26/03/07
Needs must... -
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Hey it's me.
Right, shut up we've got a lot to get through.
First things first, I finished my jigsaw. I am aware that I never even told you that I started it, but that is because we must have secrets from each other to keep this fresh. I finished it this afternoon, it was about 5000 pieces in total (although the box said 1000 - this was clearly just an estimate) and after I had finished it there was just time for fellow blogger Bethany Black (who stayed over but we never did nowt) to take a picture of me looking proud of it before I scrunched it all up and boxed it again.
I decided to buy a jigsaw on Tuesday (I think it was). I have been getting rather concerned of late that my head is too full of stuff, and I have been having genuine difficulty in relaxing or - more importantly - concentrating. To be honest, I think there's been a steady build up over the last couple of years. With the exception of one afternoon at Blackpool Pleasure Beach last year, I can't recall a time I have felt contentedly relaxed. I have a backlog of books to read that has just reached forty, I had a load of podcasts to listen to (which I did during the jigsaw experiment), and if anyone is expecting a return text off me from the last couple of weeks then you can simply forget it, I'm not being rude - but I lost track of those fucking ages ago.
So I wanted to unclog and de-chunk my brain, and have a bit of time gently exercising it with the aid of a disintegrated collage of Disney characters that it was my job to reassemble. It worked too. Promise you, give it a go if you don't believe me, I managed to properly switch off my mind for a few hours a day. Good for the soul a jigsaw is. I've ordered another one already to maintain it.
This last week ended up being pretty busy on a professional front...and you'll see that I use the word 'professional' in the loosest possible sense;
Monday was the Free Beer Show in Oxford, and rather perversely was my only normal gig of the week. It was a great night, and the audience response was as lovely as always in the Cellar Bar. With twenty minutes to go before the show started the room was full exclusively of pretty twentysomething girls, and I was mulling over whether me just spending my hour onstage kissing them one by one would be a. too letchy or b. artistically viable. There was also the lingering doubt of c. Possible anyway.
It didn't matter twenty minutes later because some blokes turned up and ruined it, but I would have enjoyed doing a ladies night.
Tuesday I started my jigsaw.
Wednesday, I took little Raji James who used to be on Eastenders on an adventure to Gloucester where I was perfoming at the...erm...I've forgotten it's name already. I want to say Royal Oak. It was something like that.
Raji brought his video camera because he decided he wanted to make a road movie, but the battery ran out so shooting was put on hold. He wasn't filming properly anyway - I knocked a cup of coffee over at the services and had to go and flirt another free one from the lady at the Costa counter and he never filmed any of it. No, me being all cool with the staff wasn't deemed worthy, but me sat moody in a traffic jam...you just try to stop him filming it.
Incidentally - Raji was telling me that he did a Doctor Who convention last week (he was in the last series...but then again, who hasn't been in Doctor Who these days?), and at the end of the day, all the celeb guests went onstage one-by-one to say a quick thanks and goodbye thing to the convention. Raji told me that by the time it was his turn to go up, everyone else had said all the possible funny things so he had to think quick. He went up and said to the crowd "You're all mental". He meant it as a joke. They didn't take it as a joke and just stared at him in silence. He had to say "only joking" before leaving the stage minus a big chunk of his fan base. Fuck I wish I could have been there -I would have loved that. I explained to him that, not only is 'mental' one of the new un-pc words, but also, you really can't call a crowd 'mental' if many of them actually are.
Anyhow - back to the Gloucester gig which was ridiculous. It was in part of the actual pub, which is always a bad sign. No material from me on that particular showing (that will be a trend throughout the following gigs I tell you about), and after making an audience member do a short spot and then another one play a ghost in a makeshift Pantomime whilst I pretended to be asleep (I did not instruct him at any point to get his arse out - he improvised that himself), I sloped offstage to be treated for some reason as a hero by the audience.
Raji regaled the fans with stories of the day that Dirty Den got caught on his webcam, and I stood and let some of the girls draw on my arm. Apparently this is some sort of tradition in Gloucester - the audience give their autographs to the performers. That's what they said anyway.
Thursday I slept.
Friday I did the joy that is Bracknell Comedy Cellar, and like the Free Beer Show, it didn't dissapoint. I'm doing it again in a couple of weeks and already looking forward to it. I think I will hopefully be doing it once a month in the new season - we discussed it as a possibility and I would love to, I gel very nicely with that audience. It was my only compering job of the week and was 'just superb' (that's not me blowing my own trumpet by the way, that's the official line from Katherine at the Comedy Company, so that's her...erm...blowing my trumpet...oh...you know what I mean...don't take that wrong and spread it as a rumour...I just told you I'm hoping to compere it regular...don't ruin it for me).
Highlights of my Bracknell compering involved doing a ventriloquist act with a gobby heckler on my knee as the dummy before putting him back in his box, and also confiscating the driving licence of said-heckler and tearing it up, giving it him back piece by piece as a reward every time he behaved himself. It was his own fault, he should have a photocard licence not one of the old paper ones. I couldn't have torn it then - they're laminated.
Then came Saturday and a return to Bristol to do another one of Mark Olver's out of town gigs. Now, you may remember that a month or so ago I did a gig in the middle of nowhere near Bristol for Mark in East Harptree, and it was an absolute belter. Totally out of the way, in a pub function room with an audience full of locals that couldn't have been more fun. This one on Saturday was exactly the same except for the 'fun' bit.
I don't know what I have done to upset Mark Olver to the point of booking me to play there but for fuck's sake - you should have seen it.
It was in a converted barn (I think that's what it was) and with the exception of a couple of tables of socially adept and slightly arty folk at the front, it was filled with fucking idiots. But proper ones - if Raji had been onstage and said "You're all mental" it would have been perfectly acceptable to even the most stringent politically correct soul. I mean, I have genuinely tried to think of a kinder way of putting that but drawn a blank, they fucking stared at me as I entered the pub because I had long hair and a hat on. When I went to the toilet some lads shouted "he's back but he's took his hat off", so I must have been the topic of (I'm guessing unfavourable) conversation, and am sure that they will be having conversations about me right now along the lines of "D'ya remember the day that bloke came in with a hat on?".
After the gig, compere John Robbins said to me that every gig we have done together I have at some point said onstage that it is the weirdest gig of my life. On Saturday night, I was telling the truth. Myself and a lad from the front row did topless pull-ups on one of the support beams on the roof. That was the show.
The only plus point was that during my 'act' a girl who I had been stood near to during the first half of the show and had heard her loudly saying very unkind things about the first act on, fell off her chair and flat on her arse. It was just about worth doing the gig for that alone. She was a horrible individual, clearly not much going on upstairs - and whilst I have no problem with stupid people generally, I do have a problem with them when they are sneery, and when they look down on others.
Pompous stupidity - that's what I don't like. I can handle "pompous" or "stupidity" - just not at the same time.
Her superiority complex fell away as she sat on the beer-drenched floor whilst everybody else laughed at her. One bloke had a microphone and was laughing into it, which must have been properly embarrassing for her because it made the laughter so loud, and perhaps a little taunting. That was certainly my intention anyhow.
And there we go.
So, to recap, my week onstage from Sunday to Sunday included doing human horse racing, acting out a pantomime whilst being mooned at, making an audience member do a comedy act to a jeering crowd, doing a ventriloquist act with an audience member dummy, ripping up a punters driving licence, laughing at the misfortune of a stupid girl and doing topless pull-ups in a converted barn for money.
And the thing is, these things were me making the best of the nights. They weren't flippant they were utterly fucking necessary. And they worked.
Well maybe not the barn thing, but nobody was ever going to be right for that audience (perhaps Jethro at a push).
This sort of pace would kill a lesser man.
And you wonder why I spend my off-stage time doing jigsaws.
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