09/03/07
Yorkshire Adventure -
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I have come to realise that nostalgia dominates a sizeable chunk of my thinking time, I am regularly casting my mind back to events in the past.
Don't get me wrong, I rarely sit and long for times gone by, but I think it's a reasonably healthy thing to look back and perhaps retrace your footsteps to where you are now on the journey. The other night I found a load of cds that I thought had been lost but were secretly hidden in the bottom of a display cabinet. They were basically cds that hadn't quite made the grade to be included when I bought a cd bag, and like all things that are dismissed from your life at some point, with the passage of time, they regain their appeal. Amongst them I found two cd singles by a band called "Younger Younger 28's". They were the house band for Late and Live at Wilkie House in 1999, the year of my first fringe show, and despite not neccesarily being my kind of thing, hearing their stuff again inspired reminiscence about that year's fringe, of late nights being carefree in Edinburgh, making new friends, and of making tentative steps into the comedy world. One of the down sides of thinking back is it always comes with a share of melancholy.
When I arived in Wakefield yesterday I took a brief detour to a house that I lived in when I was at university. It was on Low Row in Darton, Barnsley. Basically there was Top Row and Low Row, two adjacent lots of terraced houses on a hill, away from civilisation, that had been used as housing for the miners working at Wooley Colliery. By the time I arrived there as a student, the mining community had long since been bludgeoned and crucified by Adolph Thatcher, and many of the houses were being used for cheap academic accomodation. It was a three bedroom house and I paid twenty pounds rent a week. Twenty fucking quid! Can you imagine? Council tax was included as well!
I've often thought that someday I would go back and buy a house on Low Row. Probably only be about a hundred quid or something, and I was always keen on the fact that the area was in a bit of a timewarp.
I've changed my mind now though, what was left of the Wooley Colliery site and surrounding countryside is now a massive housing development so Low Row is no longer as isolated as it once was, and a bit more green is missing from the beautiful West Yorkshire views. I fucking hate "progress".
I spent a moment by my old house. It still has my curtains up, and it looked kind of deserted. I still have a key for it on my key ring, but resisted the urge.
After a brief sojourn to the soon to be closed Bretton Hall (where I "studied"), I carried on to my first destination proper. I had agreed to do a Q&A about comedy stuff with a Youth Theatre called Yew Tree which is run by my friend Sarah who was in my year at Bretton.
In the third year of University, everyone was full of ideas and aspirations. Everyone was going to set up a theatre company (apart from me who was already bandying around the words "Big And Daft") and everyone's company was going to be the one that 'made it'. Yew Tree is the only one that has actually stood the test of time.
I hadn't really given the Q&A thing much thought if I am honest, but I realised as I sat in the middle of a semi-circle of chairs occupied by the members of the group, that this was actually far more daunting than I had ever considered. It was like being on a date, but with loads of girls (and 3 boys) all at the same time. I'd assumed I'd get the usual questions of "who's your favourite comedian?" or "how did you get into comedy?" but not a bit of it. I was asked profundities like "Do you find that the confidence you get from performance affects your confidence in real life?". It was a really odd yet thoroughly enjoyable 90 minutes, mainly because it made me question my own approach and reasonings within my career. I have no idea if my rambling would have been any use to them, but it was to me.
They were an amazing group of young people, and I say that without so much as a hint of patronising - they were genuinely brilliant. About the same age as the kids that used to hang around my old house and throw bottles at the windows, but these ones were spending their social time creating art and respectfully probing the opinions of a 33 year old man who steadfastly refuses to grow up and get a 'proper' job. It made me feel really proud of my friend Sarah for managing to inspire this creativity in people that could just have easily ended up chucking bottles at windows too.
Some of the older members of the group also came down to my gig at the Lawrence Batley Theatre in Huddersfield last night, which brought with it even more pressure. It was all very well that I could talk the talk in the Q&A, but now they were going to witness whether or not I was able to convert this into a succesful reality.
An afternoon spent talking about what I do and what I believe served as a productive reminder for me and was fresh in my mind as I took to the stage to headline the gig. An hour and ten later, and I had more than adequately proved myself in the practical session. There was much banter, bits and bobs of material, a moment of severe tension with a heckler who had been solitarily incredibly rude in a room full of people that were enjoying themselves in an attempt to destroy the fun, and a resultant diffusing of this tension by me when I invited a different audience member onto the stage (I believe he was Father Christmas, and I sat on his knee to check that I was definitely getting presents this year and, more importantly, that the cunty heckler wasn't getting them).
I think I am starting to work out this ongoing question about why I get quite so much audience interraction at my gigs. I was reading an interview with Billy Connolly where he was talking about his preference for the audience to "become one entity". Much as I admire Billy Connolly (and I am, as everyone should be, a massive fan), I am completely at odds with that opinion.
I hate audiences being one entity. Or rather, I should say, I don't like the idea of them starting as one entity. I attempt to bring them together over the course of a set into that, but along the way I like everyone to feel included and entertained on a (perhaps mythical) personal level. I like them to feel as though they are as important to the event as the one with the microphone, and that they have a degree of power to influence where the evening goes. I invest in my audiences just as much as they invest in me. It doesn't always work, but it would be boring if it did. The trick is getting them into the right state of humour to do this in an enjoyable way, but the risk is always that - like last night - somebody will feel this 'power' and abuse it in order to attempt to ruin the evening. I say 'risk' - it actually ultimately works in my favour. It's an idiotic thing for somebody to do, as by that stage the majority of the rest of the audience were already enjoying playing with their new friend and weren't going to be supportive of somebody trying to piss on the bonfire. They certainly wouldn't tolerate somebody trying to bully their new playmate, and by the end of my set I was being vociferously encouraged to go over to the dissenting voice and smack him.
I had to walk past him as I left the stage to go back to the dressing room, and as I got closer and closer to him the audible expectancy in the room rose. Of course I didn't smack him, but I did lean in close as the rest of the audience clapped and cheered me and whispered "Don't you look a cunt?". Like most cowards who attempt to attack from the dark, he didn't give an answer when I was right next to him.
He knew the answer though.
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