Here, for those that are interested, is a current gig list for Tommy and the Weeks and selected solo gigs for the end of this year and the start of the new one. Yis!
15/12/08
MC – “THE FIX” COMEDY NIGHT
TOMMY AND THE WEEKS
Exmouth Market, London
16/12/08
HEADLINE – NORTHAMPTON PICTUREDROME
TOMMY AND THE WEEKS
11/1/09
SIT DOWN SUNDAYS
TOMMY AND THE WEEKS
Clapham, London
27/1/09
OPENING - READING UNI
SOLO
6/2/09
DOUBLE HEADLINER (WITH ISY SUTTIE)
HEMEL HEMPSTEAD – SOME BIG THEATRE
TOMMY AND THE WEEKS
17/02/09
OPENING – EDINBURGH UNI
SOLO
20/02/09
EXTENDED SET – OXFORD & CAMBRIDGE CLUB (LONDON)
TOMMY AND THE WEEKS
02/03/09
OPENING – HAPPY MONDAYS
TOMMY AND THE WEEKS
New Cross, London
03/03/09
SKETCHATRON NANO
TOMMY AND THE WEEKS
Pleasance, Islington, London
16/03/09
HEADLINE – DUNDEE UNI
TOMMY AND THE WEEKS
17/03/09
HEADLINE - GLASGOW UNI
TOMMY AND THE WEEKS
24/03/09
OPENING – CARDIFF UNI
SOLO
hello all. apologies for not having the full website back up yet, haven't found hosting for it yet.
there is a big tommy & the weeks gig coming up at The Roundhouse, Camden in a double bill with Simon Munnery. details here: https://www.roundhouse.org.uk/whats-on/productions/simon-munnery-tommy-weeks-2768
hello all. I have a thing, a gadget, an innovation on my website which tells me how many “hits” I get a day. For some reason I’m pushing 50 a day, eh? There’s nothing even here. I feel compelled to put some content up for people so I decided to start by putting up some links to things I’ve written, old articles and the like and then in my excitement to find them all I discovered I still had my old, much better designed website saved on my laptop which is great as I thought I’d lost it so rather than update here I’m going to try and get that back online. In the meantime I’ve posted an article as a myspace blog so ou can check that out here: www.myspace.com/tombellcomedian
Gig news, I’ll be in Dundee and Glasgow Unis on Monday and Tuesday respectively and then on Wednesday I’ll be performing with the brilliant Tony Law at “Tombola of Fun”, Tufnell Park, London. People keep telling me to put a proper gig list up so I’ll hopefully get round to that soon, but we’ve just set table tennis up in my flat so it could take a while.
Also, Tommy and the Weeks have just had a script commission from the nice folks at Comedy Unit (who worked on The Incredible Will and Greg) We’ll be pitching it as a Comedy Lab for Channel 4 which is awesome! It’s provisionally just called “Powershow!”
Check back soon for proper website relaunch, yip!
Hello all. Just a few links to share with you today. First of all a nice review of my solo show here: http://edinburgh.threeweeks.co.uk/review/5196&srch=tom+bell
I met a guy in Edinburgh who said he'd given my show last year 5 stars in the same publication, but I never saw it! Oh well.
Also, two good chances to see me and listen to some top music are coming this month
First up, The End of the Road Festival, 12th-14th September. Not only is it chock full of awesome music (The Mountain Goats!) but there'll be a half hour set from Tommy and the Weeks and I'll be performing solo as part of a late night storytellers gig. Can't wait! Although, it's sold out, so, if you haven't got a ticket then this info isn't much use. If you do, let me also recommend seeing the band Thinguma*jigsaw, an awesome two-piece Norwegian splatter-folk group.
But if they think they'll be the last good festival in September then they didn't count on the inaugural Hunga Munga Festival in London where we will be doing a one off Captain Dude & the Dude Patrol (that being the night I run in Stoke Newington) Hunga Munga are responsible for bringing all the great arts & crafts to our nights so expect a lot more of that plus a great line up of bands and some amazing comics. Highly recommended:
http://www.moondoglovesyou.com/festival.html
Oh, also, Powershow! has one London date coming up, Friday, September 19th
details here: http://www.leicestersquaretheatre.com/events.asp?eventid=24
keep dry
tom
ah Edinburgh, now I remember how little time there is to update things. well, it's the last Powershow! today. Things took a turn for the dramatic when we got an amazing review in The Scotsman and started selling the heck out (all 56 Powerseats.) I was just finding it online to put the link up when I noticed something odd. Here's the review:
http://living.scotsman.com/edinburghfestivalfringe/Comedy-Tommy-and-the-Weeks.4417131.jp
They've given us 5 Stars! Which is awesome, and also another chapter in a revealing tale. When Kate Copstick saw the show we had such a good one, everything went right, and as she knows Ed a bit, she ended up telling us (drunkenly at a party mind you and probably ill advisedly) that she was going to give us 5 stars. Cue a bit of excitement on our part. But when it was printed it came out as a 4 star review, still amazing obviously, but a bit odd as it definitely read as a 5. Turns out that sub editors at the paper have a quota on the numbers of 5 stars to give out each year so as not to seem too generous, so they had knocked a star off. Horrible. The difference between a 4 and 5 star review is huge. That someone could do that undermines the whole point of a review in the first place. That you can spend a year writing a show, rehearsing, spend money on it, get the reviewers in and hit it all on the night, and then have a sub editor change it due to quotas. There is nothing more we could have done. Gah! I was annoyed for a while. But truthfully it was just a good lesson in how this whole business works and a reminder not to take it seriously. But it got upgraded this morning 10am to a 5 star online. It got changed, so, that counts right?
Worse still was what happened to my good friends The Penny Dreadfuls (apologies if I'm not supposed to write about this) when they were called up to be told they had been on the shortlist for the career changing lottery of the if.comeddies awards but then removed for being a play. They were, it seemed, ineligible as the funniest show despite sell out crowds laughing at every brilliant joke. What an absolute mockery. They, along with Dan Antopolski, were the best thing I saw this year, but some small prints in the rules, some sub editors quotas, are more important than rewarding the performers and showing a larger public which shows were outstanding. They took it in good grace too, but it really proves that rather than being the heartbeat of the Fringe, performers are increasingly becoming its puppets, paying for most of it and being used to fit whatever agenda people have at the time. That I was correctly told two of the best newcomer nominees before the festival had begun from friends of friends doesn't fill one with confidence in its impartiality either.
The last insult came when they awarded the spirit of the fringe (the third of the major comedy awards) to "every performer at the fringe". I think they were hoping for a huge cheer and a collective thank you but everyone just stared at the announcement, like coldly accepting a gift obviously bought for someone else from an abusive lover.
On the plus side, I guess I am now an award-winning, 5 star comic. Well good.
Thanks everyone who's been to either or both shows, despite all this moaning it's been a very positive month. London dates to follow and for anyone going to The End of the Road Festival, I'll see you there!
by the way, forgot to mention that my solo show is now going really well, all the changes i put in over the first few days have gone great (i'm doing the show in the round now which is lovely as it ends up feeling like a big gang of friends rather than just a group of separate people) and I've been helped by some lovely audiences. Just yesterday a bearded gentleman that I had appointed as security had to leave early but as he did so he exclaimed in a truly Scottish accent "i have to go young Tom, but let me tell you, I work the BBC, Light Entertainment, and you've got what it takes!" and then left. It was as though he was scouting for shows for the 1940s, but lovely nonetheless.
If you're in Edinburgh, take a look, it's free and good:
http://freefringe.org.uk/programme/index.php?option=
com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=393&Itemid=58
and tommy & the weeks bags it's first 4 stars. thanks to fest amgazine. check it out:
http://www.festmag.co.uk/article/43687-tommy-and-the-weeks-powershow
we like this one as it seems to fill in bits of the plot that we don't actually mention. like a bit of TatW fan fiction.
there's also a video interview with us here:
http://www.list.co.uk/article/11252-tommy-and-the-weeks/
The night of experimental, friendly comedy and arts & crafts in London is coming to the Edinburgh Fringe for one night only. Monday August 18th @ 9pm as part of the Forest Fringe. Lots of amazing acts are already confirmed so hopefully see you there
www.forestfringe.org for more details
we've had another guardian write up and it's another odd one from Leo Benedictus. He reviewed us last year and turned it into an essay on surrealism in comedy. This year he seems to have lost it completely, have a look:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2008/aug/08/edinburgh.tommyandtheweeks.comedy
Obviously I don't agree about the weak points and he's wrong to say the show is short on laughs, but at least here is a review that cites its reference points with intelligence and confidence plus he's actually tackling the show as a whole and not just rehashing the usual cliches. It reads like he wrote it pipe astride his proud mouth. P reference to Spike Milligan as he has always been a big hero for me and I'm glad that we have a review that acknowledges here is something a little different to the fairly stagnant world of "sketch comedy".
It also makes almost the exact opposite points to our chortle review, which liked the sketches but not the rest, which only goes to prove once again just how pointless reviews are. And then some. An increasing number of comics are asking not to be reviewed this year, which is a nice idea but not really very practical for newer acts. It's a real lottery, i don't like it at all, i got lucky with a lovely 4 star review of my solo show this year, but i don't kid myself that everybody who saw it would have thought that and now thanks to the internet, i don't need to! edfringe.com, the main point of sale for every show and one that we pay to be listed on, has an anonymous listing of people's reviews beneath their show. Oh what a horrible idea, I don't know anybody who likes it, you always get the same thing, some nice reviews and some awful ones, it nearly always is full of 5stars or 1stars, which tells us what? firstly that if you thought a show a just fine then you're not going to write about it, fair enough, but also that people have different opinions, no really? for real? you would be hard pushed to find one show without someone writing a gushing review about how much they hated it. And you're left wondering, who would do that? what sort of person would waste precious moments of their finite lives to upset and abuse another human being, and not even in person. i'll tell you who, edinburgh audiences, kaboom, and more especially the sort of people who come to a free show because it's free and sit their staring at you arms folded unwilling to engage with you or your visions and seemingly somehow blaming you for the misery in their own lives. So yeah, i've had a few weird nasty attacks on that website. One lasted for nearly 1,000 words, who has that much time? it was just a free show of whimsy with a man interviewing tapes he made aged 7. who could get that angry? Moonsparkle could for one, I was being attacked by a fairy it seemed.
A bad, or even average review can hurt a performer, it's horrible to see my good friends look crestfallen as a year's worth of work gets tossed aside in a few sentences. Lots of comics don't read reviews, but it's really hard not to. The only solution I've been able to hit on this year is to write my own reviews for my show and hand them out, and that's exactly what i'm doing in my solo show. Everyday I start my day writing out some new reviews, wordy, surreal things like "I grew an extra arm to help me clap harder" and "if you could plant this show it would grow a dude tree" I'm asking people to fill edfringe.com with them so that rather than being a weird repository for people's angst it might just become a lovely board of strange ethereal nonsense that anyone not in the know will look at in bafflement. I'm not going to check it until right at the end of the run, so who knows if it will work, but with any luck it will help my beat my fear of reviews and maybe make something fun
another one! those guys love us:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2008/aug/02/comedy.scotlandandirelandlistings1
and you can now read an article I wrote for the excellent casting website www.tobeseen.co.uk
the article is here: http://www.tobeseen.co.uk/edinburgh-fringe-preview.php
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