Can't Stand Up for Sitting Down (5 page)

Richard
did stand-up and comedy songs, and can be spotted in the background in a club
in that wonderful series
Our Friends in the North.
He also happens to
have the same name as an opera singer and was booked to do a gig at the Sherman
Theatre near Cardiff once. However, the audience were expecting the opera
singer — and when Richard kicked off with, ‘My daddy was a sperm bank, he came
on my account …’ almost the entire audience got up and left.

I have
finally ended up with Andy Robinson, with whom I still tour. He is an absolute
joy to work with, since he’s self-deprecating, generous, very funny and relaxed
— and his cynical attitude towards the business is very similar to mine.

We have
such good fun when we’re touring because we get on so well. We like the same
kind of music so there are never any arguments in the car about what we have on
(Elvis Costello, Morrissey, Nick Cave-type stuff). However, Andy is a big Elvis
Presley fan and I’m afraid I draw the line at The King because I am one of
those sad people who prefer his later stuff like ‘Suspicious Minds’ and ‘The
Wonder of You’, which I think proper Elvis fans consider to be not very good.
My main attitude towards Elvis Presley, by the way, is that he was essentially
a simple country lad who just happened to be enormously good-looking and a
brilliant singer, and who was then sucked into the world of showbiz and gradually
chewed up in the most painful and visible sort of way.

Many
comics have included either an Elvis fat joke or a dying-on-the-toilet joke in
their set but I always felt pity for him — the evidence of his decline was
there for all to see as he gained weight through what I presume was
comfort-eating born out of his isolation. Elvis fans, if I’ve got this wrong,
please let me know.

That’s
the problem with excess eating… IT SHOWS. So although alcoholics and heroin
addicts can maintain their svelte figures, big eaters can’t, and piss-taking
will inevitably occur. Ditto Michael Jackson with his unearthly metamorphosis
from beautiful boy into alienated alien. I’m sure the added pressures of being
global stars just compounded their emotional confusion.

God
forbid I should ever have to tour with one of what I tend to think of as ‘The
Ambitious Boys’. There are plenty of these around. Clever, career-minded, pushy
little buggers whose only thought is for their own advancement. Bloody good
luck to ‘em but they’re not my cup of tea to spend time with, because you feel
you are in a constant battle for airtime with them.

Tour Managers

As well as a so-called
‘support act’, one always has a tour manager. He or she drives, liaises with
the theatre staff, fights off the adoring fans (yes, that’s never happened),
marshals any press people and generally is available for weird showbiz requests
should you have a sudden urge for pheasant testicles in batter at 2 a.m. on a
wet Tuesday in Norwich. I hope I am not a whim-laden sort of performer, by the
way and have always done my best to keep to a minimum these sorts of mad
demands. I think the most I’ve ever managed is some fags or a packet of
Haribos. Over the years my tour managers have been Mark, John, Jez and Grazio,
thankfully none of them behaving hideously badly (Apart from on a few occasions.)

Being a
tour manager involves a lot of different skills and at times it’s very boring.
First of all there’s a huge amount of driving involved. You’re the first one to
start in the morning and the last one to get home to bed once you’ve dropped
everyone
off.

Mark
was tour manager, if I remember rightly for one and a half tours. He was dead
easygoing, which is essential, didn’t force his musical tastes on us and did
his job efficiently and with good grace. One major worry was that on the second
leg of touring he had rather a lot of points on his licence for speeding, and
if he picked up another three that would have pushed him over and made him
ineligible to drive, so there were a few sharp intakes of breath on various
journeys but thankfully we never crossed the point of no return.

John
had worked in security before he began tour managing for me and was quite big
and scary-looking; this is a bonus, because it puts some people off approaching
you even before any trouble has started. Apparently, he looks like David Platt,
the footballer, because someone once came up to us when we were in the street
to ask for an autograph and I found myself just assuming (Bighead Brand) that
this guy was approaching me. As I stuck my hand out to take the pen, he said,
‘No, I want David Platt’s,’ making me feel very small and vain and giving us a
good laugh at the same time.

John
never felt the need to punch anyone, for which I’m eternally grateful. He just
stood there and glowered at them, and nine times out of ten that was all it
took.

Jez was
a mate of mine, who took over on a tour when John couldn’t do it any more — and
God bless him, he had only just passed his driving test, so was somewhat wobbly
on the finer details. We had a couple of hair-raising moments on roundabouts,
but on the whole managed pretty well. It was slightly difficult at times because
we were mates and I don’t like asking anyone to do anything, particularly a
friend, but we muddled through and sorted stuff out. However, Jez was great to work
with because I knew him so well. He had a brilliant comic brain and timing,
and I often thought he should be getting up on stage too.

Grazio
is an utterly charming, very helpful and sweet-tempered man who has also toured
with the likes of Lee Evans and Michael McIntyre. He is a completely soothing
person to travel with, is very helpful, and his anticipatory skills are
nothing short of miraculous. He is reliable and calm and in short, probably the
perfect tour manager; in fact, he would win an award for tour managing, should
there be such a thing.

‘Getting Your Head Down’

When I first started touring,
the tour dates tended to be continuous, one date after another with a break of
one or two days during which to recover before setting off again. Initially, in
the early days one of us comics would drive and we would be booked into cheap B&Bs
with suspicious couples eyeing us up over breakfast wondering why we were under
ninety years of age.

As the
old career progressed, the B&Bs metamorphosed into cheapish hotels which
could be terrifying. I remember staying in a particularly scary hotel in
Liverpool one night. I arrived at the door of my room, having staggered up
there from the bar, to discover that it had been kicked in the night before and
had had a piece of hard-board nailed, very badly, over it. In the room next
door, a loud argument was going on between two blokes, with the occasional
sound of smashing glass or splintering wood. Pushing a chest of drawers against
the door, I lay on the bed with all my clothes on and eschewed the communal
toilet in the hall in favour of weeing in the sink.

When
the tours were longer and more lucrative, we found ourselves in what I would
consider to be posh hotels, great big ones in town where you could have
breakfast in your room, raid the minibar and hang your clothes up on the
trouser press for want of a better thing to do with them if you were a lady.

I used
to lie on the bed flicking through the hundreds of channels on the telly
necking a lager and thinking, How could I ever get bored with this?

But the
weird thing is, you do eventually After seeing the inside of hundreds of hotel
rooms, they do begin to merge into one, and you long for the quirkiness of your
own place with all the familiar crap in it. It’s even worse when you have a
family you can’t go home to see. This was why, after I’d had children, I would
go home every night after a gig and start out anew every day This obviously
made days longer and tours harder, and meant that the distance I was prepared
to go shrank a bit, but I would far rather have done that than stay away for
days on end.

At Last — Trying To
Make Them Laugh

Once you arrive at a
theatre for a gig, normally two hours or so before it’s due to start, you
explore your dressing room. These range from sumptuous big rooms with the
clichéd mirrors with light bulbs round them and posh sofas, to tiny
suspicious-smelling hovels with one small settee that looks as if an
incontinent tramp has been sleeping on it for a fortnight. You then have to do
the obligatory sound check, which involves interacting with the techies at the
theatre — again a huge range of individuals, from cheery blokes who bung the
kettle on and are happy to furnish you with local knowledge, to teenagers
covered in heavy-metal tattoos who can barely look at you, let alone manage
anything approaching a word. It is a huge joy when people are friendly and
welcoming. Sadly, some of them decide in advance that you are a showbiz twat
and go out of their way to demonstrate this. As someone who goes out of
my
way
to be unerringly polite and friendly I find this a complete pain in the arse.

After
the sound check, there is quite a lot of sitting down and talking bollocks
until the show starts. I have found I really need this time to get into gear
for the show. I don’t get as nervous as I used to (butterflies for a week
before a gig), but there are certain circumstances which are more conducive to
being in the right mood for a gig. Firstly, I’m not good at socialising before
I do a show as my thoughts are on what’s coming up, rather than chatting to a
local journalist about how I got into comedy It’s also nice to be somewhere
private. I once did a benefit and discovered my dressing room was the same room
as the green room for friends, family and press with a makeshift bar, and Andy
and I sat in the corner trying to write out our set-list. The changing
facilities were a handily placed screen in the corner of the room, and someone
peeking round it just as I was taking my trousers off was the last flipping
straw.

I tend
to write my set out three times, don’t ask me why, I’ve forgotten by now. I
also stick some prompt notes on a speaker in front of the mic more as a
security blanket rather than actually needing it.

As
‘show time’ approaches, various announcements come through on the relay in the
dressing room, counting you down. My favourites are always the old-fashioned
stage managers who say things like, ‘Tonight’s concert will begin in fifteen
minutes.’ I always want to run round and shout, ‘It’s not a bleeding concert, it’s
a comedy show.’

Andy
always goes on first. I usually make an announcement from a mic backstage to
introduce him, warning the punters that the show will be quite rude — so if
they don’t like swearing, they’d better fuck off now. Audiences who tut at
this tend not to laugh very much, as you can imagine. After that, I stand
backstage and watch the first five minutes to get a flavour of what the audience
is like. Surely you’re thinking, an audience is an audience is an audience —
but you’re wrong. There are so many subtle (and unsubtle) differences in the
way that audiences behave. The day of the week makes a difference, the weather,
the time of year, the size of the theatre — lots of things like that. Also, if
there are hecklers, it’s useful to know what they’ve said to Andy so I can
pick up on it later.

Once on
stage, I kick off with a line that I know works, just to make sure they’re not
going to hate me. Again, levels of laughter are quite subtle and I can always
tell if they’re not quite there. At this point I might change my plan to
improvise a bit of local stuff and replace it with some tried and tested
material just to really get them going before I push off into the unknown.
However, if it’s all gone well so far, I’ll do some stuff on local news. I
always buy a local paper and scan it in the dead zone between sound check and
performance. Local papers give you a good idea of what local concerns are, and
sometimes in predominantly rural areas I find stuff that wouldn’t even get a
look-in in our
South London Press.
In Hay-on-Wye in Wales, one year at
the Literary Festival, I found a story on the front page,
Hanging Basket
Stolen,
which struck me as so sweet.

Audiences
seem to really like you talking about their home territory and it usually
elicits some responses from them and encourages them to join in, until it feels
like they are really involved. On several occasions, people in the audience
have actually featured in some of the stories and joined in on enlarging on the
story itself. The rest of the audience loves this and it’s so great when it
happens.

Major
concerns round the country seem to be crime, parking and rubbish. The other bit
of the paper I use a lot is the letters page, on which complaints about dog poo
and petty crime feature heavily. The review of the papers can last anything
from two minutes to fifteen depending on how well it goes. In Brecon once, I
mentioned a story about a minor earthquake and an interview with a woman who’d
said that when she’d heard the earthquake, she’d assumed it was her Labrador
wagging his tail against the side of the bath. Of course, several people knew
her!

It’s
quite interesting how the amount of material one does in a show can expand
enormously or concertina down into almost half the length, depending on how
relaxed you are and how responsive the audience is.

I had a
particularly difficult gig at the Hammersmith Apollo one night which was being
filmed for TV. For some reason, I have always felt that the audience at the
Apollo were not my natural constituency and so I always found it a bit of a
struggle. But on this particular day it was even more difficult because my
dear, lovely grandma Maisie had died the night before and I was feeling very
sad and slightly out of touch with reality Maybe I shouldn’t have gone ahead
with it, but I thought once I got on stage I could just work my way through on
automatic pilot. I had prepared forty minutes of material, which is what they
wanted but, given that the audience seemed a bit cold and I felt like I was on
another planet, for some reason my set shrank down to twenty minutes because I
rushed it and pruned all the excess, which one normally includes when one is
relaxed and on a roll. Well, there was a slight hiatus and I marched off stage
feeling defeated. The poor compere, Russell Howard, who’d expected me to be on
for another twenty minutes, was in the lay so the audience was treated to an
empty stage while someone rushed round in a panic trying to find him.