23/09/07
The odder gigs -
Categories: Over the years you accumulate a portfolio of the more peculiar gigs, and last night was a certain addition.
First off it was a wedding gig, something I've never done before with good reason.
It goes like this: A couple were getting married, and the bride booked me to perform as a surprise for the groom. The back story is that they'd seen me on telly and he remembered that we'd been at primary school together between 1985-87 and apparently was going on about it in the pub, so she thought it would be exciting to have me perform at the wedding.
I turned up to a mid-sized country house in Sussex, and had to hide in the car park to wait for my contact. With hindsight maybe that's slightly undignified behaviour, but at the time it seemed terribly exciting and covert. I felt like Jack Bauer waiting for schematics to download to his PDA.
After some time my contact came to meet me, then went into the wedding (which was by now in full swing) and announced that there was a bit of a surprise.
My cue.
It's never nice to have to introduce yourself when you're doing a comedy night. It's even less welcome when you have to explain who you are, what you're doing there and somehow allude to the fact that you aren't just a dickhead, but actually a comic.
Textbook adverse circumstances.
Given that, there was a great deal of goodwill in the room especially as in one stupendous foot-in-mouth move I managed to say that I didn't really know the groom at all and wondered what I was doing there. The swearing didn't go down too well, and there were some incredibly ham-fisted attempts to shoe-horn my material into being relevant to the wedding.
In the end it wasn't that bad at all, and sometimes it's healthy to operate outside what you know you can do.
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