Hello and welcome to the new look martinwolfenden.com.
In fact I may follow Stephen Fry and call it martinwolfenden.com 2.0, but I won’t. You may have noticed that we’ve cut away allot of the dead wood. All that remains from the old site is this blog and the gallery; which after all, is all a chap needs on his website. I don’t do much stand-up anymore so it was pointless keeping a gig page or biography as I’m certainly not well known enough to illicit any real interest.
A few years ago there was a series on television call The Friday Night Armistice which later became The Saturday Night Armistice and was presented by the brilliant Armando Iannucci, David Schneider and Peter Baynham. I wish they’d done far more of those. Anyway they had a fame-o-meter which had somebody at the top and Corin Redgrave at the bottom. I wouldn’t even register in the sewers under the floor of the building which held the fame-o-meter. This is rather a good thing as nobody takes me for anything else than just another comedy punter. For instance last year in Edinburgh I went to see the fantastic Richard Herring in his show The Headmaster’s Son and afterwards I popped over to tell him how much I enjoyed it. He looked harassed and pointed to the DVDs he was selling and said “which one do you want?” This confused me so I pointed to one I didn’t have. “That’s ten pound thanks” he said again with his mouth, so I went into my pocket and withdrew some brass and gave it to him. He then signed it and said “what’s your name?” I nearly fell through the floor with embarrassment, I’m not Eddie Izzard but I thought I was slightly better know that that. I just said “It’s Martin Wolfenden.” “Oh of course it is,” he said while looking over my shoulder at the queue behind me. There you have it. Nobody knows who I am, so there is little point in having a biography. Let me say though that Mr Herring is still a very nice man and his show is fantastic. The reason he was so harassed was that he was heading off to see Josie Long and was running late. Go and see The Headmaster’s Son it’s a gem. He still doesn’t know who I am though.
It’s been rather a strange week since I last entered my blog. The special podcast went up to much acclaim and I suddenly found myself chatting to radio stations and newspapers. It’s not clear whether any of the newspapers will publish but I’ll keep my fingers crossed. The radio interviews were live so I know that they went out unless I was actually talking to a mad stalker with a tape recorder. In which case the interviews will only be heard by some Police and only after I’ve been shot in the lips with bullets.
Most of the people I spoke to wanted to know why we’d done it. So I told them. We’d done it to see if it was possible to produce a comedy audio adventure of radio quality for no money and in limited time. It’s still rough around the edges but alot of love went into it. We’re going to do another next year. I think though that the next one will have at least a second draft script, a story, perhaps even a plot and we may even rehearse rather than turning up to the recording, flying by the seat of our pants and only doing one take of each scene.
Anyhoo, the podast is being downloaded like a virtual hot cake. This both makes me leap for joy and then wince at the bill from the hosting company. By the way if you fancy helping you can use the donate button on the website. You can give as little as a pound and it will allow us to continue bringing a foul mouthed message of joy to the world. *nods seriously* A cause as worthy as Comic Relief I hope you’ll agree. If you don’t then you can still donate to Comic Relief at this link.
So things continue apace. The rest of the team and me are looking at some new projects to present to those fine executives in the world of radio and television. Sadly I can’t say anything about it, as these things take an age. But if they give us the green light then you will hear it first on this blog.