Mark Watson the Comedian

That blog yesterday was a pretty important one so- um- look at it again. Thank you to everyone who came tonight; the show is in a healthy state, I think. Or it feels that way, with the right people there.

Rugby tomorrow. If I remember rightly, I persuaded every last one of you to get into it.

I think I mentioned before that my sisters are (a) identical, (b) wicked (in the modern, not traditional, sense). While at school they set up www.themoldovaproject.com to support people in a desperately poor, but not very much talked-about, country. Combining the project with their other duties of A Levels/university, hockey and being twins, they’ve managed to grow the charity into an organisation which now supports dozens of people via sponsorships from people like us (and sometimes with the help of money donated at my shows). As I say, pretty good. When you add this to my brother bringing out his first book today and my dad being the only Chemistry teacher known to have improvised a joke about Beyonce in a lesson, the Watsons aren’t so bad, I reckon.

But this blog isn’t about about how amazing we are; that topic must wait until we’re given an Osbornes-style reality docu series. Today I’m asking – not for the first time – for help.

I shall say straight out that it’s unlikely many of the regular readers of this blog (students, public servants, and other members of the dispossessed) will be able to get involved in this – although one is already, to my enormous gratitude. But I’ll be tweeting links to this page and generally using it as something to refer back to, so forgive me if this appears irrelevant to you.

My sisters are running a trip to Moldova in August. They need people to go with them and help with a range of unglamorous but massively worthwhile tasks. These include painting and rebuilding schools/houses/orphanages, playing with kids who haven’t got anyone else to play with, planting vegetables – that sort of thing. It is a ten-day trip and the accommodation and stuff is all sorted out. It would be a fairly amazing thing to do. (I’d jump at the chance to do it myself, but since I’m destined to be in Edinburgh, I’m forced to continue taking part in my traditional manner by writing cheques.)

The drawback is that you have to pay to do this trip. The charity doesn’t have spare money for overheads; what it raises goes directly to the communities it supports. This is the reason it works so well – it minimises the admin expenditure which people (rightly or wrongly) associate with big charities – but it does mean things are always tight.

So this immediately rules out a lot of you, but if I found even one person as a result of doing this blog, I’d be delighted. Perhaps you are considering a summer holiday, but feel you’d like to do something a bit different and adventurous and involving-orphanages. Maybe you happen to be reading this thinking ‘I am just waiting for the internet to inspire me into a new direction’. Perhaps you can’t countenance a trip of this kind, but this blog has made you remember that you were thinking about sponsoring a kid at some point, and now you’ll go back and do it. Anyway, you can see my motivation for this rather worthy-sounding entry.

Their website, http://www.themoldovaproject.com , fills in a lot more details. Twitter, @themoldovaproject. Facebook. Actual life. And so on.

I’m biased, but this is an immensely worthwhile thing to get involved in, and also a non-mainstream one: a way of doing something valuable that’s not something you would otherwise have known about.

Thanks for reading this. Just by loading the page you’ve donated £2000 to Moldova. Not really. Nice thought, though.

There’s been a lot of bother these past couple of days about something called unilad.com. You’ll have heard about this, probably. Uni Lad is a site aimed at – well, yes – ‘lads’ at ‘uni’. ‘Are you a LAD?’ its blurb asks, temptingly. That’s where most people who came across it would have parted ways with it for good. But it’s come into the Twitter spotlight (a spotlight which dashes around a lot more, and is turned off a lot quicker, than the real one) because they published a couple of jokes which (a) trivialised rape and unreported sex crimes in particular; (b) implied it was pretty much fine to join in with it.

Then there was a row because Uni Lad’s apology was a bit half-hearted and some not-very-bright people tried to defend it, claiming that ‘a joke’s a joke’ and ‘hey we can all see rape is bad, this is comedy, let’s chill out’ and other such defences which show a very limited understanding of the issue at hand. A large majority of people – including quite a few comedians – pointed out that this is wrong. A joke’s NOT always just a joke, it’s not just unfunny but potentially harmful to make light of problems which cause enormous misery; and just by calling something ‘comedy’, or issuing the caveat that your opinion is ‘meant to be light-hearted’, you don’t necessarily buy yourself out of a debate over whether it’s acceptable to be complicit in hammering home dangerous misconceptions or stereotypes.

Good good.

It’s interesting though, because I seem to remember saying these exact same things about a year ago in a different context, and getting a fair old bit of hate mail. Funny old world!

Maybe I’m just not noticing the fuckwitted backlash in favour of Uni Lad/misogyny/cruelty in comedy this time, because this time it’s not me on the receiving end of it. Or just maybe, the public’s relationship to the idea of ‘comedy’ as a universal get-out-of-jail card is starting to change a little bit. It’ll be interesting to see.

I’m about to do this gig in Soho where you have to improvise your whole set. They put topics on a screen and you ad lib. Hmm.

A brief blog today. I’m simply going to recommend someone else’s. This person left a comment or two recently and I looked up their website. It is:

http://www.youredoingitright.com/

…and very simply, it exists to give a small nod of acknowledgement to people who are doing their jobs well, doing something good, just basically making a respectable go of the nearly impossible task of being a viable human which confronts us all.

This is very much in the spirit of the blog. I encourage you to read this and get in touch with the curator with your own suggestions of people who have ‘done it right’.

If I were a bit older, I’d make a remark about all we ever hear on the TV is bad news, and it’s nice to finally have the other side of the story, and I don’t know why they always have to concentrate on all these massacres in Syria and aren’t newsreaders young these days and how come they all seem to have regional accents now? I’m not going to, but some of the sentiments are there.

Those of you with a Twitter habit can also follow the person manning this quiet outpouring of gratitude. I think it’s @ydir. Anyway, you’ll find it.

Well done to this blogger and anyone who upholds the basic but neglected principle of recognising people for their efforts.