It has been a little bit quiet around here, largely thanks to my touring down there in the very far south-east of the world, but I can tell you: all sorts of things are about to happen. New tour shows are about to rain down on the ‘gigs’ section of this site. And book events are about to sprout up, if I can use that phrase, as the publication of my new novel ‘One Minute Away’ starts to look spine-tinglingly close at hand (six weeks off today, as the crow flies). And there’s going to be a one-off event in Edinburgh which at least some of you will like the sound of it. Actually, MORE THAN one such event, but one in particular.
This torrent of announcements is about to leave a lot of inboxes sopping wet, so if you’re already on my mailing list, all you have to do is sit tight. Exciting? I think exciting, yes.
THE FIRST THING TO SAY is, things are going to be a little bit different on this website from now on. This ‘news’ section – what we used to call a blog – is going to be updated much more regularly, and by me, the actual Mark Watson. You can easily make a case that this could have happened much sooner, had I not failed to realise for literally *three years* that I have the login details and so can actually do it whenever I like. You can very easily make that case. But let’s do a bit less ‘making cases’, a bit more ‘making faces’: faces of delight at all the many things I’m up to.
Actually, if you are a subscriber to my newsletter you’ll already know some of this, but – well, even before 2025 – there are some shenanigans to look forward to next week. Long, streamed shenanigans, in the form of an eight-hour Instagram and YouTube party (sort of). It is basically a feature-length version of my ‘Live At 5’ Insta series, but called ‘Live at 9 to 5’, paying homage to the everyday, average-Joe, honest-to-god office life I lead. Eight hours is not actually very long by my historical standards, of course, but it should be time enough for us to hit quite a number of our key performance indicators and go a little bit mad together.
In January my memoir ‘Mortification’ comes out in paperback, in case there is a slim chance anyone devoted enough to be reading this doesn’t already possess a copy. The summer will bring a NEW novel, whose title I will reveal during the Insta party I should imagine, along with goodness knows what other information. Then, Australian festivals in March and April; Edinburgh in August; and the show will go on tour in the autumn – the dates are very likely a matter of public knowledge by the time you read this.
But being the man I am, there will be plenty more going on. One thing that’s going to happen in 2025 is that I’m going to launch a couple of what we might call subscription services (not OnlyFans) (not any kind of sex stuff, actually). None of this will take away any of the myriad free things I do from the people who currently enjoy them. It’s just that I’ve got some pretty ambitious creative directions to go in, over the next eighteen months and beyond, and I would like to take a few of the more hardcore fans to those new places with me, by FLEECING THEM FOR EVERYTHING THEY HAVE (placeholder, obviously delete this).
It could be quite an exciting period coming up. At the very least, there’ll be a bit more happening in this little column of the website than there has been for the past three years. To think all I needed to do was try the password ‘Markiscool’.
See you soon!
Oh hello.
This Easter weekend sees the third and final piece in the jigsaw of 24-hour shows with which I’ve attempted to break up the – let’s be honest – somewhat trying times of this pandemic. (Three pieces is a pretty unchallenging jigsaw, you might say, but here we are.) In many ways, this one is reasonably similar to the hopefully memorable events that have gone before it. But because this one is part of the famous Melbourne International Comedy Festival, there will be a few differences, so I thought you might enjoy an FAQ. Not all of these questions will have been ‘frequently asked’ in these exact ways, but I believe that’s the case with any FAQ, to be honest. Sometimes you can really sense it. Anyway: below is a quick guide to what I like to think will be another worthy waste of a chunk of your life.
This is a ticketed event, this time, isn’t it? I can’t just jump on and donate?
That’s right – because it’s an official festival show, which is not a distinction we’ve had before. In fact this is the first long show to be part of a comedy festival since 2009, when I put on something called ‘Mark Watson’s Last Ever 24 Hour Show’, a title which isn’t exactly ageing well. The tickets are $18 or ten quid, which seems not too bad and probably compares favourably to what a lot of people have donated for the past two actually. And if you don’t have one yet, they are here:
www.comedyfestival.com.au/2021/shows/mark-watson-and-friends-wish-you-were-here
But the thing is, I literally don’t have a tenner to do something like this, no matter how much I would like to.
That is absolutely fair enough, and a solution is at hand. A collective of public-spirited and clever people, of whom I am very proud, have been running a ‘ticket redistribution’ service for a little while now, to enable those with more resources to open the comedy door to those without. If you are able to pledge a ticket, or you want to request one from a kind anonymous donor, see below. More things in the world should work like this, by the way.
www.belowthelinehq.co.uk/home
Why is it starting in the bloody morning this time?
Because it’s evening in Australia, that’s why. The hope is to bring together Watsonians, if I may use that quite old-fashioned term, from the two hemispheres under the banner of Melbourne’s festival, which is one of the highlights of the comedy year and which all of us stuck in this half of the world are desperately missing (for the second year running). Will it be very tiring and weird and then when it’s over it’s morning, and you’re essentially jetlagged? Yes. Is this what we sign up for with these things? As they say on Twitter these days: also yes.
So is it not a charity thing this time?
Not in the same way, no – there won’t be the incessant pressure to donate or bid £500 for a piece of paper with nothing but the word ‘PIG’ on it. Or the numbers-game element of ‘can we get to fifteen grand, can we get to twenty grand’ – which is fun and worthwhile but does make it into a bit of a telethon. At the same time, of course, I do want to take any opportunity to harness the unusual goodwill of these events for wider wellbeing. So if people make stuff that’s auctionable, or if there is an appetite to pay for things that come up during the show, we’ll put a portion of that to whatever charity Melbourne Festival nominate (still talking to them about this) and a portion to help the venue, who have survived without live comedy this long.
What? THE VENUE? Are you not in your house again?
What?
What venue is it then!?
Nothing. It’s fine. You’ll see.
Why is it not on Twitch this time, by the way?
Partly because the festival have things in place to run shows and Zoom works for them. But also because this time I’d like to be able to see or hear some of the audience from time to time. However, the fact it’s Zoom does NOT mean it will be any less interactive in terms of…
Ah, this was going to be my next question.
Ok, do you still want to ask it or -?
I’m shy now.
Don’t be silly.
Well ok yeah. Is there less of an emphasis on the community all chipping in and chatting and all of that, this time?
NO THERE IS NOT. If anything, it will be more crucial than ever. The community around this show will be smaller and more tight-knit, because not as many people will just happen upon it, because of the ticket situation. So the energy will come even more than usual from you, the people getting behind the chat and making it feel like a real event. The collective of people who get involved in my efforts at creativity has grown steadily since May, when the first Watsonathon was, and it’s been a truly very heartwarming phenomenon and one of the most rewarding things to happen since I began doing comedy. So, you are very much needed.
Are you becoming sentimental?
No, YOU are.
See you there, then. Sorry I made it awkward.
Quickly before we go: do we have the bakers?
I wouldn’t be surprised.
And what are your tips on staying awake?
Don’t over-rely on caffeine. Or on energy drinks. Or on any one thing, in fact. Also don’t drink more than you can manage. Just keep everything as normal as it can be, try to con your body and mind into believing this is just another day, and accept that because of the loyalty you have shown to me, this IS your ‘normality’ now.
As I said, see you there!
24 HOUR ONLINE SHOW
Fri 1 May 9pm – Sat 2 May 9pm
Me for the whole time, and anyone else I can plead to take part from home.
TICKETS >
WATCH ON TWITCH >
Any money we can raise will be split three ways, between @FareShare, @HospiceIGNet and the @nextupcomedy Heckle The Virus fund, which supports comedians who have seen all their work disappear indefinitely.
I’ve had a slightly strange 24 hours on the popular website Twitter dot com. Yesterday evening, while I was trying to distract myself from the psychological warfare of my kids’ bedtimes, I idly tweeted the following:
I’m really fond of Americans in a lot of ways but when they committed to saying ‘I could care less’ for ‘I couldn’t care less’, it was inevitable their society would fall apart.
I suppose ‘idly’ is the adverb for 90 percent of the tweeting that I do, actually, and that many of us do – those who aren’t activists or educators or other people using the internet for more respectable reasons than as a massive, free time-filler. It was not meant as a serious comment either on American idiom, or as a genuine survey of American society (I don’t think I’m in a strong position to offer that, it’s quite complicated). It was just a light-hearted response to a tweet from an American author I admire. He’d used the phrase ‘I could care less’ where we would say the opposite and I thought – not for the first time – ‘it’s a bit weird the way Americans do that, isn’t it?’ It wasn’t an original observation; David Mitchell, as it turns out, has done a fairly comprehensive takedown of the same thing. I wasn’t even offering it as an original observation. I was just tweeting it, the way you do, for a handful of people to be amused or diverted by for a few seconds.
For some reason, though, of all the things I have tried to communicate to the universe on this capricious platform, this mild remark was one of the most popular ever. Within a few moments people had started re-tweeting it at quite a rate – at a far faster rate than if I’d tweeted, for example, ‘please tell everyone in the world about this charity thing’ or ‘this man is threatening to push me over a cliff unless I get 1000 RTs tonight’. When I woke up, I found any number of comments under my innocuous tweet, and this has continued all day. At the time of blogging the tweet has been seen (however briefly, across a timeline) by about 900,000 people: I imagine more people, by some distance, than I’ll meet in the rest of my life. For some tweeters this is all fairly standard, but it was a strange experience for me.
And the strangest element was that, as happens in this situation, the conversation mutated without me – while staying under the banner of ‘my tweet’. People started echoing my sentiments in much more extreme terms, ones I wouldn’t have chosen myself. ‘OH MY GOD AT LAST! I HATE IT WHEN PEOPLE DO THIS, SOOOOO MUCH I WANT TO KILL THEM!!!!!!!’ Someone wrote: ‘it’s not their fault they’re all so f—ing thick.’ A few Americans started chipping in to defend their spin on the phrase and explain why it came from, and some other people started to argue with them. Meanwhile, the thread had become a forum for people to vent about dozens of other American expressions that bothered them – and, in some cases, supposed aspects of the American character which went quite a long way away from the original point. As we speak, and despite the fact I’ve slightly tried to distance myself from the tweet, all this is still going on, and my timeline looks like a flat the morning after people have had a party and all gone home without helping to clear up.
I’ve done my best to create harmony out of all this, in my slightly school-prefect way. (NARRATOR: he *was* a prefect at school.) I ended up chatting with various strangers about the phrase, learning about the different ways Americans inflect some common speech patterns and why, saying things ‘haha well we’re all different’, and using the brief exposure to continue my campaign of chatting privately to anyone who particularly needed it. Nonetheless, it was a real reminder of how the smallest thing online can spiral significantly out of your control, and how therefore we should treat Twitter – or any instant-chat mechanism – with more care than we all do.
So in the end I’ve sort of disengaged from it, stopped worrying about the responses or trying to follow the micro-chats that have broken out amongst them. Turned notifications off (obviously). To continue the party metaphor, there are still people sleeping in a puddle of wine on my sofa but I’ve told myself they’ll probably sort themselves out at some point and it doesn’t matter which one was called Niall, and also the sofa probably needed replacing anyway. And this is probably a good lesson also. The connected climate we’re in surrounds us all with a lot of noise. I see people driving themselves nuts trying to address all this noise, answer every loose end, rebut every criticism – online, and off. Sometimes it’s OK to just wander to the bottom of the garden, so to speak. Sometimes you just have to say good luck everyone and take the fresh air.
Of course, I could just delete the tweet. I mean, yes, it’s brought me all these new followers, which is nice, and this wave of reaction/attention which is, in honesty, what comedians pursue from morning till night. But it doesn’t feel like the right type of attention, and especially not if the price of it is that people start to piss each other off in the wake of it.
Yeah, I could delete it instead of watching the numbers climb any more. I expect I’ll do it any minute now. Any minute.