27/11/06
Krater Club Weekend at the Komedia, Brighton -
Categories:
I love the Krater club in Brighton.
Without meaning to indulge in cross-blog sycophancy I'd have to put a great deal of this down to Stephen Grant - the place is treated like a favourite child by him, and the fact that it rarely has a seat unfilled tells you quite how much effort has been put in over the years.
The problem I had with it this weekend is a rather unfair one in my eyes.
I compered Friday night, and then both the early and late Saturday shows.
Friday night was, I feel, perhaps the best time I have ever had on a stage as a compere. Sometimes it can get a while to settle the room, particularly as substitute compere (Stephen is the resident compere and it is not unusual for the audience to let out an audible sigh of disappointment when a different name to his is announced). Friday night however I hit the ground running and had them in the proverbial palm of my hand. Ditto the early show on Saturday - in fact, at one stage I was running around backstage looking for presents to give to a gentleman in the front row who, despite looking like old Steptoe, was really looking forward to Christmas. He even asked "how many more sleeps is it?" which was as beautiful a moment as any. I wrapped up the early Saturday gig to deafening cheers from the sold out audience and then went off to the pub for an hour with James Dowdeswell before the next show.
That's all it took. One hour.
You expect a late night Saturday show audience to be a bit more of a handfull. Then again, naieve as I sometimes am, I also always expect a comedy audience - particularly one normally as savvy as the Krater crowd - to at least offer a fair fight.
Not a fucking bit of it. I found it an impossible task. And I must stress yet again that this was a freak occurence. I have done the late Saturday show many times before and never experienced anything like that. They were just too drunk. Too many pockets of dissent in that crowd, not one of them with an ounce of humour or the basic understanding that if they all spoke at the same time it would just become 'noise'. They fucking hated me.
The plus side of this was that the acts weren't subjected to nearly as vicious a barracking as I was, the relief of many sections of the audience was palpable at me merely leaving the stage. Not to say it wasn't hard for the acts, but they certainly came out of it a lot better than I did.
So horrible was my first fifteen minutes on the stage, I actually resorted to going on in the second half in disguise. A fucking disguise! I tied my hair back, wore Dowdeswell's glasses (tell you what, his fucking eye isn't half wonky - never realised quite how much till I put his glasses on - it's not a lazy eye, it's in a fucking coma) and changed my t-shirt. Despite me adopting a posh accent, the audience saw right through my disguise and I was back to square one. I tried a bit of traditional compering, asking a pretty girl in the front row what she did. If I'm having a difficult time, chances are I will talk to a pretty girl in the front row...might as well get some pleasure out of it. She told me she was a translator and a waitress. I asked if that meant she worked at Cafe Rouge. Yep - I was pretty flustered and that was the very best I could come up with. It got the minimal laugh it deserved but at that stage I was taking any laugh as a moral victory.
By the third and final section of my compering I'd had more than enough of the shit. I walked onto the stage, waited an eternity for the murmuring and pre-emptive pockets of boos to die down, turned my back on them and started to sing.
We are the champions.
All the way through...
The lights changed beautifully (hats off to Dave on the desk) and the mood was set.
It was rather cathartic to be honest, and at the very least showed me that nowhere near all the audience were against me. When I hit the high notes there were groups of people standing up to applaud, I'd completely misjudged them. I thought they were all cunts, but noooooo, the few cunts in there had just surrounded the room and ruined it for the people that really wanted it to be fun in a nice way, without the bullying and abuse. All it took to bring it home was a short, fat lad singing his heart out in defiance.
After the show I had lots of people come up to me and confirm this, and thankyou those people. I was a bit upset and they made me feel better. It's a shame that the last person to talk to me before I left the club whispered in my ear that I "needed my head kicking in", as that may have took some of the pleasure out of it. It sort of gave the cunts the last word...
I had arranged to meet Stephen Grant for coffee on Sunday, before getting my train over here to Cardiff for filming (which I did today and am now in a posh hotel trying to work out how to get dirty films on the telly - they keep coming up all red with no sound and I like to follow the stories too...I don't really). I arrived at the Cafe Rouge early to meet Stephen and ordered a coffee. The waitress nudged me and said she had enjoyed the show last night. I looked up and saw the pretty girl from the front row smiling at me.
See, I may not always be funny - but when I'm not I'm at least usually accurate.
Comments:
· http://myspace.com/anthologypage 
Permalink
27/11/06 @ 22:57 This post has 130 feedbacks awaiting moderation...
RSS Feed