So now it's official.

Standing There Productions is doing a theatre show during the Comedy Festival!

This is foolhardy and terrifying and those of us in charge of writing said show had frankly better pull a rabbit out of our hat fairly quickly.

At the moment, the show consists of a draft script and a series of hand drawn "maps", kind of like family trees, demonstrating what the show is intended to become (always good to keep by way of hilarious retrospective comparison with what the show actually ends up being). Some of these maps are on napkins. Some of them are on the backs of invoices from places like the physio where I went to get my wrist looked at. One of them is written in a crayon. (It was down the back of the couch).

In the next five months (yes I am counting December shut up) the show will become three dimensional and will develop a life of its own. Rita has drawn up a budget that, if it were a person, would be very intimidating and already would have done its Christmas shopping.

Any advice, support, love, affection, cash, and potential bums on seats would be most welcome at this point.

Also, anyone who can read my handwriting from when my wrist was broken might be able to help me decipher the previous month or so worth of not very helpful "notes" I've been taking on the show. What do we think "[indecipherable word] could be hilarious" might mean? What could be hilarious? What dammit!?

Let me know. Quickly.

Just while I'm on this point, quote of the year so far goes to Rita (as usual) for her assessment the other day that we did not need to panic about a certain aspect of the production "at this stage". I expressed my relief and Rita considered the position for a moment. "Although", she said soberly, "There's panicking to be done".

This, I think, shall be my mantra until May 2007. There's panicking to be done. How exciting.

I am so exhausted that I just wagged my first film in the Melbourne Film Festival.

It was a good one, too. Iranian.

I'm going to have a bit of a nap.

Update-wise, last night I saw The Way I Spent The End of The World, which was a lovely, slow, Romanian film. I then saw Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic, which I almost fell asleep in, which is a documentary kind of thing about Sarah Silverman, a Jewish-American comic. I think, after the Comedy Festival, I might have reached saturation point with stand-up.

Let's see how I feel about film after the six I'm seeing in a row tomorrow.

Yikes.

Happy Monday, everyone!

I logged on to our website this morning and found one of our new photographs was on rotation as the homepage photograph - an extreme close-up of two enormous iced vo vos. Most alarming. Paul the Website Superman must have deemed them (sensibly) to be worthy of placement as a central motif for Standing There Productions - the end result of course being that I'm kind of hankering for an iced vo vo with my morning cup of tea.

Yesterday I went to a play reading at The Fairfax Theatre in Melbourne. The reading was of a play called Asylum, by Kit Lazaroo, which won the Wal Cherry Play of the Year. Two Standing There Productions Peeps were taking part in the reading: Tim Stitz (who has been in everything we've ever done) and Carly Shrever (who was in People Watching). Both Carly and Tim were (guess what) excellent, as usual. I then went to ACMI to watch a whole heap of AFTRS short films, including The Birthday Boy, which I had never seen before. I went alone. This detail is important because had I not been alone, silent, with headphones on, in a booth tucked away in a corner, maybe they wouldn't have locked me in by accident when they closed for the evening.

I had to rush up to the guy just as he was pulling this enormous wall closed over the section I had been sitting in. Adds a whole new level of fear to moviegoing, let me tell you.

Then last night I attempted to go to a show called Vaudeville X, which I had called up about earlier in the day and they had assured me I would get a seat. Due to the fact that "someone" had told me the wrong thing on the phone, they didn't have a seat for me. I walked there in the freezing cold, hung around waiting for thirty minutes, and then was offered a "standing-room" ticket for TEN DOLLARS. What a sweet deal! Or, to put it another way, what a great excuse to go home and watch The Society Murders on TV.

Anyway, so my attempt to have a culturally interesting day was thwarted by people attempting to lock me in buildings and other people trying to charge me to stand up for an hour to watch musical theatre. Next weekend I think I'll go to the footy.

In other news, Penny Tangey's show Kathy Smith Goes to Maths Camp, which was on in the Melbourne International Comedy Festival and which was directed by someone who almost spent the night at ACMI last night, has entered the Australian vernacular. Go here to see how Penny's show is a measure of the zeitgeist, in that nerds being hip, cool and happening is the simple, undeniable truth. This was reiterated last week when I received a flurry of phone calls from people telling me to watch Catylist, because there's a young girl on it who is partaking in a maths quest and who declares with heartbreaking honesty that she finds maths tables more interesting for the walls of her bedroom than posters of hot guys. In other words, Kathy Smith lives.

Very busy today and so let me just use this space to tell everyone about the new photos on our site.

Paul, the Website Superman, has posted a few more shots on the homepage (namely one of me and Rita) as well as a bigger range of photos rotating at the top of the page.

If none of those look familiar, that's because quite frankly you haven't been paying attention. If the photo looks like someone slightly nerdy doing what appears to be a maths olympiad on stage, that's a photo from Kathy Smith Goes to Maths Camp, which is the show by Penny Tangey (directed by me) from the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

If the photo looks like it's other people on stage, particularly if those people are wearing Green T Shirts with "People Watching" on them, that's because those photos were taken (now this is fairly complicated) on the set of our play, People Watching.

If the photos are black & white, they are OLD, which means they were taken on the set of the Really Useless Theatre Company show, The Dinner Party.

For BRAND NEW EXCITING photographs of the recent cast and crew screening of our film, I Could Be Anybody, go to the "Current Production" menu, and then select "Screening and Success"

Any questions, see me after class.

Today is the first Sunday for four weeks that I haven't had to cram everything in before a seven thirty show. It's the first day of no comedy festival shows whatsoever.

So I got up at two this afternoon, after a rather colourful night at the festival club, and I thought very seriously about getting some of the work done that Rita and I had scheduled in for Sunday. Then I got dressed in what clothes I could find that weren't held together by cigarette smoke and rain (it's been a very healthy couple of weeks) and I went for a walk. Which was quite adventurous, considering the other option was staying in bed.

In other news, Sammy J, the guy who plays the Young Liberal in I Could Be Anybody, was awarded Best Newcomer last night at the comedy festival, which is enormously exciting and he should be sent to the congratulatorium (along with Tim Stitz, who is already there. They can have cups of tea together by the fire and talk about what to do next).

Also, I went to the Victorian College of the Arts graduation ceremony the other night. I was outraged that I had to pay thirty dollars to go and watch someone walk up on stage and collect a piece of paper. I would now like to retract that outrage. It was quite brilliant, with bits of film, music, dance, and performing that really made me wonder (once again) what life would have been like for me if I'd gone to art school.

Ben Hjorth, who played Oliver in our play, People Watching, led the most astonishing chant from the back of Hamer Hall in Melbourne. The people who did Men of Steel at the comedy festival performed some of their hilarious food-fight puppet comedy (a genre consisting, I should think, only of them) and the kids from the school of dance made me wonder what the hell I'm doing with my body (walking? sitting around? Pathetic!). Then, hours into the ceremony, a shambles of musicians appeared onto the stage and played some awe-inspiring stuff (and I'm leaving out the actors and the film makers because I'm far more interested in watching things I don't know anything about). So there. Pretty excellent stuff. Stew graduated (and surprised everyone a little when he took a polariod of the actual moment he shook hands with the Vice Chancellor) and then my friend Simon graduated, as did our 1st AD from I Could Be Anybody, Eva Tandy (who was whooped with considerable gusto by the rather reserved audience). I'm very lucky to know these people.

Anyway, I have to go and fall asleep over my new book, Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman. Yay for learning things from other people.

Off to the comedy festival again tonight and it does rather make me wonder what the hell I'm going to do when this thing finishes. For those of you not from Melbourne, there is a month long festival called the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, which is cruelly robbing me of any sleep and which is responsible for a higher than usual incidence of the flu for this time of year.

Kathy Smith Goes To Maths Camp was reviewed yesterday in the online UK Chortle, here.

See also here, which as you know is my favourite newspaper.

Also, I received an Alan Bennett DVD in the mail today, which was a present from myself. God I'm ace.

Also saw Kokoda on the weekend, a film starring our friend Simon Stone who was pretty much unrecognisable (ie he was wearing shorts) and who I really did not want to see dying in a tent. I then met up with him about ten minutes later at the comedy festival and was most relieved to see he wasn't wearing army issue shorts, he wasn't covered in mud, and he appeared not be bleeding to death.

The movie is definitely worth seeing. Although I missed a lot of it due to the fact that my hands were covering my face and I was muttering "Simon's going to die".

Thankfully, I can at least give away the real life ending: Simon doesn't die. He comes to the comedy festival with me and Stewart and Katie-Jean and we go to dinner in the city and the meal takes an hour and ten minutes to arrive so I complain to the staff and we get the entire meal plus drinks for free.

Yay for me being the hero of the story. Who knew Kokoda had such a modern twist at the end?

I'm grouchy today.

Check out this review by Helen Razer in the online version of The Age, or as we here have come to call it, The Dead Horse.

The show she reviews is called I Know What You Did Last Monday. I haven't seen the show and I don't know any of the people in it, but what Helen Razer hysterically raves about here is that these are first time performers who have misjudged what comedy is and who look nervous and unsure of themselves.

So the only newspaper allowed to report on the comedy festival has kicked the teeth out of some twelve year olds in the playground. Meanwhile, if you'd like to read eight hundred boring quotes about the nature of comedy, go your hardest. Also, lots of four star reviews of a bunch of comedians from America and Australians with their own TV shows.

Where is the analysis of the pumped up misogynists I've seen at this festival doing rape jokes and poof jokes and being laughed at because they're confident and they got four stars in The Dead Horse and the audience doesn't want to feel uncool...?

At the comedy festival, they announced the nominations for a couple of awards the other night.

The two awards they announced were The Barry Award and The Golden Gibbo. The Barry is the official comedy festival award for best show.

This is the funniest thing in the festival. It's positively Kafkaesque. Check it out: the award for best show in the comedy festival is judged by a group of people who do not go to all the shows in the comedy festival.

That's how it works. Say you're doing a show in the festival, and all you want is a positive review. If you get a positive review, you get what's called "a vibe". If you've got "a vibe", then the judges for the Barry Award get along to your show and decide whether or not to nominate you for an award.

Isn't that hilarious? Imagine pretending that's a merit-based decision. "I'm the teacher who will be teaching this class, but only the popular kids will actually be graded".

So anyway, you ready for a shock? Not one woman nominated for The Barry Award. Huge surprise - you could have knocked me over with a cock joke.

The Golden Gibbo is great, recognises really different stuff.

It would be nice, though, if the mainstream award, The Barry, recognised (say) Judith Lucy, whose apparently brilliant and brave show about working in commercial radio, I Failed, is selling out every night. Popular, mainstream, funny... but not shortlisted.

If all this was a play, it would appear dreadfully over-written, really repetitive, and not very funny at all. What a shame.