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Gordon Southern "Comedy's kind of seasonal and migratory," states honorary Aussie yet still very much Pommie comedian Gordon Southern. "Which kind of suits me because every city puts on their festivals when the weather is good," he gloats, somewhat smugly, over a lifestyle that allows him the best of both hemispheres. "Adelaide has their Fringe Festival in autumn when things are generally not too hot and usually very nice, and Edinburgh is also in their autumn which ostensibly is meant to be sunny but never is," he says of our Fringe-circuit sharing Scottish city. Originally from England, but now dividing home life between here and there with his wife, Adelaide clown and comedy producer, Frehd, Southern often takes full advantage of his frequent long journeys by Channel hopping over to Europe as well as performing in popular stopover points such as Singapore and Dubai. "What's interesting, is while I'm here this time I'm actually working more nights than I would probably work in Britain. In Britain I would do maybe four nights a week, whereas here I generally do five nights and for less money," Southern says of the demand for comedians in both lands, before admitting "Well, my record was five shows in one night, which was silly. But within London and the other big cities there's usually around three gigs happening on any night so you can open one and then go close at another, and some clubs have early and late shows too. "I suppose there's less opportunity here because there's not so many people," he further considers the proposition, "and they're dotted around the coast and hundreds of miles from each other. You can't do a show in Sydney and then quickly rush off to Melbourne, it's just not possible." This year's offering at the Adelaide Fringe Festival, 'The Unofficial Annual', was at the time of this interview, still very much a work in constant progress and it seems to be pretty much how Southern likes things to be. "It's quite a convoluted idea," he confesses, "in that somewhere there's an official annual about me out there - which there isn't, and my show is like a renegade spin off that isn't authenticated in any way so it's more like an underground fanzine about me, by me." As an example, Southern leaves the room and returns with a popular English soccer magazine yearbook. "See, these books are for fans of something and you can get the annual every year which is full of fun facts and little stories," he informs me as we peruse it... "I've noticed that whenever you flick through them your eyes are immediately drawn to the headers, the side-bars and the footers, you know? There's lots of little tidbits of information so my show's like an annual. "It's like, a book that you can read again and again without every actually reading it and it will be a retrospective of all the things that have happened over the last year," he avers. "The show will be broken up with some longer stories and loads of fun side-bars and footnotes as well as jokes and jingles," he continues, before laughing "and if it really takes off the other high concept idea of my show is that people would want to collect and keep them, 'Oh, I'll get the 2010 edition because the 2009 one was great'." Steve Jones |