Resolve
Well that didn’t last long did it? Honestly, I had the best of intentions this past week to blog regularly and instead I found myself doing anything but. Just one post in and I am already behind on the content I promised.
However, the last seven days have not been a complete loss. A friend of mine has recently found the impetus to write and shoot a few sketches and share the same on YouTube. He’s been slowly and steadily acquiring all the necessary equipment to do this and he’s now in a position to pull the trigger on the writing. That’s where I was supposed to come in. Unfortunately I had to go on a last minute press trip with my significant other the weekend we were all supposed to be brainstorming and so my contribution was limited to an outline of five sketches that could be read out to the group.
Although I was disappointed to miss out on the writing session, it was nonetheless great fun to try and come up with a few decent sketches (none of mine got taken up so they obviously weren’t that decent). When I was much younger – about fifteen years ago – a few friends and I were inspired to write sketches taking our cues from whatever alternative comedy we could get our hands on (mine were predominantly Lee & Herring, Bill Hicks and The Kids In The Hall which today probably reads like quite a cliched list of inspirations but back then was pretty alternative for a 15 year old). I ended up keeping a huge list. Naively this list amounted to little more than a series of titles and didn’t bother containing any kind of outline that might be useful, say, fifteen years later. Decoding my shorthand took a long time but it was a nice trip down memory lane even if virtually all of those sketches weren’t ready for prime time.
So I started using this nearly two decades old list to write my sketches for this new venture and I really have forgotten how to do anything that is quite instinctively funny without being stupidly dark. Rather than try and adopt some of the spirit that pervaded the stuff I was writing at university (I cannot lie and say I did occasionally try and work a talking foetus in there somewhere), I just lapsed like a recovering crack addict – in retrospect, it was quite easy to see why nothing got picked up. Still, I’m going to be involved in some of the script editing and filming which is quite exciting as this is something I’ve always wanted to do. Alas, the tale of Sarah Chip, an imaginary first girlfriend made of potato that I killed and buried in Aberdeen (a grave to which I would periodically return but was unfortunately inaccessible to anyone but myself) thus to explain why none of my friends had ever met her will have to wait for another day. My 15 year old self would be mortified.
(The Tale of Sarah Chip was not one of the sketches I submitted, incidentally. I’m not completely stupid)
