Gig Report: Wednesday Nov 4th

A very exciting week at 5 Minutes of Fame this week, not only did we have a TV crew in recording for a programme on Sky One, but it was also my 30th gig!

This week's guest compere was the fantastic Alexandra Clarke, and with more acts than you could shake a stick at, we limited everyone to a strict 5 minutes. So a shorter set for me this week, but that probably helped me trim out some of the clutter, forcing me to pick my best bits and keeping them to time.

Its hard to strike a balance between saying enough in the setup to give the punchline meaning and keeping it short enough to give a good impact, but the cliches are true: less is more. I'm finding I can get rid of a lot of waffle and needless words by rehearsing more and more, so I really need to spend more time running through my bits until I can almost say them on auto pilot (then squeeze out some more humour from the performance rather than just the words).

Of course, the downside of this is that really concise material won't fill as much time, but I can take that as encouragement to write more, and its win-win!