they (medieval europeans) used to believe hedgehogs' spines were for stealing fruit off the floor by rolling around on it

Qigong

When I was a teenager I got mad into qigong. I couldn't get enough. Got so good I learned how to send chi flying out of my hands as these, like, satsuma-sized hot orbs. Me mam was fuming, said I wasn't allowed to do it in the garden anymore and I'd have to go down the rec - where I also got in trouble for blasting one of the support struts on the banana slide. In the end I got a saturday job with my uncle exploding old asbestos sheds.

Paul Merton & Suki Webster

I did an interview with Paul Merton and Suki Webster!

We cover their role in the formation of the improv scene in the UK, why there's no Improv on TV anymore. I think that stuff's dead interesting if you like UK comedy oral history (I do).
I also asked about the role Have I Got News For You has played in launching the career of some of the most impactful right wing politicians, authoritarians and hucksters in recent history. Right wing populists have a different agenda to other career politicians in that they principally want to launch media careers and therefore gain significantly more than their political counterparts from appearing on a comedy panel show. So what does it mean to be politically neutral as one of the faces of the show? What does it mean to be politically neutral and appear in a jocular media environment with Nigel Farage? Personally, I didn't find his answer particularly satisfying. But then, how could it be? What is the satisfying answer?

This Country's Going To The Dogs

This guy flashed up on my feed the other day. Used to be medium-intensity obsessed with this guy. He made a video once in the crypts of Glasgow cathedral talking to a ventriloquists dummy about how the country was in decline because he couldn't run a ghost tour of glasgow necropolis without a street trader's license. Trevor Rooney's (that's his name) argument is that trade licenses can't apply to intangible things like ghost tours and only apply to physical items such as apples or oranges, though the logic of this argument was fractured by the puppet shouting "this country's going to the dogs!" at irregular intervals. The video's been taken down now and last I saw he mostly DJ's on Facebook Live. I met him once, in York. I was doing a gig for the late great Al Greaves and he was in the smoking area rolling a joint and dressed like a stressed extra from Pirates of the Caribbean. He said he was building a spooky hearse-themed boat that he was going to launch upon one of the public lakes or ponds in York. I said "do you need some kind of permission to do that?" and he said "fuck em". He was on Come Dine With Me once, served everyone cold mushroom soup in an unheated furniture warehouse.

Normal Game!!!!

To those of you who are just joining us, my current Big Project is Sean Morley's Normal Game. It's an experimental medium-tech gameshow which has been in development in some form or other for years now. But I'd say we're probably rounding the corner of coming out of alpha and into beta now and with this latest version I'm taking it to some cities (sorry townsfolk).

If you'll indulge me in providing a changelog: My priorities in version 0.3.0 are mostly a lot of boring stuff which you'll never see: rebuilding all the admin controls and exposing more server and database control to facilitate a third team member: a kind of moderator / dictionary corner figure. But there are two exciting things to talk about:

°1 -- Aesthetics

I've spent an inordinate amount of time trying to work out what the game should look (and, subsequently, feel) like. Fewer tables, more animations. In the end I've tried to thread the needle on some hybridisation of Utopian Scholastic and traces of the digital futurism of Y2K era Designer's Republic. Early drafts had way too much of the latter, lots of glyphs, measuring rules, and katakana but I stripped it back for legibility. I've also swapped out the tagline "Multi-faceted Mega-quiz" for "Chimerical Anti-Quiz". I imagine that's not the final variant either, but multi-faceted was more fun to say than actually descriptive and anti-quiz conveys something very important: intent.

°2 -- New Rounds

This is secondary to all the maintenance and admin work, but when I've chewed through all the gristle then we can have new content for dessert. I have a slough of new rounds I want to plumb into the grubby pipework. I'd like to keep most of it a surprise but I'm hoping to build out a new system where answers get anonymised and judged by the contestants themselves - this would allow for a suite of experiments with artistic and creative rounds.

Come Be Normal!

Use the code NORMORL for 20% off (doesn't apply to Birmingham which is a PWYW gig)

Dates

BIRMINGHAM - Cherry Reds Comedy Club - Nov 19

MANCHESTER - Fairfield Social Club - Dec 06

SHEFFIELD - Alder - Dec 11

LONDON - Museum Of Comedy - Dec 16

See you there!! Goodbye!!!