be honest. It’s been a lot of fiddling****** and thinking and tinkering and the truth is that I have no idea whether this is remotely appealing to people. But if it does work, I’ve got a variety of ideas for things to screen in similar ways. A couple more older things to release potentially but I am also having news ideas that I am pretty excited to make and then “stage” in a similar way.
I’ve always preferred doing a few smaller gigs (at slightly awkward times) rather than one big one and there’s no real reason for that to change now. Capping the tickets seems to make it feel more like an exciting thing to attend, potentially and also makes it a more sustainable way of continuing to make work and raise money for people in this, undeniably, odd situation.
Now listen, I’ll tell you this right now, there will, absolutely, come a stage when I’ll need to be making some sweet sweet coin for the Dan Dan Man******* but at the moment I spend a lot of my time feeling deeply sad and extremely lucky - there are obviously countless thousands of people whose lives have been and continue to be ruined by what’s happening in myriad ways which I cannot accurately imagine. Whereas I, a long term self isolationist, have stayed in my house and sat in my garden and ridden my bike and been, largely insulated from it all. So, if you’ll forgive me, I’m going to raise some money and fling it about like some sort of bald stuttering Christ figure.
So that’s it for now.
GOODBYE FOREVER
Daniel
*There’s a chance that me dropping this naughty word will encourage your spam filter to pop this email in the bin. But to be honest – If you can’t swear in emails to your mailing list at a time like this… Etc.
**A loaf of bread.
***He needed the toilet actually, so fair play. I mean, he did walk across the stage in his stocking feet to do so, but still, fair play.
****If you are unaware of Go Faster Stripe, they are very much worth checking out. Especially at the moment where they are doing weekly deals in aid of the Trussel Trust. This week it’s John Hegley – yes please. https://www.gofasterstripe.com/
***** If you like comedy and partaking in charitable deeds but think that maybe there are people infinitely more in need and deserving of help than ding dong comedians, then that is, hard to refute. So I’d direct you to http://www.comedyatthecovid.co.uk/ they have weekly Saturday shows, with half the money made going to the Trussell Trust and half being split between the acts. This was the first (and is probably the best, I’ve seen) of the “live” streaming gig type comedy events currently bobbing about.
Alternatively, if you want an object, a tremendous object, then Tim Key (Poet, Comedian, Fading Midfielder) and Emily Juniper (Artist, Illustrator, Designer) have collaborated on this wonderful thing - https://www.utterandpress.co.uk/bookshop/thursdays-a-limited-edition-print-for-the-nhs and all money goes to the combined NHS charities.
****** Grow up.
*******The name on my bank card.
********There will be a time when this sign off feels light hearted again. I truly believe that. It’s what gets me out of bed in the morning. It’s either that or the bin men. Or needing a wee. One of those three.