10/11/06
Big And Daft (Part Four) -
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Dragging on a bit this now isn't it? I wish I'd never started it. I was quite happy just telling you what I was up to on a day to day basis rather than writing a fucking autobiography. Still, all you people texting and emailing to tell me to hurry up and get to the bit where Big And Daft implodes won't have too much longer to wait.
So, we were about to go up to the fringe for the third consecutive year doing the Christmas show.
Whenever people talk to me about B.A.D they more often than not say that the Christmas show was their favourite one. Earlier this year I watched it back on video on one of those nights where you are looking for a blank tape and end up getting distracted and watching the tapes instead. Have to say, it really wasn't great. The problem for me was the fact that the show was no longer just the three of us.
That's not, incidentally, a criticism of the other performers in ability - far from it - but we had established a near-perfect dynamic with just us three and then gone and added another two people. Add to that the fact that the B.A.D tendency to wander off script was a little infectious and you begin to see that the Chortle review of the Christmas Show (here) had a degree of merit to it (for once). It just all got a bit messy.
Again we had striven for greater things with the show though. There was a self-contained plot (something we had previously discarded once passing the point of premise) as well as an overall resolution to the 'trilogy through line', there was a proper set that revolved to make other environments, there was a short film at the beginning of the show, and there was specially recorded music. We were also in a much bigger venue (The Gilded Balloon Dining Room at Teviot). It was about as high concept as we were going to get.
Andre Vincent had replaced Johnny in the role of Father Christmas, as Vegas had scheduled his own show for 10.30pm (half an hour after ours ended) and there was a genuine concern from Karushi that he would die. Johnny always said he wanted to come on stage with us on the last night dressed in a home made Santa outfit. Adam Bloom was drafted in at very last minute to play a little orphan slave boy. We found out late on in the run that he was advertising it in his own show by saying he was in a 'proper play'.
The opening night of the run in Edinburgh went veeeery badly. None of the jokes were sticking, there didn't seem to be audience love for the characters, and you always knew when Big And Daft was going badly as a performer because you suddenly started to feel self-conscious about dancing. We were concerned that we had dropped a major bollock in abandoning the tried and tested format of just myself, Rob and Jon doing 'sketches'. On that evening during the post mortem of the show Adam Bloom announced that we had just done our bad one for the run, and it was good that it was out of the way. It turned out to be a prophetic statement, and reinforced my original assessment of Adam which was that, despite being a bit of a full on Rain Man, his wisdom was without question. I had heated run-ins with Adam during the run of the show, mainly because he sometimes took my aggressive onstage behaviour as genuine, but I remain a fan of the lad.
In fact, as a little aside, it was the characters we played in Big And Daft that eventually destroyed it. As I mentioned earlier, we ended up playing exaggerated versions of ourselves, but this meant that we ended up exaggerating our bad points. My nastiness was tenfold, as was Rob's daftness and Jon's 'maturity', and when you are experiencing this on a nightly basis you do start to believe in it. Towards the end I was getting infuriated with Rob's "showing off" onstage and believing he was pulling focus all the time. This may have been the case, but he was just doing what his character was meant to be doing. On one of the nights that Adam Bloom and I fell out I tried to explain this to him as we sat in the Teviot bar. Within a couple of months I was no longer heeding my own assessment of the situation though.
I'd insisted on a full writing credit for the Christmas Show. At the time it felt like a primadonna thing to do, and looking back it seemed like a primadonna thing to do, but there was a good reason for it. Truth is, I could have had a full writing credit on the space show as well - never claimed I wrote the lot, much was added in rehearsal and performance - but I wrote the bulk of it and wanted a bit of recognition for that. Rob had naturally emerged as a favourite character for audiences, and try as I might it was hard not to feel badly done by when reviews singled him out given that his character was being penned by me. Having the writing credit never made a blind bit of difference mind you.
As the run of the Christmas Show went on, we were having more and more meetings about our future. There was an offer of representation on the table from James Taylor at Avalon, to look after us as a unit and as individuals too. Rob also had an offer from PBJ for management, but this did not involve Big And Daft. For myself and Jon this was naturally a no-brainer, we would be better off keeping together to avoid any future inter-management wrangling. As soon as I saw that Rob was weighing up his options, I decided to do the same and asked James whether he would still take me on as a client with Avalon without Big And Daft. Self doubting as I am, his response surprised me, and I am truly grateful to this day for his vote of confidence.
Once my back was covered, I felt a degree of relief yet a sense of impending doom for our little threesome. I still wanted Rob to come with us, especially given that this was the only situation that would meen Jon was covered too, but had resigned myself to the fact that he probably wouldn't.
We left Edinburgh 2001 with our run of good reviews still intact, and our fanbase increased again, but the writing was on the wall. We had started to do interviews for the forthcoming tour, and our revelation that it would be a "best of" tour meant that the articles being written from them were also speculating sadly that this was to be the swansong.
It was only a matter of time.
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