Wait,now we don't have any poo jokes

So, as promised, today I am writing about my involvement in the chorlton players' newest production.
Our sketch show, Homegrown Hotpot.

I made this bad-boy!

Okay, so the production before hotpot (which I didn't get a part in) (yeah yeah, Maili, cry me a river) was An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde. I stage-handed for this production which mostly included me staggering blindly onto an unlit stage groping around for a table that Rohan had bowled over making his dramatic exit and making sure that Giles had the right button-hole ready. So I was busy most of the way through this making sure I was on hand to throw a chair on the floor at just the right moment and the like, and completely forgot the fact that I had wanted to write a sketch for Hotpot.

Now, I had assumed that like all our other productions there would be a week off after it in which I would have time to write (I was still unemployed at this point so was posessed of all the time in the world but none of the vigour.) I was wrong. I was informed that on the following Monday and Wednesday, we would be meeting up and reading through our sketches and voting on them.At this point I didn't even have the inkling of an idea so I considered myself screwed but thought I would take a crack at it anyway. I missed the Monday session but presented my two last-minute sketches '101 Reasons not to drink alcohol'and 'Fangirls' on the Wednesday.

Both were greeted with actual real person laughter, which I honestly hadn't expected but gratefully accepted, and the latter was voted into the show! So, come the 31st May, something I wrote will have been performed on a stage by actory-type people! I am very excited! The sketch is about three girls waiting for a celebrity to arrive at a signing and that's all I'm going to say because you should really come and see it. Really. Make note of the details on that poster.


As is traditional for the annual chorlton players sketch show, the writers of the sketches direct their own sketches. Henceforth, I will also have directed an actual thing by the end of the month. Directing isn't something I take to naturally, having no bossy tendencies at all beyond my childhood penchant for bossing my brother around. Thankfully, the people I've cast are also my friends (everyone who auditioned was, so no favouratism, I swear!) so I feel better telling them what I want them to do than total strangers but it's still a bit daunting when someone turns to you and asks "So what now?" after a run through with fifteen whole minutes of rehearsal time to spare. ("Do it again? But with mouse voices?") I'm sorely tempted to just keep telling them "Again, but LOUDER" and see how loud I can get them to go before they realise what I'm doing. They've already included their own sex noises so I didn't even coerce them into that.

"Okay, let's do this again-but this time, less egg, more chicken"

The writing process for Fangirls was simple for me, I had very limited time in which to write my sketches and I took a type of people I knew well, namely crazy fan girls from the internet. I have known many obsessive fans in my time and I scroll through tumblr from time to time (ALLOFTHETIME) so I had a lot of material to draw on so I just wrote. Solidly. I wrote the whole thing in minutes and was printing it off, stapling it and carrying it to drama with me in a little plastic wallet within the hour. Admitedly, I'd left in a couple of typos in that short time span but apart from that, the finished product I'm using now is what I wrote feverishly in those few minutes trying to get anything funny on to paper. Some people might say that a lot of the humour is obvious but I would say 'Screw you!'to those people, or something a little more explicit.

And then I would expand on the point that if humour has to be ambiguous or complex to be funny than why do most of us still take joy in a good fart joke? (Slightly unrelated but a fellow, slightly more senior, member of the players divulged to us recently that his mother used to call farts 'poo noises').

Indeed, staying with the subject of fart humour, I was a little sad when a friend of mine, Charlie's, sketch didn't get into the show (not because it was his, he entered six and three of them got in so he's not disappointed.) but simply because it used the simple, unadulterated humour of one of our slightly posh friends saying poo a lot and the suggestion that the face of jesus could be found in a smear of dog excrement on the bottom of a shoe. (Also, the immortal line "I can't believe you thought Kenneth Brannagh was Jesus.") Thefact that it did not get in escaped quite a few people's notice until later when someone, with genuine shock and horror, exclaimed that 'Wait,now we don't have any poo jokes!"

On that note, I am also appearing in the sketch show in a couple of things. I will be on at the very beginning doing some air-hostess-style pointing for my friend Vicky's health and safety announcement, briefly in some black and white filming we did which will be played in clips in between sketches, and then at the very end in Charlie's sketch 'The Mysterious Case of the Lots of Murders'which is a satire of Poirot-style mystery/crime dramas. (I've also volunteered to be a congregation member in a funeral sketch but I have no idea where that is in the running...)

I mostly told you that so that you could see there is lots of me to be had in this production! ( I even made the poster!) Therefore, it is most definitely your duty to come and see this production if you're in the country. 

I EXPECT TO SEE SOME OF YOU THERE.

director chicken courtesy of Jeanette McCurdy