Can't Stand Up for Sitting Down (11 page)

I’m
sorry if I upset Scott, because he is very likeable and good fun. He is also
extremely filthy and has an ability to make people in audiences do sharp
intakes of breath every few seconds or so.

Recently,
my friend Betty’s seventeen-year-old son went to see him with a mate, and the
fools sat in the front row, which I would never advise — especially if you’re
seeing Scott or Julian Clary — because you will get the piss ripped out of you.
The friend had to endure an elongated assault on his appearance and I think it
taught him to sit well back in the future.

I was a
bit apprehensive about the first gig. Would the audience understand the
references, the Bernard Manning joke about racism, concerns like that? I
needn’t have worried. The audiences were keen, warm and appreciative.

After
Sydney we proceeded to Melbourne: warm, friendly and very laughy gigs, which we
all enjoyed. I did notice though that, much to my surprise, there was quite a
bit of racism knocking about, particularly amongst younger people. I suppose I
just expect older people to be racist in that rather naive way that they have.
But to hear a Goth girl who looked like a radical leftie say ‘Fucking Pakis,
they get on my nerves,’ was a bit of a shock, particularly as the peer group
around her didn’t bat an eyelid.

We had
a little break in proceedings before we went to Perth, our final destination,
so I decided, dragging my co-conspirators along, to go to Tasmania to visit a
friend and ex-flatmate of mine, Gabe, who was by now a GP with his wife, also a
GP, in a small town in the north; as a sideline, he had a deer farm. When we
arrived, it was pissing with rain. We spent a very enjoyable, if soaking, night
hunting for platypuses, not spotting a single one.

We flew
back to Sydney and from there went on to Perth, which is isolated — and feels
it — right out on the west coast. The gigs there were great, with cheery,
enthusiastic audiences.

After
that, even though really we had done bugger-all, we felt like a holiday, so we
hired a boat with a man who knew what to do with it and toured the Whitsunday
Islands up in the North-East for ten days. The heat was tropical and my ankles
turned into footballs which wasn’t terribly attractive, but we had a good laugh
even though John, our tour manager, kept us awake most nights with his titanic
snoring.

I also
hadn’t realised that toileting was such a palaver on a boat. Don’t read this
next bit if you’re slightly squeamish… but we didn’t know that if someone’s
just had a poo, it’s not a good idea to go in for a swim at the same time. The
sight of Jeff swimming through a patch of little plops and the look on his
face, gave me one of the best laughs of the holiday It was idyllic though most
of the time, turtles swimming past the boat, snorkelling (us, not the turtles)
and admiring the fantastically coloured sea-life in a clear azure sea and
lounging on the boat as the sun set … it was pretty much perfect.

Holland

The great thing about the
Dutch is they speak really good English and watch lots of BBC programmes. The
only problem they had with my set was ‘panty-liner’ but they soon got the gist
as I did an award-winning mime.

Harry
Hill was over there too, and it was to him I recounted my huge sense of
disappointment when, at the end of the day I reached for a well-deserved
Toblerone in the fridge in my room, only to find someone had already eaten it
and stuffed screwed-up paper back into it to make it look like they hadn’t.

Of
course, the attraction for a lot of people in Amsterdam is the red-light
district. Those people do tend to be of the male variety though. I found it
quite surreal and rather disturbing to wander along a street with women all
dressed up in the shop windows trying to entice customers in for a quick one.
Added to that I’ve never been a prodigious dope smoker, so cafés selling every
variety of the stuff didn’t really attract me, populated as they were with
glassy-eyed gigglers. So two days was enough for me.

The Shetland Islands

I know that, in theory,
the Shetlands aren’t a foreign country, but they certainly feel as if they are
at the end of the world. Once you arrive at Edinburgh airport you have to
change planes and get on something that looks like it worked as a back-up plane
in the First World War. As we queued to get on, I couldn’t avoid listening to
two blokes chatting. One said to the other, ‘You know one of these crashed last
week, don’t you?’ To which the other replied, ‘Yes, they’ve got a terrible
safety record.’

That’s
not really what I want to hear as I’m just about to get on one. The gig in the
Shetlands was in a tiny theatre and the audience seemed to be so pleased that
we’d made the effort to travel in the Plane of Death that I got the feeling we
could have said anything and they would have laughed their hand-knitted little
socks off. Jeff and I both had absolute stormers and came away from the show
with a warm glow. This soon dissolved when we discovered the next morning that
we were locked in by fog and it was too risky to take off. Still, better to
wait until the fog clears than to enter a lighthouse without having to climb
the stairs … No, I don’t know what that means either.

Stavanger, Norway

Stavanger is a pretty
little town with quite a lot of oil stuff going on (she said knowledgeably).
Consequently there are quite a few English and Americans knocking about. We went
on the day after the General Election in 1997, and one of the friends who came
with us was still pissed from the night before when we knocked on her door, and
sat through the flight in a haze of drunken joy at the thought of Blair getting
in. She was in good company though. Shane MacGowan of the Pogues was on our
flight looking like my friend was going to feel in about three hours’ time. He
gave me that weird nod that people on the telly give each other. I suppose it’s
like a fireman bumping into another fireman.

Customs
at Stavanger consisted of a trestle table manned by a bloke in a cap, and as we
filed past I noticed that poor Shane was the only one picked out of our bunch
and was standing with his suitcase open on the trestle table looking like a
naughty ten year old.

I
didn’t really like the gig. There is something about ex-pat types that makes my
hackles rise, although I can’t really put my finger on what it is. So I presume
I stepped on stage with the wrong attitude and it all went downhill from there
until the heckles and general hubbub sent me off slightly earlier than I’d
intended.

Ireland

Because the Irish speak
English, I had assumed that culturally it would be very similar to Britain.
That is definitely not the case. It is indeed a foreign country and they do
things differently there.

Northern Ireland

On my first trip to
Northern Ireland, I carried all the preconceptions that most of us do, when all
we know about a place is what we’ve seen on TV or read in the newspapers. The
cab driver who took me from the airport to the hotel jokingly told me at the
time (early nineties) that quite a few people, mainly businessmen, bob down on
the back seat for fear of being picked off by a sniper or a bomb going off.
Whether or not it was a figment of my imagination, I certainly found the
atmosphere over there to be imbued with an underlying sense of danger, but I am
sure that was all self-generated. (Although it is somewhat disconcerting to be
told you are staying in ‘the most bombed hotel in Belfast’.)

Many
people wanted to go and gawp at all the infamous areas of Belfast where the
Troubles were focused. I couldn’t bring myself to do so, because I felt it was
a bit voyeuristic, so I let them get on with it and stayed at the hotel.

My
first gig ever in Northern Ireland was at a mainly Protestant university in
Belfast, and I wasn’t prepared for how pissed and lary they would be. It was
like a duel with the audience, and I ended up doing none of my prepared
material at all, while they chanted ‘Fuck Off You Fat Lesbian!’ in unison and
seemed to be enjoying themselves enormously So I pretty much let them get on
with it.

I
graduated to a bigger theatre in the centre of Belfast some years later, and
this was the only occasion on which I’ve had a piece of clothing thrown at me.
About twenty minutes into my set, a pair of light blue, slightly baggy Y-fronts
landed on the stage in front of me, having been lobbed from the balcony …
quite an impressive throw. I picked them up gingerly because I was planning to
display them to the audience. They were still warm and a shiver of something
went through me and I flung them immediately to the floor. Most unsettling.

I also
did a bit of TV in Northern Ireland and appeared on a satirical show which, it
turned out, the viewing public there wasn’t really ready for. After the episode
I appeared on, the series was cancelled — for once nothing to do with me, but
down to an impression of Ian Paisley which I think was just too near to the
knuckle.

One
thing that happens when you do this job is that you tend to meet comedy heroes
quite unexpectedly and it was while a few of us were sitting in the green room
watching an old Monty Python episode that the door opened and Michael Palin
himself popped his head round.

What a
surreal moment! Along with Terry Jones, Michael Palin was always my favourite
and I was overcome by that fannish-will-I-say-something-stupid moment and just
stared at him as if he was a recently landed alien. He gave us a chirpy
‘Hello!’ and then disappeared again.

Republic of Ireland

In the late nineties, I
toured the Republic, going from Dublin to Waterford to Cork to Limerick. The
audiences seemed really shell-shocked by my material and I began to wonder
whether I should tone it down a bit. Having done a few gigs before in Ireland
at the Kilkenny Festival and a comedy club in Cork, I was quite surprised by
the reaction, but it may have been that the theatres I was appearing in had a
slightly muffling effect on people’s exuberance. Or perhaps they just didn’t
like me.

During
the tour I visited the castle in which the Blarney Stone is situated. Legend
has it that if you kiss the Blarney Stone, it will give you the gift of the
gab. However, it’s not quite as simple as you think because it is attached
rather awkwardly to the castle, and you have to sort of shuffle out on your
back looking down over a huge drop. This, and the fact that someone told me
that people occasionally piss on the Blarney Stone, rather put me off deciding
to snog it.

Edinburgh is comedy Mecca
and the city towards which all we comics face in blind obeisance (although
blind drunkenness might be a more appropriate metaphor).

It soon
becomes apparent that Edinburgh is where it’s at if you want to advance your
comedy career. The Fringe Festival there gives you the opportunity which you
don’t get in London, to showcase your wares. Because there are so many clubs in
London, your average producer/TV exec can’t be arsed to flog round all the
little clubs but prefers to go to Edinburgh for a couple of weeks where all the
eager comics are grazing. Plus, because it is a festival, the execs have the
added advantage of many many reviews — which enables them to weed out the
rubbish, so they needn’t even bother to go and see the crap shows.

There
are hundreds of venues in Edinburgh and hundreds of comics vying for the
attention of the public. Bank balances are severely under threat if you are a
less experienced comic whose show doesn’t sell well; in fact, thousands can be
lost by comedians who are either naive or a little too over-confident.

In my
day (yes, I know I sound like your grandma, but it was a long time ago), one
aimed to appear at one of the top three venues, because they had a guaranteed
audience.

The
first was the Assembly Rooms — always considered the poshest venue, containing
small stages and big ones like the Supper Room. Sounds stuck-up, doesn’t it? It
was a nice venue and I performed there one year.

Unfortunately
because of the lay-out of the place, you cannot get on to the stage unobserved,
to appear, like the Bad Fairy, from back stage, so you have to plop yourself
round there before the audience is allowed to enter, fifteen minutes before the
show. As nerves are an unwelcome accompaniment of any stand-up show, one needs
a wee roughly every ten seconds, and this is just not possible once you have
sited yourself behind the curtain. This leaves you with the unwelcome choices
of holding on to it, wetting yourself or pissing in a receptacle — boys in
lager bottles and girls into something with a wider rim. Sorry to plant this
unpleasant image in your minds, but it’s a necessity unless you want to appear
on stage with a wet patch sullying the front of your attire.