My third visit to the William IV pub's monthly comedy night, and for the third month in a row, I'm doing a totally different set to last time.

After last week's "experimenting" at Jester Jester's, I figured I'd start honing my phrasebook routine to try and cut it down to a lean 4 minutes (or even less!) to make way for a little improvisation. So after some feverish editing (most of it on the train), I trimmed down the routine to only the highest quality gags.

I still think the material is a bit weak initially, although it does include some nice audience interaction. Something I need to pep up with some madcap performance, methinks. However, once I'd got to the "meat" of the story, I started getting a much better response, and built up enough momentum to keep it high right to the end.

I'm finally starting to feel comfortable with this set, and think it could really go somewhere. Just got to keep working at it. Probably my biggest cock up of the night was not timing or recording myself, so I'm not sure how effective my trimming has been. Will have to do plenty of rehearsal over the next week or so, with a real eye towards timekeeping.