Friday 10th December, 2010 - I and my imaginary friend, a.k.a author Lisa Scullard, go to see Mark Watson perform stand-up comedy at the HMV Apollo, Hammersmith, London. I say imaginary friend, because we had two seats to ourself :) A small fleet of us, The Stood-Up Brigade, were comparing the seating positions of our spare tickets just prior to thinking collectively "Sod it" and running inside so as not to miss the start. Even so, once I got upstairs and found my seats, for a moment I was nearly bumped from them by a man who imagined temporarily that he had more than his quota of real life friends with him and was under the impression he had bought the whole row. Bless him. But the end two had Voodoo written all over them. If he'd known that, he probably wouldn't even have wanted to sit his own imaginary friends there either.
Comedian Mark, who describes himself as "a little bit Welsh, a little bit West country" has more chatter than a sackload of monkeys. And he's engaging as well as funny - if you've seen his appearances on Mock The Week, or his current TV show Mark Watson Kicks Off, you've seen a snippet of his humour - seeing him live really does him justice. He's a generous performer as well as intelligent, there's no sense of him holding anything back, and his enjoyment of performing infects the audience. A very, very likeable personality. A youngster's active mind meets philosopher of age in a grown-up world which at times seems to be like Babel to live in.
If you want to know what that means, go see him :)
Right at the end Mark mentioned his novel "Eleven" (published by Simon&Schuster) was for sale downstairs and he'd be signing copies in the lobby for anyone who wanted to come and say hello. So I went down to grab a copy and started reading it in the queue for autographs. It's great to see more fiction by comedians - a Voodoo Review will follow later at some point...
Not only did Mark sign my copy of "Eleven", he also signed my travel-sized copy of Glamour, right across the lovely Kylie Minogue, with great pleasure. Now that's a magazine that's staying on my coffee table...
Mark's a fast mover as well as talker... :)
...I feel sorry for my real life friend who didn't make it to the show - you missed a good one, dude!
(Mark Watson is on tour now - click here for dates)
(Mark Watson is on tour now - click here for dates)
L xxxxxxxx
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