How far outside Manchester do you travel for a five-minute spot?

I’m trying to work out when travelling for stage time stops being useful and starts eating the whole week. For a five, do you mostly keep to Manchester unless the night offers something genuinely different, or regularly travel to nearby towns just to get another room? I don’t mind the train home after a good set. I’m less philosophical about two connections after four minutes that taught me absolutely nothing.

Do you keep a separate five for open mics, or keep feeding new material into it?

I’ve got a five that’s reliable enough now that I could probably keep taking it out unchanged, which is comforting but not especially useful forever. Do you keep one dependable short set for nights where you mainly want stage time, then test new stuff elsewhere? Or do you keep replacing a minute at a time so the five never becomes completely fixed? I’m trying to find the point between actually developing material and turning every open mic into five minutes of experiments.

How far do you travel for a five-minute spot before it stops being useful?

I’m trying to be less automatic about saying yes to every spot I can physically reach. A five can be useful because it’s a new room, new audience and another chance to test material, but a long return journey can turn five minutes onstage into most of an evening. How do you decide when travelling for a short spot is worth it — quality of the room, whether you’re testing something specific, chance of getting booked there again, or just how badly you need stage time that week?

Do you keep doing the same Manchester rooms once you know them well?

I’m starting to get the opposite problem from being brand new: there are a few rooms where I know the journey, the setup and roughly how the night works, so they’re easy to keep booking. That’s useful, but I’m wondering when familiarity stops helping and starts making the gig diary too comfortable. Do you deliberately keep some regular rooms while rotating new ones in, or just go wherever you can get useful stage time?

Manchester comics: do you build a local circuit first or start travelling early?

I’m trying to work out whether there’s more value in becoming a familiar face around Manchester first, or deliberately taking gigs in other cities while I’m still fairly new. Travel obviously turns a five-minute spot into a much bigger commitment, but I can also see the danger of only learning how to play the same handful of rooms. If you were building your first proper year of gigs again, how local would you keep it?

When do you actually retire a joke instead of endlessly fixing it?

I’m getting better at rewriting bits that nearly work, but I’m also starting to suspect I’m keeping some of them alive because I’ve already spent so much time on them. If something has had a few proper tries and still only gets the occasional laugh, when do you bin it? Do you have a number of gigs in mind, or is it more about whether you can still see what the fix might be?