17 posts tagged “jane hill”
Here's a comedy performance I was particularly please with - in the final of the North Essex New Act Competition (NENAC) on 28th March this year. I came joint-second.
Here's an interview I did recently for a website/cable TV thing. I'm talking about Can't Let Go.
(I've taken the interview clip out until I can work out how to embed it without it starting automatically every time the page is opened).
Three books in, I shouldn't get so excited by this, but I do. If you happen to be on the Waterstone's website and do a search of author events, you'll find that I am doing three whole bits of Waterstone's-associated publicity for the new book. Here we are:
We found 3 events for author Jane Hill
Crime Evening
Jane Hill, John Harvey, Peter James
Cold in Hand
WATERSTONE'S SOUTHAMPTON ABOVE
Thursday, 6 March 2008, 7:00PM
£3, redeemable against the purchase of any crime title on the night.
Another of our crime evenings. This time we will have Peter James, John Harvey and Jane Hill in attendence; discussing their own books and the crime genre in general. This is a wonderful opportunity to talk to some of the leading authors in the field in person.
Further details: 02380 633 130
North Herts Literary Festival Crime Readers Day
Sophie Hannah, Jane Hill, Mark Billingham
The Big Sleep - Penguin fiction
The Sun Hotel, Sun Street, Hitchin
Wednesday, 12 March 2008, 1:00PM - 5:00PM
Tickets £6, available from the shop and to include light refreshments
Three bestselling writers discuss three great crime novels in panel format and then in groups with us, the audience! A chance to discuss books with real authors so why not read one (or more!) beforehand and voice your opinion. The books for discussion are: The Big Sleep, A Quiet Belief in Angels and In the Woods.
Further details: 01462 422329
Jane Hill - Talk & Signing
Jane Hill
Can't Let Go
WATERSTONE'S LINCOLN HIGH ST
Thursday, 13 March 2008, 7:00PM
Tickets £3
Jane Hill will be talking about and signing her latest psychological thriller.
Further details: 01522 540011
The Quay Arts Centre, Newport on the Isle of Wight... a short drive and a 40 minute car ferry ride away from my home in Southsea. Beautiful venue - a local arts centre built in old red brick buildings (warehouses, I'd guess) on the river in Newport. An audience of 60ish people, all ages, sitting at tables and looking forward to a good night out. I was nervous because I hadn't had a gig since before Christmas, and I'd had a couple of not-that-good ones in December. And also, I was headlining (admittedly, it was a new act night... but it's still a big deal for me to be top of the bill).
It was a complete delight! I did about 15/20 minutes, worked in a few new jokes, forgot a few bits and then brought them back in later... in fact, I felt very relaxed and discursive. It was great fun. What a shame I forgot to take my video camera with me.
Meanwhile, here's an old photo that I've just been sent. This is from Edinburgh 2007, taken during our Free Festival show Late & Free @ Hillside. Note the glamorous venue - a cross between the Black Hole of Calcutta and your grandmother's front room.
Here is the video from a gig I did about a month ago. It's taken a while to upload it because it was a big file and I had to use my limited computer knowledge to shrink it so I could post it here. It's a gig I did at a comedy club called You Jest, at a venue called Talking Heads in Southampton, and it's probably the performance that I'm proudest of so far. I really enjoyed it and felt very relaxed doing a longer set than usual. Definitely one of my best yet. A few new jokes, some old favourites. Apologies as always for the quality - recorded on a very basic video camera by a guy standing at the back of the room. Enjoy!
It's not out until March 2008 but I got to see the cover of my third book Can't Let Go today. It's coming out in hardback, and my publishers keep telling me it's going to be my breakthrough book. I certainly hope so.
Meanwhile my second book, The Murder Ballad, will be stocked by Asda when it's published in paperback in early December. And it's going to be a BOGOF deal! ("Buy one, get one free"). Apparently if you buy the book, you'll be able to send off to the publisher and get a free copy of the first book, Grievous Angel. Because, you know, there are so many thousands of unsold copies out there. The offer is a good thing, I think: it's going to hit Asda in time for the Christmas market. (For my American friends, Asda is a downmarket but hugely popular supermarket that's owned by Walmart.)
I had an indifferent gig last night at the Newbury Comedy Festival. Newbury is a pleasant market town about an hour from here, and I was taking part in the new act competition. I did my turn, told my jokes, was professional and slick (too slick) and pretty solid. I got quite a few laughs but not many guffaws. I didn't die but - I just didn't enjoy it very much. Probably the first time ever that I felt a bit meh about a gig. Usually, even the bad ones are great fun. I felt I didn't get any interraction going with the crowd. The gig was in the local arts centre, and the audience was quite middle-class and a little older than usual, which normally works for me. So - maybe I'm getting complacent and need to do something a bit different. I don't know.
Anyway, I didn't make it to the final of the competition. And I didn't enjoy the gig. Not Newbury's fault, not really my fault either. Just one of those bland nights that happens sometimes. Anyway, I'm trying to work out whether the reviewer for Newbury Today liked me or not - or maybe he too was completely indifferent:
Jane Hill, a self-confessed fortysomething spinster who mixed up knowing stereotypes about women of her age with some filthy gags.
Those of you who've watched my clips, please tell me what's filthy about my gags... I got the strong impression that the good folk of Newbury didn't like the pubic hair stuff. Maybe that's the problem. Where I normally get a huge laugh, I got a chorus of "eeewwww"s.
This is something I promised a few days ago, and thanks to those fabulous people at Vox who actually reply to "help" emails, I now know what I was doing wrong (all I needed to do was to convert the file from an MP3 to an MP4, and they even told me how to do that...). Anyway, this is me talking on the radio - a few snippets from the country music show I used to present on Lincs FM. You can tell it's quite old because I'm talking about whether or not Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban are actually dating!
We had fun with the word "badonkadonk", as used in the Trace Adkins song on this clip. After I asked my listeners what it meant, we did our research and discovered it was either (a) a bootilicious Beyonce-esque woman's backside OR (b) a small personal tank that you can purchase from Amazon for just under $20,000. I think that the song was about the former, although given that it was Trace Adkins he might just as well have been singing about a tank.
Talking of Trace Adkins, he played a key role in the first episode of My Name is Earl - he was being interviewed by Carson Daly on TV and asks Carson for the secret of his success: "Do good things and good things happen to you," was the reply.
Video: Show us a video of yourself.
Submitted by JamesTr.
I've already posted this elsewhere on this blog, but if you haven't seen it, here's your chance.
It's been a comedy whirlwind for the past week or so!
Last things first - here's my performance from last night's Funny Women showcase in Richmond-upon-Thames.
That picture on the still shot isn't me, by the way - that's the compere. Lest there be any confusion. Anyway, twenty people from across all the showcases get to the semi-finals, and I won't find out for another month. I was nervous last night. I don't get nervous often. But last year I got to the semis of this competition and played a blinder in my showcase, so I was nervous about living up to that standard. I think I did okay. It was raining out, so I didn't bother straightening my hair and went instead for the hippie frizz. Which looked okay-ish, I think, except it revealed my fivehead to the world.
It was my sixth gig in quick succession. I had two gigs in London at the start of May. At one, Hammersmirking, run by a top bloke called Bobby Carroll, I played to six punters and seven fellow comics, but very much enjoyed it. I left before the end, and apparently missed a big sweary fight and a mouse!
The following night, I did a showcase gig at the Queen's Head in central London, in order to try to get a gig at their regular stand-up nights on Fridays and Saturdays. Dizzy High, who's to be one of my Edinburgh co-stars, was the host. Two audience members turned up - a pair of middle-aged women - and they got a cracking line-up for free. I also met up with an old friend of mine who came to see me. So, technically, my two London gigs netted a total of eight actual proper audience members. The glamour.
Dartford, on 4th May, was an entirely different matter. Around sixty people turned up for the first night of comedy at new venture called The Big Eye Yam. The organiser had been inundating us acts with emails and spreadsheets and so forth, and seemed very nervous about it all. It was a huge venue - a big, characterless, echoey room at the brand new football club stadium. The audience was the sort you might expect at a working men's club - all ages, dressed up for a good night out, happy to enjoy whatever entertainment was put in front of them.
The microphone didn't work. Well, it did in that it made us sound louder, but it threw all the sound to the ceiling and made it impossible to hear. The first few acts, including the aforementioned Bobby Carroll, really struggled because the audience simply couldn't hear them. We were all well pissed off. I was on quite high up the bill - second from last - and in the end I did my act without a microphone. I'm normally fairly quiet and laidback, but I had to make my performance really BIG and lively. It went down really well, thankfully, and it was a useful learning experience.
Back at the start of the year, when I had no gigs lined up, I decided to take any stage time I could get, and lined myself up some random gigs for after term finished at college. Which is how I found myself in Manchester, on perhaps the most brutal stage in Britain - the Manchester Comedy Store gong show, 'King Gong. "Whyyyyyy?" I thought, as I climbed on to the stage. I managed nearly three minutes before getting gonged off. It wasn't a useful learning experience in any way, and the only good thing about it was realising that I wasn't in the slightest bit nervous because I simply didn't give a shit. That, and meeting up with my friend Ellen and having a really nice night out.
Then on to Grimsby and a club called The Other Side. I used to live up that way. I stayed a couple of nights with my lovely friends Jan and Mark Keable, who I hadn't seen since last year. This was a new act competition with a difference: two acts each get to do ten minutes, and there's an audience vote. The audience seemed to like me, and I got through to the semi-final. Somewhat distractingly, the compere, a nice bloke called Jon Reed, got the giggles during my bit about toilet paper sticking to one's lady garden, and I nearly corpsed as a result. I had to stand there and ride the laughter, and it made me seem a lot funnier than I actually was.
