Jem Rolls

kind of appealing so that people um will want them really and um so yeah so i do make a living doing the hour show so it's a 60 minute show and i have to write a new one every year and i mean i think i have some quite some you know some big numbers knocking around the history i've done you know 2600 shows and i've promoted well over a thousand and i've had

35 five-star reviews and they've got 150 at least by miles four star reviews but the big number the big number is the number 10 i've written 10 poetry shows but i think at some point in the future i don't think that how on earth do they write that 10 years straight another poetry show and i like them all yeah i mean some of them are more keen on others you know my 2006 show i didn't know it was in my 2006 show you know all my records have gone

I can't account for 20 minutes of the hour.

I really like that show.

And to the audience, you know, because it's all about the audience.

But yes, I mean, there's a great nakedness about the medium and there's a great immediacy.

And I think all the other stuff is, in a sense, is not that necessary.

Nothing compares to the situation of performing a show to the audience.

Everything else is just second string information, to be honest.

And, you know, that doesn't always work.

It's a tough one.

Nothing's guaranteed, you know.

Just because they like you one day doesn't mean they're not going to hate you the next.

Just because they hate you in one sitting

doesn't mean they're going to love you in the next, you know, and so on.

So it's, you know, it fries your nerves and it's an up-down crash band wallet, but when it works, it's, you know, and I have to sweat blood on the shows for months, maybe years, so, you know, there is a sense of when it finally pays off, you know, there's a kind of culmination, a consummation in all this, you know, and that's what I...

Yeah, that is the best thing, and I don't really know that many other people have quite the same relationship with audience or with media, because it's just about the audience.

So this piece is about my ever-growing, more popular global pastime known to some as spectator queuing but to the rest of us as tourism.

So this is called The Day Died Very Old.

I was only five hours into the day and I was already into my fifth palace, abbey, museum or gallery.