Have I Got A Blog For You
Hello. Mark here. This is the first proper entry in a series of Fun and Informative Blogs, by means of which you will be able to track every detail of my life and opinions as they happen. I will use it to inform readers of any shows I am doing, appearances in the media, hit singles I’m putting out for Christmas, murders I am about to confess to, etc. Occasionally I might record particularly noteworthy Facebook Scrabble results here, or tell you something interesting about a celebrity I’ve met, like Tara Palmer-Tompkinson. In general I wouldn’t expect the blog to be too funny though, because if I have amusing observations I tend to save them for professional purposes. I am always slightly surprised how many comedians put a lot of effort into funny blogging, but rarely change their actual act.
Still.
The main thing to say in this blog is that I’m not doing any more live shows until Christmas, aside from a weekend of gigs in Stockholm in December. I’m taking a bit of time to renew my energies before embarking on a Winter and Spring tour of Britain, which begins in January, and keeps going until the first week of April. If Spring still hasn’t arrived at that point, I will bloody well keep soldiering on till it does. So it could be a war of attrition between me and the seasons.
I will then do the usual festival circuit of Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and New Zealand for the second half of April and most of May. Details of these shows already are/will be elsewhere on this site.
But how I am going to fill the weeks of recuperation until this tour? Will I wander around London looking vulnerable, hoping for funny things to happen to me so I’ll have material to fill the next show? Will I sit on my bony arse feeling a bit useless and reflecting on the paradox that it’s draining to do shows all year round, and yet psychologically tiring in a different way when you’re NOT working? Or will I appear on national television and finish another book?
The answer is a combination of all three. For one thing, I’m putting the finishing touches to my third novel, which I have been working on since February, and in secret for some time leading up to then. Unfortunately because of the speed things move at in the publishing industry, the ‘finishing touches’ themselves normally take between ten and twelve years, and I don’t even have a publishing deal for this book yet, so I wouldn’t await it too eagerly, unless you are the sort of person who can sustain eagerness for very, very long periods. Still, I am fairly happy with the first draft and look forward to its one day being released, if, indeed, people still have books by that point; right now Apple are probably working on something to replace them.
TV-wise, I will be on both Never Mind The Buzzcocks (BBC2) and Have I Got News For You (BBC1) soon. On Buzzcocks, I am a team captain, filling the considerable shoes of Mr Bill Bailey. On Have I Got News… I will probably sit there all shy, laughing at clever things Merton and Hislop say.
If you come away from these shows thinking ‘it was so nice to reminded of the existence of that scrawny comic; I wish I could have his voice in my ear all day and all night long’, I ought to point out that you can now buy Series 2 of my radio, Mark Watson Makes The World Substantially Better, on Amazon. Along with Series 1, of course. The new one is not out for a couple of weeks, but if you pre-order it, you will have the peace of mind that comes from knowing you definitely own it, just in case demand is so great that the whole world runs out of blank CDs and no more can be produced before Christmas.
This blog has been a lot more Informative than Fun, but I’m really still finding my feet as a blogger and I should expect the next outing to be a lot more easy-going. Until then, thank you for reading this. When this blog becomes a sensation in the ‘blogosphere’, and starts to blossom into a masterpiece of humour-and-fact fusion, you can tell people that you prefer the early stuff.
Mark x
