21/02/07
Leeds/Northampton -
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Which brings us onto the Leeds heat of the Chortle Student thing award on Monday.
On my way up I had a wander around Meadowhall which is a big shopping centre thing just off of the M1 in Sheffield. When I was at University I used to go there quite a lot to buy Star Wars toys with my then girlfriend, and it took quite a while for the place to lose that association for me once I had left Uni and she had dumped me (yes, can you believe it? She actually dumped me...). It is one of many major flaws in my character that I allow places to be haunted by the past, often to the point where I simply can't go there anymore.
Anyhow, I hadn't eaten a thing for about 24 hours by the time I reached Sheffield at 6pm, and as I wandered around I began to become aware of that fainting feeling. You'd really think that someone with as much reserve as myself would be able to last without food for perhaps a year or so without resorting to fainting, but there you go. I found myself beating a track to the food court bit (I say 'bit' - it's massive) and once again had to ask a stranger for help. It wasn't nearly as dramatic as the other times I've come close to the fainting thing recently, but the girl at the organic juice counter looked after me tremendously and even gave me a discount for being so fucking pathetic.
And, not wishing to come over all Robin Askwith, but if you're ever passing through, it's worth going to the Meadowhall to see the girl working at the Pasty King counter - she was wearing what appeared to be a bikini covered by an apron. She didn't give me a discount but I don't care. Some day I will marry that girl.
Unfortunately, I recovered sufficiently to make it to the Leeds University gig.
Hard to know what to say about it really, I don't want to have a go at the acts because they were all relatively new and some of them were actually very good, but suffice to say that the Newcastle gig was a potentially false dawn in terms of standard. One of the acts was a man dancing with a puppet duck for five minutes.
Actually, to be fair, that was one of the funniest things I have ever fucking seen in my entire life. Two minutes into it and Dan Nightingale leant over to me and said "he's actually going to do the whole song isn't he?", and he did. It was incredible but hard to see where he would go from there in a full set...I suppose he could get a longer remix of it...
What you need in these situations is a good up-for-it audience.
That didn't happen either.
It's a really awkward situation to find yourself as a performer blaming a bad audience for a night being rubbish, but there really was nothing to be done with that crowd. Dan Nightingale was compering and wasn't getting anywhere near what his standard of bantering and material deserved, a good percentage of the audience were pompous and arrogant and determined to sneer at proceedings, which is fine for myself and Dan because it's just another night for us, but for the entrants of the award I felt it a little shitty.
Yes, they weren't all great, but they were having a fucking crack at it, they had all clearly prepared (albeit misguidedly for some), and they had all turned up to give it a shot. I thought the audience were rude and miserly and lacking almost enitrely in any form of joy or, more importantly, basic fucking respect.
I perhaps shouldn't have told them that when I went on to headline, but as a former student of Leeds Uni, I felt pretty much ashamed of my slight association. I'd been looking forward to doing that gig too...
The Chortle Awards continued up to Edinburgh last night, leaving me behind to do a gig in Northampton instead.
Now, conversely, I was really not looking forward to going back to the Northampton Picturedrome. I've done it about six or seven times, and the audience there have always been...well, pretty much like the audience were at Leeds uni to be honest. I've been having such enjoyable gigs so far this year, I really wasn't relishing the prospect of having two duff ones back-to-back, and completely confounding my expectations the Picturedrome was actually all right last night.
Well, I say "all right", there may be a degree of me saying that by comparison to what it is usually like, but I at least didn't leave the building in a major sulky strop this time and text people to tell them that I'd had enough of all these cunts and was going to quit doing stand-up which is what happened when I did it last year.
Not saying I enjoyed it, because that would be pushing it, but I was wide of the mark in how I had decided it would be before it had even started.
I should stop trying to second guess gigs.
Comments:
· http://www.yew-tree.com See you soon...
Is it disturbing that I knew exactly what you meant by all of that....
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21/02/07 @ 23:01 · http://www.myspace.com/foxbronte yeah, the audience were scary.
Anyway, your set really cheered me up, I was feeeling really really
miserable after dying in the way that I did. So thanks alot!
Take care of yourself,
Ian (Fox Bronte)
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