It’s been a decent Saturday after a difficult period with my uncle’s illness and my ongoing living situation. My uncle is one seriously tough bugger. What he’s going through would’ve felled many, but this guy is just old school. What I needed from today was respite, basically. And I got some today. I had an early gig today. The latest I’ve ever been on stage was 2am at a rumbustious Covent Garden gig about 18 months ago. Now I can say the earliest I’ve been on stage was about 13:45 on a Saturday afternoon. More on that shortly.
I’d stayed up way too late last night, considering I was gigging today and had to leave the flat before midday. But I’d given myself a couple of days off from everything and was reading a lot, listening to the radio, catching up on podcasts and as I do every night, watching some of the latest boxing news and also, as a longtime collector of 3.75” Star Wars action figures (not interested in the actual films) and any 3.75” figures for that matter, watching a brilliant YouTube channel where they show you how to ‘boil and pop’ a figure’s head. Collectors do this when they have duplicate figures and I have a few which I’ve not been able to shift on eBay. I was curious. Would I be able to pull this off?
How it works, you put the figure in a cup of boiling water, headfirst for about 3-4 minutes and then you keep twisting the head until it ‘pops’ off. In the case of the first figure I tried, this was effective. Now the early generation of what they call the ‘vintage’ action figures were made differently, so it’s unlikely you could swap the heads on a modern day figure and one from the 70s or 80s, so I tried to stick within the same range/releases of figures as a newbie trying this for the first time. The second head took ages to come off. That guy got dunked repeatedly. It was like some witch trial from centuries gone by and then the head finally ‘popped’. Even with pliers I couldn’t pull his head off. Eventually, after 20 minutes, when I should’ve been prepping for the gig, I succeeded.
Inevitably, I ran into difficulty popping the swapped heads into their new bodies. I followed the advice on the video, trying to push the necks in with a flathead screwdriver and then a knife, to no avail. At this point, I should’ve dunked the heads back in boiling water to make the necks and the pegs more malleable. This is what I’d do next time. Instead, I used an oven lighter to try and melt the end of the necks to see if it would make it any easier. This is where I came unstuck. I couldn’t get the heads back in. I ended up having to glue the heads into their new bodies. One of the figures, I had such trouble with the neck, it’s only halfway in and he’s been left with a Ronaldo-like neck. I’ve got three more figures to try with this evening. If I can nail this, then I might have a new hobby.
I also bought some PTFT tape from the local DIY store this evening. The idea with this is you bunch it up and wrap it around the joints of very loose-limbed figures so they can be posed, or in my case, be more robust for my Star Wars Football League which has been running since October 1982. Old listeners of my Daniel Ruiz Tizon is Available radio/podcast show will be familiar with the league whose latest season ended yesterday with Hoth defeating Bespin 1-0 in the Champions League Final.
Onto the gig then. This was a Quarter Final Heat of the Not So New Comedian of the Year 2024 in the beautiful Museum of Comedy in Bloomsbury. I’m not great at competitions, though the last six months I’ve won one, but as a storyteller, they’re not easy for me, but I was confident in my set today and the difference in recent months is I’ve been better at choosing what are shorter sets for competitions. As long as I didn’t have to open the show, the toughest spot of all, I was confident.
The MC, one of my favourite comics on the circuit, drew the names out of a glass. The first name to be drawn, inevitably, was ‘Daniel Ruiz Tizon’.
“That is a f***er,” I said to the comic sat next to me.
Chatting moments later to another comic, she told me that it was still possible to win through to the semis from the opening spot. It wouldn’t be easy, she said, but it can be done.
As it was, I had my best gig of the three I’ve done this week (it was a quiet week on the comedy front for the first time this year) and I was very satisfied and quietly confident that I’d laid down a marker. I have opened a lot of shows in the last year and while I’ve done well on many of them, it’s not easy and regardless of how well you’ve done, you always know your set would go down better when the room has warmed up. As it was today, I didn’t really have that feeling. I was very pleased and, in a way, I cursed my luck at having to open because I thought if I never made it through after that performance, it would be because I’d opened and as the show wears on, the opener gets forgotten.
Just under a couple of hours later, the three winners to progress to the semi-finals were announced, in no particular order. I was the second name to be read out. I savoured the moment and I felt it was deserved. The next round will be a lot harder, and I’ll need to consider my set and knock some new material I debuted a couple of nights ago into shape.
After the gig, I jumped on several buses and had a quick hot chocolate in a Brazilian Stockwell café with an old friend. As we left, the local Iceland was again being raided to an extraordinary degree, this time by a guy who must’ve been in his seventies. Wearing a white hoodie, he walked out with about 20 tins stuffed down his front and another 20 down the back of the hoodie, making for a curious sight. Even as the alarms sounded, he didn’t make a dash for it. That Iceland gets hit every week. Shit people robbing a shit supermarket that specialises in often unhealthy food for the poor.
In other news, When Shorts Were Short, my historical football podcast is on a short hiatus. There’s so much difficult stuff I’m having to deal with right now and with so many gigs too, putting myself through the punishing weekly or even fortnightly schedule of editing a podcast, the most mind-numbing thing I can think of, truly, is just not realistic. Which is a shame because I think it’s a very strong show. The monthly downloads are still 700 or so short of what they need to be to stand a chance of being monetised and in my situation, or anyone’s for that matter, I just can’t be working for free when I’m under so much pressure.
There is something like a dozen episodes left to edit to complete series 3 and I just have no idea how I begin the process of preparing series 4, despite lots of guests being lined up. It’s too much work for one person, even two, which is why I made such an effort the last few months to grow it but there haven’t been enough positive reviews and there’s been no support from the platform. As I always tell people, if there’s an indie show you like out there, take the time to give it a good review on your chosen platform because those reviews are the only way any small podcast can grow and survive.
My comedy work/gigs can be best followed on the Instagram page and the work can be supported either by becoming a paid subscriber on this Substack page and unlocking all the paid content, or the Patreon or you can support the work on my Ko-Fi page.
Thank you for reading.
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