Lo! friends,
May is nearly dead in the water, which means there’s only a handful of previews left before I take my new show to the Fringe. You can buy tickets for that here! For keen beans and eager eyes, I’ve got the following work-in-progress shows coming up:
3rd June - Chops Comedy, Bristol - TICKETS
8th June - The Robin Hood, Bristol - TICKETS
8th July - The Bill Murray, Angel - TICKETS
And then I’m running a series of previews at my favourite pub, The Betsey Trotwood, in the last week of July with some acts whose work I love to bits. It’s the week before the Fringe kicks off, so these will be fresh, fresh shows. A cracking time to see them! I’ll be doing my show each night, alongside a preview from the following killers:
22nd July - me + Ania Magliano - TICKETS
23rd July - me + Jordan Brookes - TICKETS
24th July - me + Sharon Wanjohi - TICKETS
And don’t forget you can get tickets for my autumn tour in all of the following places…
I am spending far too much time on Instagram at the moment, and (surprise surprise), it is warping my sense of reality. I know this is not a mind-blowing confession - at one point or another we’ve all thought the same, or noticed it in someone else, or read a lacerating thinkpiece (by Jia Tolentino probably) about the harried, fermenting soup social media is briskly whisking our brains into. But I’ve become self-aware - I keep having the realisation that it’s slow-cooking my attention span, and so do my friends who complain to me about their dirty phone habits, and so does the government, and every newspaper, and official surveys - and yet we all keep going back and back, out of financial necessity or addiction or whatever. It feels like waking up from a horrible dream, over and over again.
With that in mind, for my own dignity, it’s important to me that you know I don’t go onto social media to relax. Pathetic as it is to say, I have to go there for work. In itself that feels like an insane and childish confession. The phrase ‘I’m on TikTok for work’ feels like it shares a fair bit of DNA with ‘I go to Nandos to vote’. But clock in I do, and, unfortunately, every time I go on there to see how my reels are performing (for reference, normally under-) I also give myself a extracurricular treat and take a glimpse into the endless pit of digital tapas being served in the reel mine. A trip to Insta is like a visit to the fridge for milk - impossible to do without also grabbing myself a glucose-heavy snack or two from Zuckerberg’s illicit top shelf.
But the effects of this snacking? Of having infinity in your pocket? To begin with there are the small moments where gross digital habits superimpose themselves on the fabric of reality. It’s 9pm and you’ve tried to use ApplePay to unlock your front door. You’re in bed and you’ve swiped up on the pages of a Lee Child novel. Instead of leaning in to a sign you can’t read on the Tube, you’ve pinched the air between your thumb and forefinger and tried, maybe even twice, to zoom in. A trick has been played on us, and it’s convinced us the molecules that make up our world might as well be sugary blue photons, the oxygen around us a haptic perspex film that responds to our greasy, kebab-a-like thumbs.
And that’s just the start. Perhaps what I’m more interested in (or scared by, it could be scared by) is what I’m subconsciously learning about life from living every alternate five minutes in the feverish digital meadows of my phone.
Your algorithm is different to mine. But in a sense it is the same: a steroidal pick’n’mix of aspirations and distractions - a little bit of something you want, a little bit of something you are, a little bit of something you’re embarrassed to desire. Mine (currently) is a patchwork quilt of muted, tasteful interior design, blockbuster trailers and (of course) a scattered selection of impossibly spherical butts. Everything that does not fall into those categories is invariably presented or performed by someone cartoonishly beautifully. And I mean cartoonishly - beautiful in the way beauty is presented in a cartoon. Absurd. Geometric. Juvenile. Body parts that swoop and bulge. Men who look constructed from brick. Women who look like they blossomed to life from an AI-generated vase. In the land of reels, there is no in-between.
I worry about how exclusive, infinite access to that level of visual stimuli effects my daily life. I already find myself falling for beauty in dangerous ways in my diet of culture and entertainment. Even TV shows and films that are about the pitfalls of aesthetics and superficial value cast increasingly gorgeous actors. The characters these actors play are often good implicitly because they have a certain kind of farfetched, almost inflamed beauty. Or alternatively they are evil in spite of it - either way, what makes them worthwhile engaging with as characters is how they look. And I fall for this all the time. I find I have a greater well of empathy for characters who I find attractive - I gun for their plans to work out, or for them to behave morally, for them not to die. And if my hopes for them are not met, I am often legitimately sad! I sort of want the whole narrative to be chucked in the bin! How terrifying is that! My moral compass used to have a North and a South. Now, when I look closely, the markings just say HUBBA HUBBA! and AWOOGA!
You might say there is no way to avoid this in a visual medium. Characters look a certain way because they have to look some way - so why not incorporate the way they look into our experience of the character? I suppose, yes. Although I guess I wish more often we leant on other more sensual ways to gauge them - their voice, their language and body language, the floating, ethereal other things that make up a person. Not just the perfect sweaty trapezoid they make when they unnecessarily bend over to fix a classic car that is not related to the plot.
Maybe I should just relax. Philosophers have been freaking out about beauty, what it is and what it means, since people had eyes. Plato never shut up about it, though at least he also talked about other stuff too - education, politics, love, olives (probably). But it’s impossible not to feel anxious about my declining faculties when life is lived somewhere between the oily 2D screen in my hand, and the twitching scrim of the real world, where it’s starting to feel like emotions are born from symmetrical shapes, and there aren’t any good or bad values, just good or bad angles.
Feeling generous?
If you’ve got spare honk, why not consider giving to one of these amazing charities?
Medical Aid for Palestinians - if you haven’t already donated to this (or another Palestinian charity) now is the time!
Parkinson’s UK - Parkies provides care and support across the UK for people with Parkinson’s, and fund research into a cure. They do incredible work! Please consider donating!
If you have a charity close to your heart, however big or small, and want to include it here {or you wanna get in touch for whatever reason!} - just send us an email benpope86@gmail.com or Tweet at us @LoAnEmail