Can't Stand Up for Sitting Down (2 page)

Back to
Friday Night
Live,
the comedy extravaganza on Channel Four which is the show for all
ambitious alternative comedians to aim for at the time. The compere is Ben
Elton, the politically motivated, sparkily relentless nemesis of Margaret
Thatcher — every right-thinking alternative comic’s sworn enemy.

The
show is a hotchpotch of stand-up comedy, sketches and music. I’d found my way
onto it because I was invited to attend an audition at the Brixton rehearsal
rooms to prove to some people behind a desk that I was worthy of four and a
half minutes of jokes on live telly.

There’s
nothing more demoralising for a comic than an unpissed, unsmiling panel of
judges in broad daylight staring at you as you struggle through your routine
doing your best to keep it upbeat. It has to be said, though, that in my case
my delivery was about as upbeat as a funeral sermon, given that I had slipped
into an approximation of the way the football scores are read out through a
combination of nerves and ignorance. I was finding it impossible to sound like
anything other than a depressed bloke with an inability to manage verbal light
and shade. However, despite this they booked me and the experience was exciting
and terrifying in equal measure.

Of
course, having never done telly before I was swept along in a miasma of glamour
and fear, doing a sound check, sitting in my dressing room telling myself all
the clichés such as, ‘You’ve made it’ and stuff like that whilst glaring at my
overlit face in a light-bulbed mirror. I was sandwiched between the Pogues and
Mark Thomas, dressing-room-wise. A strange place to be. I reckon the Pogues had
had a half or twelve, as at one point what sounded like a bar-room brawl
erupted in their dressing room involving shouting and the sound of wood
splintering. I would have been disappointed if they hadn’t, though.

On the
other side, with my door slightly open to catch the maximum effect of my virgin
telly appearance, I could hear Mark Thomas negotiating with the producers about
the level of bad language he was permitted to use. I’m sure I heard the
sentence, ‘If you get rid of a “wanker” you can have two “toffee bollocks”.’
Aah, the poetry of comedy.

Mark
Thomas was always an electrifying presence on the comedy circuit. I remember
seeing him very early on at the Comedy Store before I dipped my toe into what
can be the terrifying cauldron of death on a Friday night. He seemed so big,
self-confident and he filled the stage. I think the audience was probably a bit
scared of him, and I recall thinking to myself that perhaps his approach was
the way forward, like a no-nonsense teacher — don’t give ‘em a chance.

After my appearance on
Friday
Night Live
which everyone seemed to agree had gone OK, I sat back and
waited for the offers to flood in. Quite what sort of offers I expected I’m not
sure, but whatever they were in my head, they didn’t flood, they didn’t even
trickle. So it was back to the circuit for a bit, to practise my act around the
London comedy scene.

One
great thing did come out of
Friday Night Live
and that was that I got
myself an agent. Naively, I didn’t even realise it was something I should do,
and my idea of an agent was a short balding American bloke with a very loud
voice and a big cigar, going on endlessly about percentages and auditions.

Vivienne
Clore approached me after the programme and asked if she could take me on …
as it were. I can’t remember much about our initial conversation and my powers
of judgement were not up to much as I had no idea what I was looking for. But
Vivienne seemed articulate, intelligent, cynical, a bit scary and good fun. And
at the time that was good enough for me.

Vivienne
is still my agent so I obviously made a good choice… for me. Agents seem to
come in all shapes and sizes. Some are like over-attentive parents, constantly
on hand to sort out the smallest problem in your life; others are like your
mates, who go out on the town with you, get pissed, take drugs and sleep with
you, while others are like the head of a Mafia family You can take your pick.
Vivienne and I have become good friends, but are not in each other’s pockets,
which I think is important. I can’t envisage ever being unfaithful to her.

Vivienne
has always been incredibly professional and comes from a big ‘talent’ agency
The Richard Stone Partnership. She’s been very supportive towards me and has
religiously turned up at every single Tom, Dick and Harry of a programme,
however potentially rubbish it’s been. But the other thing I appreciate is her
honesty.

It’s
very hard when you work in telly and get to a certain stage in your career to
get an honest answer. Now I realise I haven’t got to the Madonna part of my
career (and never will) where I do exactly what I like and no one can give me
any advice about the direction in which I am going. On the whole, if people
think that something you have done is complete rubbish, their preferred
approach is to pretend that it (and you) don’t really exist, rather than
telling you the truth. This makes it very hard to get an objective opinion.

Of
course, Vivienne doesn’t go in for personality-destroying invective. If
something hasn’t gone well or has been definitely dodgy, she will acknowledge
that and suggest changes. Similarly, my husband will tell me if something
wasn’t so good. Basically however famous you are, if you retain any vestiges of
true perspective, you will know yourself when you’ve been shite.

In
those days, there was a certain hierarchy of clubs —

the
little sweet ones in the back room of a pub and the bigger, higher earners like
the Comedy Store and Jongleurs, which had more of a ring of glamour about them
and meant you didn’t have to change or put your lipstick on in a toilet,
kitchen or corridor.

When I came onto the
comedy circuit in 1986, it had been going for a few years already.

My
friend Mark Kelly, with whom I write, remembers that when he started in 1984,
there were only a handful of venues. Added to that, in the early days, the
circuit seemed to have room for acts that were not just pure stand-ups. You
could see a number of poets and also other people who were more like
performance artists than stand-ups.

My top
six acts, for their weirdness, were:

1. Tony Green and Ian
Hinchcliffe

These two heckled me off
at my first-ever gig. Tony Green did a character called Mad Jock Macock, which
I feel is self-explanatory, while Ian Hinchcliffe would do things like eating
glass, stripping naked and rolling on the floor on broken glass. Didn’t float
my boat, but we all have different tastes.

2. Kevin McAleer

Kevin was an absurdist
whose act at the time consisted of a slideshow — although the only slide I can
remember was one of a baby owl with huge eyes. Audiences seemed mesmerised by
Kevin’s strangeness and he sat among the stand-ups like your bonkers uncle at a
family party.

3. The Ice Man

The Ice Man truly was a
performance artist. He would try to melt a huge block of ice in a variety of
ways including fire and salt, whilst a tape of opera and sounds of the sea
played over it. He had two other acts: one in which he would build a crane, and
another which consisted solely of him dragging a huge anchor chain across the
stage. Can’t see that on
Britain’s Got Talent…
or can I?

4.
Arloe Barloe

This man did an act with
huge extendable arms. I can say no more than this.

5. Fanny Farts

Never has the phrase ‘It
does what it says on the tin’ been more apt. This woman, FF, was a regular for
a while at the Tunnel Club in Greenwich, and she blew raspberries out of her
vagina. The capricious audience at the Tunnel would love her or hate her,
depending on what mood they were in. It wasn’t pornographic in the sense that
she felt compelled to display said vagina, but several people had a word with
Malcolm Hardee — who ran the gig and who had a propensity for pulling in the
most outrageous acts he could manage — and said they weren’t sure he should be
booking the woman.

6.
Chris Lynam

Chris looked like a
malevolent elfin teenager with a huge mass of dark backcombed hair, eyeliner
and the general demeanour of someone who was out of control. Some of his act
consisted of eating a bar of chocolate by smearing it all over his face or
simply abusing the audience as if he was a pissed tramp. His pièce de
résistance, however, was shoving a firework up his arse, setting fire to it and
standing looking at the audience with a cheeky grin whilst the firework
disgorged white hot flames into the air. Yes, I think he did burn his bum a few
times, but people loved it. I remember working with him at a pub in Wandsworth,
and for some reason he threw a shoe into the audience and by accident it hit a
woman on the head and caused copious bleeding. Made a change, I suppose, to
reverse the process… and have the act chuck things at the audience.

Performance Poets

It may be hard to believe
now, but on the early comedy circuit, performance poets were big news. Many
stand-ups started as poets and then switched to pure stand-up, among them Mark
Lamarr and Phill Jupitus. Jenny Eclair also started with a bit of poetry; so
did the sharp-as-a-knife Mandy Knight, whose poetry was dark, enormously funny
and beautifully put together, as was she.

Then,
as the circuit grew and became more stand-up orientated, and as bigger, more
commercial clubs began to spring up in Central London, like Jongleurs and the
Comedy Store, the fringe elements of alternative comedy started to fade away.

John Hegley
seems to be the only comedy performance poet who is still going strong, and
thank God for that, because it would be morally wrong if he disappeared. If you
are a comedy performance poet who is still happily performing and are miffed
that I have only mentioned John Hegley, please feel free to write to me and
have a right go.

Many
acts on the comedy circuit in the early days had silly names, myself included
(The Sea Monster). This was not just because they liked having a silly name, it
was because many were on the dole and wanted to hide their identity, so they
weren’t taxed on the extra quids they earned for performing. Legend has it that
one performer was called into the dole office and told, ‘Look, I saw you on
television last night, so it seems unlikely that in the future you will be able
to draw state benefits.’ He considered himself told.

The
weird and wonderful venues flourished, stewarded by the equally weird and
wonderful. I remember one club run by Tony Allen, a towering, grizzled figure
on the circuit for a while who many people named ‘The Godfather of Alternative
Comedy’. Tony’s club was in an old church in Notting Hill and used to get quite
an ethnically mixed audience, unusual since most comedy clubs tended to be
relentlessly white.

I did
the club one night and was heading to my car, always alert for potential
danger, when I heard a roar behind me. I looked round to see a massive black
guy running up the street towards me gesticulating wildly and shouting. Oh
shit, I thought. Is it going to be a robbery or a sexual assault? There was no
point in running as he was legging it up the street at the speed of light. My
hands closed round my car keys instinctively as I planned to poke him in the
eye if he started anything. Pathetic, really — he was so big I would have
needed a bloody ladder. So I just stood there and awaited my fate.

He
skidded up to me, patted me on the back and said, ‘Well done, you were
brilliant tonight.’

So my
innate racism was finally revealed and I felt ashamed that I had just assumed
he was going to do me harm. Still, it taught me another lesson about London’s inhabitants.
They are often not what they seem.

North and South

Given that it is split by
a river, I suppose it was inevitable that rivalry would develop between Norf
and Sarf Londoners. And indeed it has, to the point that it became a huge
cliché for a while that black-cab drivers legendarily would not go south of
the river after a cut-off point at night, for fear of the crime-ridden alleys
full of murderers and muggers. South Londoners think North Londoners are
stuck-up nobheads, whereas North Londoners think themselves more sophisticated
and intelligent. North Londoners think South Londoners are rough as old boots
and chavvy (I hate that word so much), whereas we South Londoners see ourselves
as edgy and interesting.