How I Escaped My Certain Fate (5 page)

By the following summer, we’d sold out the 600-seater room at the Assembly Rooms for the month of the
Edinburgh
Fringe, and Nick Hytner wanted to open his tenure at the National Theatre with
Jerry Springer: The Opera
the next year. Amazing. Our manager’s hustling had worked. Maybe we’d even get paid. That same summer, I wrote and performed a little theatre piece I’d also ‘scratched’ at BAC,
Pea Green Boat,
at the Traverse in Edinburgh,
dealing
directly with the theatre via the promoter Hils Jago. I made £600. It was the first money I’d earned in Edinburgh in twelve years, since the £450 I got as one of the four acts in Comedy Zone in 1991. Things were looking up.

But three years later, after all the awards, and after
steering
a cast of now nearly fifty through the ever-expanding show and moving it from the cocoon of the National
Theatre
to the bloody commercial reality of its West End run,
there were things I realised about the production, and by implication the wider world, that thrust me back towards stand-up.

First of all, it was clear to me, even with the costly
firepower
of our management’s marketing department and all the goodwill of the critics behind it, that
Jerry Springer: The Opera
was a piece of art. It was essentially confusing and opaque, whereas commercial musical theatre hits, and commercial hits generally, tend to be about comforting certainties (see Appendix I). No matter what production values and lush orchestration and full-colour posters you threw at it, it was at base a genuine piece of work, created by artists, initially without a commercial end product in sight. Once you stuck it in the West End at £50 a ticket, you’d already priced a significant proportion of
discerning
arts consumers out of the market, and located it
somewhere
they didn’t particularly want to go.

Secondly, having spent my twilight years as a stand-up complaining about the limitations of the art form and the low expectations of its audiences, it now seemed
wonderfully
adaptable. Richard Thomas hadn’t let the fact that all people who like musical theatre are divs frighten him away from trying to expand the limits of the genre. And the
simplicity
of stand-up, the fact that you can think of an idea in the afternoon, after a long lie in, and implement it in the evening, suddenly seemed very attractive to me, now that I was a commercial theatre director whose attempts to make even the slightest change to the work required separate sets of instructions to literally dozens of people. Nor did you need an elaborate and literal stage set, though Julian Crouch’s tasteful and minimal design for
Jerry
had grappled subversively with commercial theatre’s
institutionalised
insistence on extravagance. But onstage, alone,
as a stand-up, you could suggest anything with a few wellchosen words.

And thirdly, from an economic perspective, stand-up suddenly didn’t seem such a bad bet. With
Jerry
, I was in the midst of a palpable hit, but I still didn’t have
anything
much to show for it. Our manager, who was also the producer of the show, had narrowly missed out on a lucrative deal for the publishing rights to the opera’s
critically
acclaimed songs, but as he explained to his loyal
client
Frank Skinner, who recalled a conversation with him in a
Guardian
interview, ‘When you give someone the job of manager, you are basically giving them the right to play poker on your behalf.’
*

We worked on the show from spring 2000 to the autumn of 2001 for nothing, before getting a salary at the National, but we ended up waiving our royalties towards the end of the West End run to cover a legal battle with the
Daily Mail
. I used up all my savings to work on the show. From an
economic
perspective, I’d have been better spending the Opera years doing stand-up in rooms above pubs every night than swanning around the West End, drunk, brandishing a financially worthless Olivier award.
*

But in a sense
Jerry Springer: The Opera
made me.
Looking
at what I’d observed of the strengths and weaknesses of the show as a business proposition, I realised that if I could aim my stand-up act at a small but loyal audience that would get it, in small and tasteful venues where it would work, raise my game with the raw material and the form of stand-up in the same way as Richard Thomas had done with musical theatre’s, and somehow find a way of not spending more on promoting shows than I could
possibly
earn, it ought to be possible to be a commercially and creatively viable – and maybe alternative – stand-up
comedian
once again.

Around that time, my teenage comedy hero John Hegley told me you only need a few thousand fans. And if they all give you ten pounds a year, you’re away. And I thought about all the musicians I like – the folk singers and free jazzers and alternative country cowpokes and persistent punk veterans who all hang in there, on small labels, selling self-released CDs for cash out of suitcases after gigs and operating within viable margins, tour, rest, tour, rest and sell some CDs. They survive.
*

However, as well as these three reasonably rational
reasons
why I wanted to start stand-up again, I had another, less rational, more disconcerting motive. I had been on nodding terms with Ricky Gervais since he was the
Entertainments
Officer at the University of London student union in the early nineties, where he was an enthusiastic promoter of stand-up nights and smitten fan of comedy. The compliments he would pay us were so extravagant that it often made interaction with him awkward and
embarrassing
, a natural characteristic he was subsequently able to siphon, to great effect, into the brilliantly realised role of David Brent.

At first I hadn’t made the connection between the former comedy promoter and the man who, in 1999, took on the persona of an ignorant right-wing irritant on Channel 4’s
The 11 O’Clock Show
. At the time, Ricky was around the
circuit
occasionally, doing the character of a man with
learning
difficulties. However, nothing in Ricky’s work to date suggested the consummate and genre-redefining
bombshell
he was soon to drop, alongside Stephen Merchant, in the form of
The Office
, one of the all-time great television shows.

On the back of the success of
The Office
, Ricky was
suddenly
able to do his first full-length solo stand-up shows, to large and enthusiastic audiences. It was drawn to my
attention that he always praised me and Sean Lock in
interviews
, and cited us as his main inspirations. Ricky was
preparing
his second live tour, 2004’s
Politics
, when I drifted back onto the circuit. I hadn’t seen any of his stand-up.

The first time I was informed that I had copied Ricky Gervais was at The Amused Moose in Soho, sometime in late 2003 or early 2004. A mother and her daughter, who had enjoyed my set but never seen me before, said that I was ‘clearly very influenced by Ricky Gervais’, with the implication that they had rumbled me and I really ought to find my own shtick. Then it happened again two or three times. And then I started to wonder why Ricky was always praising me to the skies in interviews, and so I took up an offer of tickets to his new show at the Bloomsbury Theatre.

I sat there, dumbfounded. It wasn’t that Ricky was the same as me. He wasn’t. And I’m not saying he had copied me. There wasn’t a single line that exactly duplicated
anything
I’d ever done. But Ricky had the calmness, and the way of offering up contentious ideas as if they meant nothing and were merely idle thoughts, that I felt was a hallmark of my work, and which had always made it such a difficult fit for mainstream audiences at populist clubs. And there was enough coincidental overlap, in terms of tone and
subjects
I might cover – Aesop’s fables, a long routine on ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf ’ – to mean that now Ricky was a big name, I could understand why the casual viewer would mistake
me
for an imitator of
his
approach. I hadn’t
realised
how much my stand-up mattered to me until I
considered
the possibility of never being able to do it again. I became aware that the two people I had come with, sitting either side of me, were looking at me, concerned, and one of them took my hand in a supportive gesture. My face was frozen in numb shock. All around us people were laughing
and clapping. I felt like I had died, or had never been born. Had my friends guessed what I was going through?

At some point during the show I experienced an
emotion
I rarely feel. It was jealousy. I had honestly never been jealous of another comedian, and after working with
musical
theatre performers my admiration for stand-ups had reached a point where I loved them all indiscriminately. And there were lots of friends and acquaintances of mine I’d started out with who had been much more
successful
than me – Al Murray, Steve Coogan, Harry Hill – but I didn’t ever feel like I was in competition with them because they are so different to me, and the choices they have made are theirs and not mine. And there were also people whose talents far outstripped mine, who produced work I thought I’d never be capable of in my life – Daniel Kitson, Simon Munnery, Jerry Sadowitz, Richard Thomas, Johnny Vegas, Kevin McAleer – but I didn’t want to be them, because I could never be them. But watching Ricky I felt myself thinking, ‘This is the kind of thing I used to do. And all these people in this massive room are loving it. Whereas in the dying days of my stand-up career, I was reviewed as if I didn’t know what I was doing, and found myself playing to fifteen people in Dundee.’ I hadn’t minded not being
popular
when I’d thought that what I did could never be
popular
, but seeing something not dissimilar to what I might do being enjoyed by 500 people, already sold on the strangest bits by virtue of Ricky’s celebrity, was bewildering.

Ricky had invited us backstage, but I felt too shaken up to go. The upshot of that evening at the Bloomsbury was that I realised, somewhere within my dead and defeated hulk, I had an ego. For better or worse, I did not want to be Ted Chippington, a fondly remembered and influential cult back to doing a day job. And I did not want to be a
footnote in stand-up either, cited as the comedian that the famous Ricky Gervais always said he liked. I wanted to get what I did as a stand-up back in the public eye, even if only on a low level, before whatever had been unique about me became subsumed into the general mass of comedy.

I also knew that if I did start again and took it seriously, I would have to move what I had done onwards a stage or two, in case the mother and daughter from The Amused Moose were in the room. A few months later, I rang Ricky up and asked him if I could use one of his flattering
interview
quotes about me – ‘the funniest, most cliché-free comedian on the circuit’ – on a poster. He agreed, glad to help, and I think this single-handedly sold out the show
Stand-Up Comedian
on tour and in London and
Edinburgh
. But I often wonder what happened to Ricky Gervais. He never crops up on London circuit gigs now. I assume that, like all those long-forgotten names of my open-spot days – Two Gorgeous Hunks or The Singing Fireman or The Amazing Mr Smith – Ricky must have just given up.