Sort Your Life Out

Tonight was all-star night at the TakeOut Comedy club, and I got to do ten minutes in the middle of the show. It was a good sized crowd, although not always too forthcoming; in a way that's good, as it makes you work harder to earn your laughs.

I've improved my joke about going to the gym: the last segment just didn't make sense, and now it's fixed. It's strange that I find it rewarding to revise my comic material, yet really struggle to go back over my Great Hong Kong Horror Novel and tighten it up for publishing.

Maybe I need some sort of motivational coach. Or just a tape recording of an angry man shouting "Sort Your Life Out!" that I could listen to when I start slacking off. Well, perhaps an angry woman. A lady, with a posh Edinburgh accent. Threatening, but not scary. Just enough to get me worried.

I considered asking my fiancee to record the motivational message for me. Hey, now it's the 21st century I don't have to use tape, I could create an mp3 of her yelling "Sort Your Life Out!", sell it on iTunes. Later, we could be a duo of motivational gurus, like The White Stripes if they'd spent their days reading Seven Habits of Highly Effective People instead of playing music. Although then we'd have to divorce and pretend we were brother and sister: that's not a good suggestion at all.

Besides, I fear she's not the right person to yell the message. The trouble is, you see, she has a Canadian accent. Nobody ever felt threatened by a Canadian accent. It sounds too pleasant. Start telling people to sort their lives out in a Canadian accent and they'll start thinking about maple syrup, large mammals with horns and robust gentlemen in red tunics enforcing the law.

That's not a bad thing. It's good to have an accent that makes people relaxed, rather than my simultaneously smug-and-snide English sneer. If you're reading this and you're Canadian, please don't take offence that you'll never be taken seriously if you start shouting "come and have a go if you think you're hard enough."

Just the same as nobody will ever like me if I say "what's that aboot then, eh?"

I'm just thinking I need a volunteer with an accent that's a bit more ferocious than Canadian, but not as squalid as my Estuary English. What is there in between? Greenland? What does a Greenlander accent sound like? A viking, maybe, but colder, and potentially angrier after having been stuck in the mid-Atlantic for three hundred years.

Maybe that would be a bit too angry. Sierra Leone? The Falklands? Recruiting voice artists is harder than it looks, people.