A Milkless Evening
Wednesday 1st April 2026
There’s just eight days to go before ‘The SMALL Stuff’ debuts next week in Clapham and I am understandably preoccupied with the prep. It’s full on and unusually for me, as things stand, I’m not doing any gigs before that. That may be the right thing. It may not. I have now reached the stage of full rehearsals.I did four yesterday, that’s four x 1hr rehearsals. It should have been five, but I got caught up in some annoying stuff with the council in the morning that I had to sort out. Today, I am aiming for the five. Exercising and runs are taking a backseat to this, though maybe I can get out for a run later.
There’s about 15-20 minutes of new stuff within that hour that I need to nail. Some of it right now is working, too much of it isn’t because despite running through each line hundreds of times, it’s just not being seared into my muscle memory. This is a lot for me. I am struggling with my focus in general and the last couple of weeks, with my friend passing and a close relative now in hospital, that default-these-days-fragile-focus is even more stretched. But I will need to plough through it.
I had resisted the first kebab of the year all weekend. As I was rehearsing well into the evening yesterday, I hadn’t made anything to eat so I thought, ‘I’ll venture out for the kebab’, which is only across the road, but before that, I’ll walk to the nearest TesSainsCo Convenience store, those annoying small iterations of those once great supermarkets that now dominate every high street and grab some milk. I got to the shop, only I couldn’t find my wallet. I could believe it. This is typical of me since Long Covid frazzled my brain. I headed back home. I had the kebab money on me but not the milk money.
Once home, I couldn’t find the wallet. I checked my jackets. The wallet definitely wasn’t in the usual pocket. These days I wear a gilet over the jacket which is an extraordinary development because I have never liked them, but let me tell you, with Long Covid wrecking my ability to regulate my body temperature, the gilet was invaluable to me over the winter so it’ll be with me for life now. And there was the wallet. In one of the gilet pockets. Risky given the zip up pockets for the gilet have been near unusable since week 1. I have tried to replace it but not many stores have them in stock now. I will have to wait until late summer, early autumn before I can replace it.
Oh, I didn’t get the milk in the end. I have a local shop across the road from me. For a few years now, I’ve not been keen on the Freshways milk so haven’t bought any for 5 or 6 years now. But last night, after having to come back home for the wallet that was actually on me, I thought as it was an emergency, I’d just try the local shop. It was converted to a Londis before Christmas. Those guys are notorious for their high prices. £1.50 for 2 pints of milk when I get 4 pints for £1.60/65, no chance. I walked away from the milk. It was the right decision.
It was a milkless evening.
The first show will be the seat of the pants one. The second one should be better. Longterm I do need to try and get my marketing and social media skills up to scratch. I’ve been doing social media for nearly 20 years and I was brilliant at it, but today’s social media, all about reels and fancy videos targeted at the increasingly shorter attention spans of today’s generation mean this is a very different social media, far less fun. Now it’s about strategies, selling, getting people to part with money in an age when a generation is growing up expecting free entry for so many things and bucket donation at the end. I have a lot of work to do to adapt to this new age.
I am trying to get on a course that helps me learn something like Canva. I have made numerous attempts with this and Bazaart, but it’s just not my thing. We can’t all be good at everything, and I am certainly not good at design. I can visualise how something should look, but designing it, as things stand, is beyond me. It’s also something else that takes you away from your work. Until I nail this though, it’s likely any show I do will be a hard sell.
I am hoping to release Facebook or Instagram ads in the next day or two, though I know these are hit and miss. Late in the day for next week’s first show, but they might do something ahead of the second one on the 20th and I am going to have to accept that the bulk of the audience is going to be made up of the odd friend and peers, which is not ideal for a comic. That is a hard audience to perform to. I would much rather have complete strangers.
In terms of today, in-between each rehearsal, I think I will also just run through the new bits that are causing me trouble, though that will take a lot of time up. I also need to memorise the running order of the whole set. To be fair, I am really good at learning these on the day. I don’t have a regular set and in changing my set at every gig, I constantly run through the rejigged setlist order in my head on the day and I am finding I am really good at it. Which as I have said to a few people in the last few months may be effective at stalling dementia if that ever comes my way. Trying to memorise the running order for a complete hour though will be significantly harder.
I should have already started today’s rehearsals. But here I am faffing around on here because I’m waiting for a callback from BT/EE/Open Reach, whoever they are these days, as their failure to install fibre optic in the property now reaches its eighteenth month. These once great bastions of the UK, BT, the Royal Mail and others are absolutely useless these days. I think most of us will have experienced how difficult it is to get anything done with these guys now.
I know from what I have learnt in the various clinics I have been in that this issue with focus, watching your days slip away, is the LC. I have never been like this. I found some notes the other day from my days of doing my old historical football podcast ‘When Shorts Were Short’, a brilliant show if I may say so, but like ‘The SMALL Stuff’ is set to be, a commercial disaster. I managed every single thing of that football show on my own and it was a colossal project but I was so in the zone. I was a superb administrator. And I was still doing this going into the third year of the pandemic when I fell to Covid a second time. I was still in that zone, that headspace. I could manage massive projects. That’s what this work in progress needs but I just don’t have it anymore, so I’m really having to do what I can.
The focus now is on just doing a good show. Worry about promoting Brighton once the London shows are done and just accept this is where I am now. I’m more than fine on stage though next week will test that given how far behind the show has fallen and I can’t really work from notes as I’d need to be putting my glasses on and off, and I find that level of multi-tasking hard. It creates a barrier between you and the audience, the lights are bouncing off your lenses and so on. I just want the show to be good now. Going forward, hopefully I can work on the marketing side of things and improve that.
The SMALL Stuff that isn't so SMALL
There’s just 11 days until my debut hour show.
Here's an interview I've done with the venue The Bread & Roses Theatre on the inspiration behind my debut hour show next month and my route from fronting late night radio to being on stage.
I could've used 'journey' but that's so w**ky.
TICKETS FOR LONDON AND BRIGHTON ON SALE
A reminder that tickets for my London and Brighton solo shows in April and May are on sale.
The SMALL Stuff
Daniel Tizon offers a forensic dissection of daily life’s minor agonies, from dealing with a chatty new neighbour to accepting, aged eight, dancing wasn’t for him, concluding that the extroverted demands of flair, gestures and exaggerated facial expressions were a technical impossibility for his understated persona.
He explores, with equal scrutiny, the fraught etiquette of the adult education college urinal, specifically the moment a classmate you’ve never spoken to in class attempts to initiate the breakthrough conversation while positioned next to you at the trough. Of all the places to finally bond, the gents’ feels like a questionable choice.
It's all a social minefield.
LONDON
The Bread & Roses Theatre
68 Clapham Manor Street, Clapham SW4 6DZ
Monday 8 April 2026
Starts 9pm (1hr)
Wednesday 20 April 2026
Starts 7pm (1hr)
Brighton Fringe 2026
My tickets for this year’s Brighton Fringe are now on sale and can be found here
26 May - 7pm Caroline of Brunswick
28 May 9.30pm, The Walrus (Hideaway)
A decade on from his late-night Resonance FM shows, Daniel Tizon has dropped the frequently mangled by the monolingual ‘Ruiz’ from his name and returns with 'The SMALL Stuff', his debut one hour work in progress stand up comedy show.
Daniel Tizon offers a forensic dissection of daily life’s minor agonies, from dealing with a chatty new neighbour to accepting, aged eight, dancing wasn’t for him, concluding that the extroverted demands of flair, gestures and exaggerated facial expressions were a technical impossibility for his understated persona.
He explores, with equal scrutiny, the fraught etiquette of the adult education college urinal, specifically the moment a classmate you’ve never spoken to in class attempts to initiate the breakthrough conversation while positioned next to you at the trough. Of all the places to finally bond, the gents’ feels like a questionable choice.
It's all a social minefield.
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RehearseRehearseRehearseRehearse
Sunday 15th March 2026
With no gigs this weekend, I did what I probably shouldn’t have done from a mental health point of view and that was stay in since Friday. Time and again I make this too-easy-to-make mistake and by Sunday I am struggling. I don’t think it’s been as bad this weekend because I threw myself into rehearsing for the upcoming solo shows where my feet are now pretty much to the fire.
I lost too much time at the start working on the design for the image, which was my fault and that time should have gone into learning the new bits for the show. It is a work in progress and as I finesse it, obviously some bits will come and go, but still trying to do this three and a bit weeks before the first show is a big worry, more so when there’s still all the marketing to do for the London shows.
I haven’t even been able to tackle the admin for the Brighton fringe shows and I anticipate the result will be no different. Those shows are over two months away but I know this version of me will be going into May still up against it. I just do not enjoy project management at all these days and it’s only in the early part of this decade running my historical (and commercially doomed) football podcast When Shorts Were Short that I was able to oversee big projects in an efficient and very thorough manner. I liked having the bit between my teeth. I was a doer. Too much of one really. I was obsessive with my work. I don’t have that now.
I know why this is happening and why it’s been happening for the last three-four years now and I know there’s not much I can do about it. I just have to try and ensure I do what I can. The talent remains but that’s never enough with these things.
I’ve spent the weekend rehearsing, hours each day, though even then, probably not as much as I should be. Today I’ve done 3 hours, missed a lot of football, and still have another half an hour to go of trying to learn the trickiest bit of the first five new sections I am trying to nail down. I’m not an actor so I find learning lines very difficult though I have improved over the years but sometimes new bits just take forever to stick. Also, I never appreciated that when you write a lot as I do, you often forget the very old material you have and you have to learn it all over again. It’s a massive challenge for me.
I tried to look into acting courses last summer, not because I suddenly wanted to act, but because I wanted to see what I might be able to do to streamline the line learning process, but I saw only one course devoted entirely to ‘memorisation’. Speaking to some actor friends, they all told me the same thing: it’s the same for every actor. Some find it easier than others but there’s no way around it. You have to burn these lines into your muscle memory. It’s what I am now having to do and it’s keeping me up. And it’s incredibly boring. I set the stopwatch on my phone, plonk the phone in its stand, and spend 30 minutes repeating each section.
I’ve also recorded each segment and on Friday’s run, was listening to the chunk giving me the most trouble on what was a difficult run. I know enough by now to know that for some reason, listening to material doesn’t help me learn it. I seem to have a block with audio as a means of learning which is weird, perhaps, given that I am a big radio guy and obviously have that long radio and podcast background. I have the same problem with audiobooks. I just can’t get on with them, so learning my lines is only going to happen by going over each line on the printed page.
There’s a problem with my eyes too which makes learning material harder because I’m constantly taking the glasses on and off while rehearsing. I find this enormously frustrating and I do believe it slows me down. Wearing three different glasses these days after failing to adapt to varifocals and that is a pain. At one gig last week on what was a very narrow stage, the mic had been left tangled up for me and it took a little longer than it should’ve to untangle it because of my vision and this is something I plan to look into in the next few months. If I wasn’t having to learn lines, I’m not sure I’d bother. I’d accept the age-related vision deterioration but I do believe it affects my work.
I have tried to make an effort with the sleeping the last two or three nights. Eight hours is always beyond me. I had nine and half hours last night, probably sleeping for six of those, before waking up to another issue I had to address in this c*** of a flat and losing a couple of hours on this morning’s planned rehearsals which is why I later had to skip the early football games.
I did manage to watch the Liverpool v Tottenham game this afternoon. Coincidentally one of my WhatsApp groups was comprised entirely of Liverpool and Spurs fans and I probably spent too much time in that instead of focusing on the game.
I did call it right though. Liverpool have been pants this season. I was not surprised at all that Tottenham got a late equaliser.
I have a workshop gig tomorrow night and it would be great to have some of these new and revamped bits ready for tomorrow. I’m not sure that’ll be the case but I have to keep at it. Historically I always backed myself, putting myself in high pressure creative situations because that often brought out the best in me. I’m less sure these days. The show, I am confident, will be very good as I work and improve it but the process to get there is definitely problematic. And selling tickets is a monstrous issue for all emerging acts these days.
Four of these five chunks that I have been working on are pretty much there. That last bit in this initial tranche of new material I am trying to learn, isn’t.
It’s going to be a week of rehearsals, rehab, some running, and hopefully some improved sleep.
Back to one final 30-minute session of rehearsing now.
You can book your seats for ‘The SMALL Stuff’ here.
Dates 8th and 20th April.
The Bread & Roses Theatre
68 Clapham Manor Street, Clapham SW4 6DZ
Lastly, to all my friends and subscribers here who no longer have their mums and find Mother’s Day difficult or unnecessary, a positive thought to you guys. We never forget our mums. They are the most important people we’ll ever know. They give us life; they shape us and we need to appreciate them when we have them. I’m not sure I fully did though she was the most important person in my life when she was about, but advancing through life, I appreciate more and more everything she did for me and these people are always with us.
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The SMALL Stuff - Work in Progress Tickets now on sale
Daniel Tizon offers a forensic dissection of daily life’s minor agonies, from dealing with a chatty new neighbour to accepting, aged eight, dancing wasn’t for him, concluding that the extroverted demands of flair, gestures and exaggerated facial expressions were a technical impossibility for his understated persona.
He explores, with equal scrutiny, the fraught etiquette of the adult education college urinal, specifically the moment a classmate you’ve never spoken to in class attempts to initiate the breakthrough conversation while positioned next to you at the trough. Of all the places to finally bond, the gents’ feels like a questionable choice.
It's all a social minefield.
