I went back to my old work today (Tough Love on Triple M) to talk on radio about the two comedy shows I'm directing. For those of you who don't know Tough Love, click here.

It was so fun to be back there, actually. Someone should write a book about radio. It is just such a funny universe. You know how sometimes you listen to the radio and you wonder what sort of people actually take time out of their days to call a radio station?

Well, turns out, all kinds of people do exactly that. Part of my job used to be putting people on air for talkback. I used to get calls from (literally) brain surgeons (that happened twice), truck drivers (that happened more than twice) and one time I got a call from a guy who kept suddenly talking about stocks and shares so his boss wouldn't get suspicious that he was calling a national radio show. When we put him to air, he quite unashamedly put us on hold. A nation waited, listening to a couple of bars of Fur Elise, desperate to hear the end of his story.

So it was good to be back, and wasn't it quite the contrast to Radio National, where (as Mick correctly surmised) there aren't quite so many bomber jackets as one tends to find at Triple M.

Check out the show I was working on at the ABC (The Deep End) here. The eight hour day story mentioned below is available here.

It was interesting working there, although I have to admit that the ABC building at Southbank in Melbourne is very confusing for someone like myself. All the floors are identical. The studios, the bathrooms, the visitors' waiting rooms... Identical.

Which is why I accidentally walked in on a full orchestra rehearsing a quite reverent movement of something by Bach for ABC Classic FM. See? Not the sort of thing you walk in on at Triple M. More likely to walk in on a sales meeting where an executive is up on a table roleplaying his favourite animal (true story).

So, radio is unpredictable (see for example Judith Lucy's show in the Melbourne Comedy Festival) but then so is any job really. One time I worked at the Arts Faculty at Melbourne University and part of my job was processing applications for Special Consideration. One person wrote on his form that he needed an extension because he was "tired on account of being part of a medical experiment".

All in a day's work.

A week is a long time in politics, and we all know the personal is political, so a week is a long time in any context really.

In what might be described as irony, one of the stories I've been producing for Radio national this week is about the estblishment of the eight hour day. A hundred and fifty years ago today, after the industrial revolution in Britain (and the Gold Rush in Bendigo), a bunch of construction workers who were building the law quadrangle at Melbourne University downed their tools and marched through the city, picking up fellow workers from other sites and making their point in the centre of the city. The rest of the western world eventually followed by example. Followed. Melbourne. That was how the eight hour day - and Mars commercials - were established: 8 hours of work, 8 hours of rest and 8 hours of play.

Which of course is why workers' rights are so enormously respected today.

Now, this all feels very close to home for me because:

1. I studied in the Law Quadrangle. In fact, it was the stones in the law quadrangle, laid by the very stonemasons who started all this ratbaggery, that I rested my bike on when I rushed to the Law Faculty to hand in my essays at three minutes to five on the due date.

2. The eight hour day is being celebrated by the deliciously historical people in at the Trades Hall in Melbourne, which is where Yianni's comedy festival gig is (where they call you comrade and give you a free beer when you've just performed a show).

3. Our office in at Radio National is opposite Damien's office. Damien runs the Law Report. I work for the Victoria Law Foundation, which is running Law Week. Also, I'm doing a story on the comedy festival which I've been working at every night, I'm doing a story on the history of protest (in which I feature) and I'm doing a story about writing theatre shows and not being able to get them on in any theatres unless you do the whole thing yourself (which, I dunno, DESCRIBES MY LIFE). So. Maybe if I stayed at Radio National, next week I'd be doing a story on people who come from Eltham and cut their finger almost completely off in grade four and who used to be vegetarian and aren't anymore.

The eight hour day. I wish!

I think maybe my life works in the exact opposite way to everyone else's. The busier I am, the further into my work, the bigger my social life becomes.

I'm working at Radio National this week with some fabulous people (including my very addictive friend Michael Williams, which I'm sure will get one of us fired), and then every night I go to one of my shows to discover a long list of people I haven't seen in years.

It's brilliant. Do come and see the shows because I'm sure I've been dying to see you.

Penny's show has been reviewed here and in the new comedy zine, The Pun, and both her houses and Yianni's are starting to fill up, so make sure you book.

And check out the new Aussie film with my friend Simon in it. Kokoda, which I haven't seen yet and which is reviewed rather bizarrely in The Age today, is definitely my first outing after the festival finishes. I'm going to try not to giggle every time he comes on screen purely by virtue of the fact that I know he doesn't usually wear army gear. Peehee. The fourth wall comes a tumbling down.

My Essay, By Lorin Clarke

Why the Melbourne International Comedy Festival is like University

The Melbourne Comedy Festival is just like doing an undergraduate degree for six years at university while working part time in the Arts Faculty (an experience I presume we all share). First of all, the comedy festival feels like something you should look forward to. You get a timetable with all these exciting weird postmodern subjects on it and you rush over to enrol but the queue goes forever so you wait til the end of the week. Sometimes you see a subject in the timetable and you think, that sounds boring, but then it turns out the dude that teaches it is completely brilliant and everyone's trying to get into his class because he strays from the course material and tells fabulously interesting stories about being in the navy. It's all about word of mouth, so by the end of the week, you can't get in anywhere.

Of course, the big core subjects are hugely over-attended and usually pretty mediocre. Quite often it’s the same guy doing the same material he was doing when your older brother was in first year.

No matter, there are many subjects to pick, but it’s probably inevitable that you’ll spend a great deal of your time interpreting homophobic subtexts, deconstructing gendered performativity, and drinking too much beer.

In conclusion, the comedy festival is like university because it's a hard slog that starts out being fantastic fun and then by the end you're exhausted, poor, addicted to coffee, and you think maybe you should have gone to film school instead.

Both of the shows I'm directing in the Comedy Festival, Yianni's Head and Penny Tangey in Kathy Smith Goes to Maths Camp, have opened with their pre-Easter preview shows.

The Peter Cook bar was abuzz with highly strung comedians on the first night of the festival. Each of them had a story about something that went wrong. Projectors changed their minds half way through shows, CD players didn't work, audiences wandered into venues far too early to discover the punchline standing on stage, half dressed in a chicken costume and swearing at the front of house staff.

Yianni and Penny were not without drama. Yianni's show suddenly had to have a new ending, due to the fact that the slides he was supposed to respond to did not appear on the slide screen. Thankfully, this proved to be much more amusing than the original ending. We've now changed the show accordingly.

Penny's show went well, apart from the fact that about eighty percent of her audience accidentally lined up in Will Anderson's queue and didn't show up to Penny's until about a third of the way through. Distracting for Penny? Yes. Disconcerting for the audience? Hell yeah. Mind you, it's funny to think that some of Penny's crowd might have actually made it through to be seated in Will Anderson's audience and left an hour later, rather baffled as to where exactly the maths references were.

As I said to everyone I spoke to, hey, it could have been so much worse.

Here are some edited highlights from my experience in live entertainment:

1. Primary school production, Sleeping Beauty
I was in grade five, playing a character with a cockney accent (which I retrospectively realise must have been because one of the teachers realised I had watched a lot of Dickens movies). Anyway, the fairies in the Sleeping Beauty were played by boys (a joke in itself of course, enjoyed no more by anyone else than by the boys themselves). They were each given stockings, a leotard, and a wand made out of cardboard.

Every woman knows that negotiating a leotard - particularly with the stockings underneath - is quite a complex little game when one is young and one really needs to go to the toilet. I don't want to drag this out unnecessarily. Suffice to say that one of the boy fairies performed a miserable little dance on opening night with poo all over his tights and dropping off him onto the stage.

2. Primary School Production, The Wizard of Oz
I played a munchkin, whose job it was to describe in an over-dramatic and long-winded way, the circumstances wherein the house had fallen on the wicked witch. (I now realise of course that partly this was a joke in itself. As the show wore on, the descriptions became more ridiculous and verbose. Everybody knows typecasting is funny).
My other job was to accidentally knock the hat off the Mayor, played by a boy called Lucas. Lucas was the tallest boy in the world. One night, he actually had to bob down so that I could knock his hat off, because my previous eight attempts had really dragged the whole show to a standstill.

3. Secondary school production, Three Sisters.
I was playing Irina in Three Sisters and Rory was playing the doctor. Rory somehow made me senseless with giggles. Three Sisters is a play by a Russian dramatist called Chekhov. It's not cool to become hysterical with snorty giggles in a Chekhov play. Well, the director didn't think so anyway.

4. The Really Useless Theatre Company, The Max Factor.
In the middle of The Max Factor, the lights went out. I was sitting next to Lawrence Leung, in the audience, and he still has little crescent moons on his arm from when I reached over and grabbed him in order to prevent myself from screaming and running from the theatre. After what seemed like several hours, the lights came up but they were tinged with a violent red. The play suddenly had all these evil undertones. As did I.

5. Standing There Productions, People Watching.
People shouldn't go out and party the night before a show. That is all I am prepared to say on this point.

6. Tough Love, Triple M. When you're in charge of reading out the best of the year's emails sent in by listeners to a national audience and you realise - on air - that what you've brought upstairs is not the listener emails but the article you printed out about a chip that's being sold on ebay because it looks like Mary Magdalene, you have to make sure you remember to breathe.

I've just realised this list could go on forever. Why anyone would work in a nine to five job is beyond me. Imagine the glamour of stuttering your way through some made up emails on radio, or slipping on your own poo in a fairy costume on stage. What a fabulous career choice.

Tomorrow is the opening night of the Melbourne Comedy Festival.

What does that mean? Well, it means that the comedians who have been working very hard for months preparing their shows for the festival all go out until five in the morning to the opening night party and contract various strains of the flu.

That, and it means cheap tickets until after Easter. Go here and check out the "local heroes".

Meanwhile, tell me if you think this is a good start to a week:

SUNDAY: Drive to Yianni's - Arrive late - Work for several hours - Leave late - Arrive home late to print out tech script for Penny's trial gig - Freak out while printer has existential crisis - Recruit Stewart to fix printer - Leave Stewart alone in house with printer - Drive a hundred and fifty metres to Glitch Bar - Dodge the issue rather unconvincingly when Penny says, "Lorin where's the tech script?" - Receive call from Stewart with a diagnosis re printer being "buggered" - Assume Emergency Position: call Rita - Recruit Stewart to film Penny's gig - Stewart arrives, hugely impressed by my contribution to his evening - Rita arrives, saves universe by providing tech script just before gig starts - Penny's gig completely hilarious - After Penny's gig, Yianni's gig - Recruit Stewart to film Yianni's gig - Stewart starving as has not eaten due to various distractions involving computers and filming - Stewart orders pizza - Lorin orders noodles, eats noodles and pizza, regrets not going to gym more - Mel calls with news that she has just completed a marathon - Lorin eats last piece of pizza - Yianni's gig finishes - Convince Stewart to drive to parents' house to transfer film from camera to DVD - Stewart asks during drive to parents' house whether Lorin has the requisite cable for transfer of film to DVD - Lorin assures Stewart she does - Lorin does not - Return camera to Tim - Return home Find toilet blocked and flooding - Recruit Stewart to help - Look at Stewart's face - Get completely weak with giggles - Fix toilet - Go to bed.

MONDAY: Get up one hour early and walk to work at Law Foundation (inspired by marathon and pizza) - Work all day on sending out stuff about Law Week and various other things - Receive phone calls from professional people on useless phone that does not work and hangs up on people constantly - Completely fail to finish mail-out on time - Manage to be last person out of building - Buy extremely annoying, broken card that sings only half a song, for Stewart's birthday - Walk to Stewart's Birthday drinks - Engage with actual people - Walk home - Go to bed.

Tuesday
Get up, write notes on gigs - Email notes to Penny - Call Yianni with notes - Get off phone to Yianni several hours later - Get dressed - Rush to Law Foundation - Finish mail-out - Rush home for brief moment on way to Trades Hall - Use moment to pour cup of tea because not eating properly and need something - Pour tea into huge urn thing with lid on it to take to rehearsal - Carry folder, laptop, huge urn, bag, extra clothes - Reach for door - Hurl urn of tea through air, watch it bounce - Tea all over walls, floor, furniture, self - Tea very hot - Shout expletives - Recruit Stewart's help - Stewart gets weak with giggles - Take offence at Stewart's mockery - Assume Emergency Position: call Rita - Arrive late to gig - Set up in theatre - Order baked potato with lentils in attempt to be healthy at meal break - Scoop lentils out of raw potato and choke on cheap cheese - Finish rehearsal - Go home without dropping by old friend's going away party - Feel crap about being bad friend - Go to sleep.

And today, well today has been going well. It's my lunch break now and I have to go to the bank, go to Half Tix, go to the shops, eat lunch, and post this.

Tonight is Yianni's preview. Come along for cheap tickets. You might get to see me spill something.

Here's some genuinely rather impressive news from our Sydney office (represented as it is by Standing There Captain of Industry Melanie Howlett).

Mel, production manager and now lawyer, decided some time ago that she'd like to run a marathon.

I decided, at about the same time, that I would never be late for anything again. I also decided that I was going to start a soccer team.

As you know, the Standing There Soccer team is in its third season, preparing for the finals next Saturday, and my GOD we've done well for a team that came out of nowhere.

Or, to put it another way, there is no soccer team.

I wish the central theme of this diary was not the massive chasm between my expectations and the reality of my every day existence, but at least Mel can lend us all some inspiration.

Mel finished her marathon yesterday. Not only did she arrive on time (it was at seven in the morning, which is apparently a time of day) but she beat her expected time by what's known in the running business as "a country mile".

She's a legend of the sport already, finishing with a time of 4:07:52 (which is not a time of day, and it denotes hours, not days or weeks). That's what's known in the biz as "pissing it in".

Anyway, in her absence, by way of revenge, we have held a meeting wherein it was decided that if she keeps this up, she's fired. A motion was passed that Standing There Productions be renamed Sitting There Productions and that any breach of this would be seriously debated in a restaurant, bar, or loungeroom. No running shoes allowed.

Congratulations Melanie Howlett you're a big ole champion, just quetly. But that's enough. Everybody just pipe down please.