Glossop Comedy Festival will return later this year. Keep checking the page for more info.
It's been a busy month or so since the last post. The tutoring continues to do well and every student who was with me during the school closure has opted to stick with me now they've reopened. Which makes for a busier Saturday but a less busy weekday daytime. I don't know for how long we'll be hearing about how children have to "catch up" due to the pandemic but I estimate it to be at least as long as the funding lasts and then it'll revert back to beating schools with a stick for not doing enough to "raise standards".
Angela has also got herself booked for a live show in Wales later this year and a full hour's performace at the Ram Festival in Derby at the end of May (most likely online through Zoom, possibly live in person.) More festival dates are being lined up but, for obvious reasons, little can be confirmed at the moment.
That's enough for now.
January is usually a quiet month when the world isn't contending with a pandemic. However, we are and it wasn't.
Anyway, that's the serious bit over with. What's been going on in comedy?
TikTok (link)
So Angela signed up and started posting. Initially her videos were hatchet-job edits of some of her songs but she then moved into telling jokes to camera - something infinitely easier to do in such a short timeframe. The chorus to Fitness to Practice got 850 views, Nuclear Cooking Cave cracked 500, then everything else started to bump along at around 200.
It turns out banal, obvious and downright moronic engages the TikTok generation. Angela making puns about Nigel Farage in front of a greenscreen doesn't so much. Still, it's a start and if this was any other platform I'd be pleased with how it's going. What is unique to TikTok, at least in my experience, is how international the audience is. One Trump-baiting nursery rhyme later I had MAGA devotees telling me to "watch out" because "something big" was going to happen on inaugeration day.
So maybe Angela needs to learn a dance routine, "bus it" occasionally or record her own version of a joke ten other people have already re-enacted (yes, this actually happens). Or maybe she'll just keep ploughing her own furrow like a beligerant indie band and grow slowly but surely.
I assume that can still happen. It was definitely a thing in the 90's.
Yoga (link)
It went on TikTok and, despite the dance moves and music, it made it to 146 views and gave up. Facebook video did better as I posted it to various humour and drag pages and it's currently on 252. As an afterthought I posted it to Youtube for posterity and didn't really talk about it at all. The next day it had over 900 views as Youtube had decided to recommend it to a lot of people.
I don't think I'll ever understand how social media works.
Bonkers Quiz Night (link)
February
Notable for containing my birthday. Though I don't think the last year really counts so I may just have the same one again.
It's been quite a year hasn't it? After a promising start, lockdown kicked in and the whole world went to crap. However, whilst we lost our socialising, gigs, festivals and freedom many of us took up new interests to plug the gap and, well, survive the social distancing.
I'm no exception and, as I've just been out and bought all the beer and cheese necessary to see in the new year, have some spare hours to write about the highs and lows of my 2020.
Let's start with the...
Lows
A couple of months later when many of the families I worked with acclimatised to the new normal things did begin to pick up. I'm still earning less than this time last year but the vast majority of my sessions are now online though Zoom. I've even started working with two families in Hackney who tracked me down through my association with the primary school I worked at down there for ten years. When people talk about outsourcing work remotely to cheaper areas I'm pretty sure they didn't mean the north but I'm not complaining!
Physical festivals and gigs died a death of course. Anything Goes (my monthly open mic) was forced online and the bar it took place in is now gone forever. The annual trip to Edinburgh didn't happen and neither did bookings everywhere from Retford to Morecambe. There was a thin silver lining to this though which I'll go into shortly.
On a personal level, not seeing family (who are spread across the country) much - if at all - has been particularly hard. However, we're all now well versed in Zoom, Facebook Messenger and that old fashioned thing known as a phone call. I saw my nephews open their presents on Christmas Day and I keep up to date with the adventures of my 91 year old grandparent via letter and telephone. Once "all this is over" I'll be down south asap. You never know, I might squeeze a gig or two in along the way.
Highs
Ah, the uplifting bit. This roughly breaks down into three areas; work, family and comedy. Let's do it in that order.
Work, as I've said, has picked up and I have developed my skills when it comes to tutoring online. I Zoom with up to three children at a time and use the same interactive whiteboard software that I would be using in class. We've all learned to screen share, annotate and wait for BBC Bitesize clips to buffer. Things continue to improve when it comes to the hours I'm working and when the national tutoring programme is finally able to deliver all it's promised I should have more work than I need. Which is always a good place to be.
When it comes to family I have been able to keep in touch with everyone thanks to the technology we all have to hand. Ebay and the infamous Amazon have stepped into the present buying gap left by the closure of non-essential shops (sorry, but it's too convenient.) Like all couples, Anna and I (and our cat Lilo) have been living in each others' pockets with little in-person interaction with anyone else and we're still stronger than ever. Come the zombie apocalypse we'll be just fine.
Which leads us to my (or rather my new character, Angela's) work with Bonkers Bingo. A plucky startup overseen by a couple of people in their early twenties, the original plan was for Angela to MC the bingo with songs and general rabble rousing thrown in. Covid hit and the twenty or so shows planned out reduced to just two and a replacement event had to be found. Anna and I had always fancied running a pub quiz so Angela Bra's Bonkers Quiz Night was formed. Running fortnightly on a Saturday at 9pm, the quiz welcomes live guests (via Streamyard) and regularly gets hundreds, sometimes thousands, of views. We make the content, Bonkers promotes it. It's an arrangement that's working out well for both parties. Is it making any money? No. Is it helping us develop our characters, increase our exposure and lay down the template for a new cabaret quiz night once being socially distant is once again considered to be a bad thing? Yes.
Moving from a bloke in a t-shirt and jeans (possibly a golf visor when rapping) to a female character act with influences ranging from Drag Race to Lily Savage to my late nana. Lou's (the presenter of The Big Gay Comedy Show - performance pictured) first comment when my Streamyard feed went live was, "Gemma Collins has lost weight," which was pretty much on the money. Is it just a character or is it an expression of an authentic "me"? Both. If you've ever listened to Courtney Act talk about their take on gender fluidity I'd say I'm in the same camp.
And it does get pretty camp at times.
So far Angela has featured in her own six part Youtube series, recorded a bunch of parodies, presented and appeared on a handful of comedy shows and quizzes (not just her own), started an Instagram account and blog and is putting the finishing touches to the first draft of her 2021 show, At Home With Miss Angela Bra. A musical comedy suitable for an all-ages audience mixing up songs from the series with parodies from my Parodies From The Peak District virtual festival show this year. DDP is going ahead too - aimed squarely at an adult audience, which'll be a first for us.
As anyone who knows me well will know, I love a good set of stats. Without Edinburgh to dissect by spreadsheet this year, here are my top 10 Youtube videos by views. Really I should add the additional views from the Facebook and/or Instagram versions but even I think life is probably too short for that.
Happy New Year!
My Top 10 Youtube Videos of 2020
(as of 31/12/20)
1. Dominic Cummings 500 Miles - Andy Quirk (88,343)
2. Dom's The One And Only - Andy Quirk (1,575)
3. Livin' Covida Loca - Andy Quirk (895)
4. All I Want For Christmas Is Spoons - Angela Bra (889)
5. We Will Pee - Andy Quirk (505)
6. Ryanair Refund It! - Andy Quirk (382)
7. At Home With Angela Episode 1 - My Nuclear Cooking Cave - Angela Bra (355)
8. Agent Orange In A Shirt - Andy Quirk (though looking like Angela Bra) (306)
9. Andy Quirk's Parodies From The Peak District (Full show, mainly on private link) (253)
10. Sani-Tiger - Angela Bra (242)
All videos can be found here.
With confirmation we were going to be stuck in Tier 3 for the foreseeable future, it was back to the internet for all things comedy this week. Who needs actual social contact when you've got a green screen and Streamyard? Well, everyone as it turns out but this runs a close second.
It's been a busy couple of days full of clever questions and occasionally clever answers as Angela Bra has both competed in and hosted a quiz show this weekend. In the run up to this there was much chaos on the hosting front as I got to grips with Streamyard, question writing and the best way to stream to ensure no-one appeared as a blurry collection of pixels. Overall, it work out pretty well.
The show lastest about 1:15 and felt turbo-charged for the most part. Running a quiz is a very different beast to performing comedy straight and gives both the contestants and host the chance to continuously adlib safe in the knowledge that everyone will at some point come back to questions and answers. The pressure to be funny is less intense and as a result when funny occurs it's more natural.
Importantly also, with the pub quiz aspect opening the show up to multiple audiences the viewing figures were excellent with approximately 400 tuning in live and a further 200 watching the recorded version today. Once this lockdown's over Anna and I will be looking to take it live but until then regular episodes are almost guaranteed.
Tomorrow it's back to the weekday necessities but I'll certainly be looking for more opportunities for Angela to pop up on alongside her own doings. The most recent Anything Goes Online Comedy is close to 200 views itself which is a huge improvement on the past few.
I've also attracted a troll or two this week which I'll take a compliment.
Occasionally I make a decision that pans out for the best in retrospect. Two weeks ago, feeling frustrated, I started to make enquiries with the various bars in Glossop about running a covid-safe comedy night as the town was in tier two and with any luck would be moving down a rung within the month.
Then it occurred to me that this could be a lot of work for something that wouldn't happen so I retreated back to the box room office to think again. Days later Bonkers Bingo were on the phone to tell me that all the November shows were being punted into 2021 and could I think of anything that Angela could do to entertain the substantial army of Facebook followers they'd be amassing.
Now, I've always liked a pub quiz. I've always liked a gameshow. Not the daytime ones with real questions and actual tactics but the cheesy bombastic ones where previous rounds become irrelevent as the money doubles. Family Fortunes is king when it comes to this, Catchphrase and it's increasingly obscure non-sayings is heir to the throne and Pointless is most likely the court jester with its attempts to add marginally higher brow content through the veil of 100% silly.
Pub quizzes are great too because you get to join in. But the catch is they can go on forever and the questions are often far too challenging for mere mortals. There's also the issue with people cheating on their mobiles. The i-phoneys of the egghead world.
Incidentally, Eggheads is rubbish.
So I've started work on a gameshow pub quiz for these lockdown times. Some rounds will appeal to know-it-alls, others are more so for those who preferred their gameshows with a gunge tank. You might get all the questions right. You might not. There's no point in cheating because there aren't any prizes and if you're on your own you can chat with others by commenting on the Facebook stream and watching the "special guests" (also known as locked down comedians) on screen with Angela.
At a technical level there's an audio mixer for background music, a green screen and a video round. Will it all work properly? Probably not. But Angela isn't so good with the tech and she'll no doubt ride it out in style.
Angela Bra's Bonkers Quiz Night streams on the FB page for Bonkers Bingo - The Tour from 8.45pm with the quiz kicking off at 9pm and runs for a solidly manic 60 minutes on Saturday November 14th. Pop it in your diary by joining the event here.
I'll leave this with a joke that popped into my head this afternoon when Anna showed me a photo taken during her walk in a churchyard. No, I don't want to know who thought of it first hundreds of years ago!
When people create scales they usually have a ranking that runs from low to high. But the people in government are not usual people. They have a ranking system that starts at "medium" and then climbs to "high" and "very high" in a move somewhat reminiscent of a certain minister who in the past said all schools should have "above average" results.
Manchester is "high" (insert obvious joke) which, though not as bad as the tier above, is still pretty grim for bars and similar venues. Yes, you can get a drink. No, you can't drink it with anyone outside of your household.
What I do know is that the most watched video of Angela's on Instagram TV comes in at 28 views. Clearly there's still some way to go before she becomes a social media sensation.
And before you ask. Yes, as well as views the videos do actually have likes. And yes, I have grown my subscribers by a modest but much valued amount.
Elsewhere in comedy, Retfest is on in two weekends' time and Parodies from the Peak District will be showing in video form. There's also a chance I'll be doing something more live for them in the run-up to it next week. With the chance of live shows further diminished by Boris's flipflopping I'm pretty much a streamer for hire for as long as this cruddy situation continues.
Last Thursday I broke my covid enforced stage absence with a show in Manchester for new act / new material show The Laughienda. Based at The Lions Den on Deansgate the beer was ordered from the bar by text message and the audience were socially distanced only in the physical sense. In short, a nice little night.
Overall it was thoroughly entertaining with a number of more experienced hands stretching their stand-up wings once again. Ben Silver and Hannah Platt performed either side of me in the final segment and both were great to watch. Also, it's also nice to see Adam Hughes, on MC duties, hasn't let fatherhood or lockdown change his raucous rambling approach to crowd work and drinking on the job.
My own set gained momentum after a slightly shaky start with 500 Miles, making its live debut as the mic stand recoiled and forced me to pretty much stand over it to be heard, before I gave it a few determined twists and tugs and knocked out Stuck in the Lidl With You and Ex On Fire like the stalwarts they really are now they form the core of my Parodies from the Peak District show.
By 9:50pm the show had run and we were outside the venue - the audience using the QR code posters to donate to the night. Laughienda is every Thursday night at The Lions Den from 7pm. Entry is free and you should definitely go.
It's been a month since the last blog but that doesn't mean nothing has been happening. In fact, quite the opposite. Okay, that is excepting the small matter of breaking out of our sickly isle for a week in Turkey (productivity rating: 0, sitting in the sun and swimming in a pool rating: 10) but otherwise it's been rather busy.
Last week I published the sixth and final vlog/music video for the 'At Home With Angela' mini-series on Youtube. A green screen on green screen tribute to female fronted indiepop bands of the past and a certain contemporary comedy duo, Tea Time Lottery turned the guitars up to an audible level but still made room for some mum-at-the-wedding-disco dancing in the choruses.
I had hoped that by the end of this series the pandemic would be easing but quite the opposite appears to be happening. Angela is booked in for several appearances with Bonkers Bingo in the coming months but early closing, social distancing and super-lockdown measures in the north mean that these will be the only shows she'll be doing in the forseeable future thanks to the large rooms they inhabit and the useful coincidence that bingo has always been a form of fun delivered best seated with people you know.
So for now the focus stays online. In a tribute to the multi-format music releases of the past (who remembers the CD, tape, vinyl trio that used to be offered on the weekly singles?) I'll be uploading re-edited versions of the AHWA shows onto Facebook and Instagram in the coming months.
Angela will also be hosting Anything Goes Online for the while. Now published monthly, my round-up of the best new UK comedy on the web will feature actual links between sections of the show and even more content. The last one was a bit slim on clips, a sign some people are actually getting back to work I think, but October's is looking really good at the moment.
Anything else to report? Angela's been approached by Britain's Got Talent today and a sportswear brand has written to her offering to pay her for endorsements in her videos. Will either go anywhere? If you see more footage of the sort last seen in Fitness To Practice then you'll certainly know!
In parody news, I'm playing a show next Thursday in Manchester for Laughienda and Retford Festival will be showing the full fringe show online in October.
As I said, it's been a busy month.
This evening Parodies from the Peak District got it's first proper live airing thanks to Laughing Horse and their virtual Edinburgh Fringe offering. I had no idea who would be buying up the tickets to see me pay homage / desecrate the hits of The Smiths, Erasure, The Zutons and others in a vague narrative of my life between 2018 and 2019. Come 8pm I had a Zoom gallery window largely made up of retired Americans and Australians - plus a few Brits.
When the first question posed by your audience is "Where is the Peak District?" you know that it's going to be an interesting 45 minutes. They were all an absolute joy of course and there's was plenty of chat between the songs. It had the vibe of one of the smallest festival rooms you get at the fringe where the fourth wall is so blurred its part theatre show / part dinner party minus the food. Except in this case people actively encourage you to get your guitar out and sing some songs.
I can now also say with some certainty that no-one outside the UK realised that Mark Ronson and Amy Winehouse didn't write Valerie. Educational and entertaining.
Elsewhere this week, project Angelabra continued with her first live outing as the featured comedy act at Bonkers Bingo - an all singing / all dancing Butlins-style cabaret with a few games of bingo thrown in for good measure. Nearly thwarted by unforseen circumstances the show went on and Angela spent a good portion of her set ribbing the tipsy but good-natured audience members at the front before cracking out I Love My Microwave and finding the same set of people singing along to the chorus.
Performing in pretty much the same outfit featured in the photo (a still from her advert for the night) it turned a few heads in what was an otherwise ultra-straight cocktail bar come gastropub but there was no grief or heckles that the reputation of a location like Bolton might suggest. Angela may actually be more mainstream than first thought. Or Bolton is more camp.
Why Balls Balls Balls in the title? This.
Approximately three years after anyone else watched it, I completed both series of Pls Like on iPlayer. A spoof documentary following a comparatively ancient thirty year old's investigations into the vacuous youth-driven vlog movement it ticked plenty of funny boxes and even featured a guest appearance by the very funny Yuriko Kotani towards the end of series one. If you haven't seen it and find the tick tocking insta-world a confusing combustion of the self aggrandising and truly deluded then you probably should.
It was a parody video party this weekend with not one but two new videos uploaded to Youtube, plus the full Parodies From The Peak District fringe show for 2020 got its first airing at the Hastings Online Comedy Festival.
