Mark Watson the Comedian

As you'll be aware if you've read any of this blog before, the past week has seen my first attempts to adopt an optimistic attitude to life, after pretty much 30 solid years of pessimism.
 
I said that everyone should try to do one small thing towards their self-improvement aim - no point in trying to run before you can walk, we've got 10 years - and sure enough, most of my progress has been pretty slight, with very little in the way of palpable evidence. Nonetheless I have given it a shot. Trying to overhaul your mental landscape is a different kind of challenge from, say, trying to learn a language or get more exercise, but in essence it's exactly the same process: take something that's not working too well, try to make it work better. That's what I told myself.
 
I started in a very small way indeed. The other day we were trying to go out to the shops, but a health visitor was meant to come and do some tests on our very small boy. We didn't have a way of contacting her, so it was a case of going out and simply crossing our fingers we wouldn't miss it. This sounds like a pretty manageable situation compared with, say, landing a passenger aircraft whose engines have failed, but it's the sort of tiny problem that normally sets my needless-alarm-bells ringing. What if we miss her? What will happen then? How will we reschedule it? Am I going to prison? This time, I forced myself to consider what the worst was that could happen. The worst was that I'd have a couple of phone calls to make. Moreover, I told myself, the worst probably would NOT happen. 'I reckon we'll make it down there and back in time,' I found myself predicting, airily. 'I'm sure it will all work out.' We went to the shops, came back, the woman hadn't turned up yet. It had all worked out.
 
One of the most boring anecdotes you've ever heard, there, but a tiny advance for me; and sure enough, being positive about it had saved me a lot of exhausting fretting which would have been of no use whatsoever.
 
I've repeated this sort of tactic several times over the past week. Having an incredibly small, helpless person to look after - and look after 24 hours a day - presents a huge number of opportunities, big and small, for worry. Am I holding him right or will I drop him? Will he drown in this bath? Is he warm enough? Will he explode? Is he still breathing? Nobody tells you the answers to these questions, and (especially in the middle of the night) they can hang pretty heavily in the air. I've got through the week largely by thinking, once more, 'well, things will probably work out'. I got to 30 without dying, didn't I? Everyone I know with kids has raised them without killing them by mistake. All the dramatic nightmare scenarios that flood your brain are dramatic nightmares precisely BECAUSE they're so unlikely. Most of the time in life, the banal happens; the lurid doesn't. Sure enough, he may have shat all over the bath and reacted appallingly to my wife going to the dentist, but everything has been more or less fine, and they certainly wouldn't have been finer if I'd insisted on beating myself up about it at every turn.

The most difficult type of optimism I've employed this week has had to do with my career. In six months I'll be on tour (this sounds like an advert, but it's not, except in the sense that everything I do is a plea for popularity I suppose). Six months sounds like a long time, but it's a worryingly short time to sell a lot of tickets. Some shows are selling well; some, to be fair, aren't. If we don't sell enough tickets, there are two main consequences. The first, obviously, is that I don't make as much money, which is a bit of shame with the increased financial pressure of 'supporting a family'; but the second - and more serious - is that I do a series of shows in half-full theatres, get a bit depressed (it's almost impossible to feel like a show's going well if there's only half a crowd) and lose faith in my abilities. This has happened before but it can't really be allowed to happen again.

Today’s blog will be a bit on the geeky side.

As I mentioned when the Ten-Year Self-Improvement Challenge got underway, one of my aims in setting it up was to replicate, in a different, less sleep-deprived form, the communal atmosphere of the 24-hour shows. These celebrated and unpleasant events worked by setting up an enormous number of challenges, games, running jokes and stupid activities, and then sustaining them over a day-long period until everyone’s resistance had been worn down. The number of people signing up to the Challenge has been heartening, and by Thursday, we should have collected in reports on their success (or otherwise) in taking first steps this week. But in the meantime, I’d like to explore some other ways in which this 10-year blog can keep alive the traditions of the long show. Here are a few.

Firstly, GAMES. I began one on Saturday, by offering to give a free iPod to the person who made the best appeal for it, in mitigation of my slightly controversial remarks about the death of music radio. There have been quite a few moving appeals already. If you haven’t already, and you want to win an iPod, you have until this coming Saturday to post a suitably beseeching comment on that blog. I’ll reveal the winner the Monday after. And then, in suitably 24-hour-fashion, we are going to try to convey the iPod from me to the winner, by means of a human chain involving other readers of the blog. Fun!

Every week there will be a similar game or competition.

Secondly, ADMIN. Pointless admin, keeping tabs on the audience members coming and going, was always an enjoyable feature of the 24-hour shows. So: first of all, has anyone read the blog every day so far? These people are the equivalent of the ‘lifers’ who stuck out the whole of the marathon shows. I’d like to determine how many, if any, there are. Then we can keep track of them over the next ten years and see how many stay the course, and again, b

Read full post >>

Since becoming a dad I’ve started to be aware of things, like yesterday’s ‘Sunday rest’, which I remember as perfectly normal aspects of life, but which will seem ridiculous to my boy when he’s a teenager. I think it is quite a useful strategy to identify, in advance, things which will one day seem dated and bizarre to your kids; it protects you from the cold-water-shock of realising you’ve been overtaken by time and your assumptions are now old-fashioned. I wish I’d realised during the nineties that one day the haircuts on ‘Friends’ would look much too floppy to be taken seriously; then it wouldn’t be so quite frightening watching it now.

Most of pop culture, obviously, has a kind of built-in naffness to it purely because it’s so much about the here and now. If you go out on a limb with massively over-stylised costumes and design like Cheryl Cole or Lady Gaga – let alone Jedward – you’re kind of acknowledging that you’re only likely to be relevant for a very short while, and thereafter you will always look a bit silly. There’s not necessarily anything wrong with that – the Sex Pistols, the Kinks and the Manics all look pretty odd to today’s observer, but it doesn’t diminish the music; if anything their willingness to go to extremes makes them all the cooler in posterity’s eyes.

But what’s more interesting and odder is trying to work out what features of everyday life, away from the excesses of pop, are going to look comically outdated in twenty years’ time, or even ten years when this blog ends. Here are a few which occur to me but do feel free to add your own. I hope by bracing ourselves now, we’ll be less disconcerted when a young person in 2023 says ‘did you seriously do that?’ Or communicates it by whatever method’s replaced speaking by that point. SpaceSpeaking.

-Landlines. Not long ago I used to have to ask my dad if I could call my girlfriend, and then wait till aft

Read full post >>

Thanks to everyone who read my ‘secret’, i.e. non-Tweeted-about, blog yesterday. Many disagreed with me, but that is more than fine. I continue to be amazed by how many people can be bothered to listen to and even reply to my often ill-thought-out remarks. It’s doing my optimism campaign the world of good.

Since I began (admittedly only three weeks ago) I’ve succeeded in maintaining this blog on a daily basis despite the baby and so on, but today I’m going to give myself something akin to a ‘Sunday rest’. I’m old enough to remember (I hate starting sentences like that, but a lot of people who read this are about 18) when basically bugger-all happened on a Sunday. Pubs were, without exception, shut. Most shops were shut. There was, at most, one game of football on TV in the afternoon, and something like Ballykissangel in the evening. If people went and did stuff, someone from an older generation would raise an eyebrow in faint disapproval and say ‘and it was open on a Sunday, was it?’

Like many advances in society, the near-abolition of the Sunday rest-day was pretty sensible, but ever so slightly regrettable. So I’m going to take it easy today and I encourage you to do the same, or do something else that people used to do on Sundays, like believe in God or have some lamb. 

Quickly, though: a new feature called Gig Report. Aside from other things, I am, in fact, a comedian, and after the baby’s birth I’m slowly getting back into working. I thought it might be vaguely interesting for others, and for me in ten years, if I publish a little report on my efforts now and again. So – on Thursday I did a corporate gig, which went as follows. I’m laying it out like a real conversation to make it more homely.

GIG REPORT

What sort of gig was it, Mark? – I was hosting an award ceremony for marketing people. There were ca

Read full post >>

The weekend is here, and we come once more to my famously dangerous Weekend Blogs, in which I take advantage of a slightly reduced readership to express some mildly controversial opinions. Today I'd like to express a mildly controversial opinion on the scrapping of 6Music, a subject which has animated me and many of my contemporaries over the past couple of weeks. And by 'animated' I mean we've been pretty scathing about it on Twitter, signed a petition, and some of us even wrote to the BBC or The Times. Which, in this depoliticised age, is the equivalent of a previous generation setting fire to something or marching on Parliament.

Now it should go without saying that I'm opposed to closing 6Music, like almost everyone I know who's ever listened to it, but - crucially - unlike the Director-General. The reasons have been well covered by other people: it's the BBC's best, most interesting music radio station, representing cutting-edge music where the likes of Radio 1 suck up to the Saturdays; it's not right to close a station because it offers unacceptable competition to commerical channels, as has been absurdly claimed; its entire budget is the same as the BBC pisses away on people to write Jonathan Ross's monologues, or wax Graham Norton's face. And so on. And more worryingly still it's a slippery slope: if the BBC sets this precedent, what other assets will it sell off or throw away once the Tories come to power? As I say, I'm in agreement with all these arguments and I would strongly recommend adding your voice to the dissent, writing to the BBC Trust, pretending you also care about the Asian Network, whatever it takes to at least make sure this isn't done lightly.

But.

It does seem to me that the whole idea of 'music radio' is something of an anachronism in a world where we can all download any song in the known Universe, in a matter of seconds, for about 70p (and I'm aware that certain individuals also do it for free, but

Read full post >>