Small Man in a Book (33 page)

Nine or ten months into my self-imposed sabbatical, I began to get the itch once more. This time, though, I told myself it would be different. This time, I wouldn’t just stand there doing impressions. I would instead dazzle them with my wry observations on life – like a smaller, Welsh Jerry Seinfeld. I’d have them eating out of my hand with my pithy one-liners and my well-constructed tales of my semi-truthful misadventures.

I arranged some more open spots at clubs around West London, and there was a competition, held at a venue above a pub in Hanwell, that I entered and did well in. There was a red-haired girl on the bill that night who went down quite well too. She talked about being an actress, but not getting anywhere with it, she did a bit about
The Bill
and showed off an array of voices. The audience liked her but they certainly weren’t going crazy over her. I remember standing at the back of the room watching her and thinking,
Is it just me or is she actually very good indeed?
She was Catherine Tate. What a fucking liberty.

My material had developed into a mixture of voices, characters, observations and impressions. It wasn’t great. I did a bit about those sales you see on Oxford Street where some hucksters have illegally taken over an empty shopfront and begun an auction of sorts. They have a black bin bag full, if they are to be believed, of expensive big-name electrical products. They then tell you it’s not fifty quid, it’s not forty quid, it’s not even thirty quid …

‘Who’ll give me twenty quid? Hold your money up now!’

And then, unbelievably, a concentrated throng of the capital’s most gullible hoist their hard-earned banknotes aloft and head off into the distance with their bags. My take on it was to have the ‘auctioneer’ listing incredible things, such as a speedboat, a BMW, or a seven-bedroom detached home, all waiting inside the bag. As the price comes down, a Scottish couple are standing at the back watching the action. The price reaches twenty pounds and the husband cannily says, ‘Wait, Sheila … he’ll come down.’

Hmm, it got a laugh sometimes.

I did some very basic stuff about the difference between posh British Airways pilots and downmarket Virgin pilots (I was still flogging a version of that one ten years later) and ended with the thing that always guaranteed a strong finish, my Tom Jones impression. He had been in the charts again with the charity recording of ‘Perfect Day’. My take on it revolved around the sophisticated observation of how much louder he was than everyone else on the record. It climaxed with an as-loud-as-I-could-make-it ‘Aw, you’re gonna reap just what you sow …’, all held-out notes and big eyes. Generally, people were surprised that such a little chap could have such a big voice; as cheap and gimmicky tricks go, it was pretty cheap and gimmicky. But it usually got applause, and it gave me a big ending, so its place in the first team was secure.

I seem to recall making it through to the semi-final of this competition above the pub, before coming a cropper. At the same time I was picking up more gigs here and there and, slower than very slowly, gaining in experience and confidence.

Confidence is a fragile fellow, and mine took its biggest beating yet at a notorious club in Greenwich, Up the Creek, run by the late and also notorious Malcolm Hardee. First off, and this may strike you as an odd thing to factor into the equation, the drive from East Sheen to Greenwich is a long and horrible one, made more so by the knowledge that you’re making this effort for a five-minute spot in front of a crowd that will in all likelihood be leaning towards the hostile. I had heard so many horror stories from other battle-scarred open spots about how tough it could be, and I struggled to put them out of my mind as I crawled along in the traffic heading slowly east.
Maybe I’ll be different; maybe they’ll like me. Someone has to do well there, surely?
I kept up the internal pep talk all the way, parked nearby and tried to affect a confident gait as I walked into the club. I don’t remember anything else of the evening, other than the time spent on the stage and the drive home.

I began the act with a remark about being Welsh. Immediately a man near the front of the audience made a sheep noise.

‘
Baa!
’

People laughed.

I chuckled slightly and carried on, pleased with myself for having taken this almost-heckle in my stride. Five seconds passed, and from a far corner of the room another sheep piped up, as though responding to the first.

‘
Baa!
’

Hmm, OK. Just carry on.

‘
Baa!
’

Don’t worry, they’ll get bored with it.

‘
Baa!
…
Baa!
…
Baa!
’

There were more now, but I carried on regardless, as though it wasn’t happening.

This isn’t a good tack. You can pretend not to have heard the odd isolated heckle – in truth, due to the acoustics in certain venues you often
don’t
hear the things that are shouted out from the audience – but when it’s something as concentrated as this, it’s madness to ignore it. It makes a mockery of your relationship with the audience; in fact, it only highlights the fact that you
don’t
have a relationship with them. When you do, you bounce off the spontaneous things that happen and the evening is enriched by the knowledge that we’re all experiencing something uniquely in and of the moment. The sheep were now getting their act together beautifully; the more of them that baaed, the more the rest would follow. Like sheep – the very same dumb defenceless creatures they were so cruelly satirizing.

Soon it was a deafening flock. The sheep were angry now, yet still I carried on with my carefully memorized act, behaving as though it wasn’t happening. In my head I was frantic, desperately running up and down corridors in my mind, opening doors and searching for something funny, something that would turn it around, something that would save me. A border collie of a line that would round them up and lock them safely back in their pen.

I didn’t find one. I was dying. I was probably already dead.

I remember Malcolm Hardee laughing as I came off, looking at me as if to say,
I’ve seen some bad ones in my time, but this took the biscuit
. Actually, that wasn’t what his look said. That’s how he seems in the version I’ve built up in my mind, the version of the story I’ve told to friends and fellow comedians over the years. I suspect the truth is more mundane. I think his look said no more than,
There goes another one
.

Far worse.

As quickly as possible, and making eye contact with no one, I made my way towards the exit, consoled by the thought that at least there was no one in the audience who knew me.

‘Hiya, Rob!’

Shit. It was Bleddyn, from Cardiff. What the hell was he doing here?

He had worked on
Except for Viewers in England
with Ruth and me; he’d been a runner and had, in my opinion, a complete disregard for the unwritten rules of status on such an enterprise. I had been a runner myself, in 1989, on a BBC Wales television show,
The BBC Guide to Alcohol
. The job had involved coming up to London and loitering backstage at
Top of the Pops
, grabbing the acts and persuading them to do brief interviews with our presenter, Gaz Top. At that time it was an exciting gig for me, as it meant a visit to the very famous set at TV Centre where I noted, like many before me and with clunking predictability, how much bigger it appeared on television. In my increasingly infrequent diary I went on to observe:

I saw Dave Lee Travis, who by the way was carrying a portable phone, as was anyone who was anyone.

These fantastical glimpses of the future – or ‘portable phones’, as I felt they were destined to be called – obviously hadn’t reached Cardiff at this point.

I digress … The runner, with the best will in the world, inhabits the very bottom of the bottom of the food chain. He or she runs, fetches, carries, makes tea, takes tea, fetches tea and then carries tea. They do, up to a point, whatever is asked of them. Many of them go on to occupy positions of power further down the road, but when they run they just run. The good ones are always helpful, polite and above all enthusiastic. The
very
good ones will always do a little more than is asked of them, cleverly making themselves indispensable in the process.

Bleddyn – that’s not his real name (after all, I don’t know what he’s doing now, he might have befriended a very good lawyer and consider my version of events to differ significantly from his own) – was not that sort of runner. He was the sort that quietly chipped away at the fragile veneer of my confidence during rehearsal, with the odd sigh here, a raised eyebrow there. At one point during the production, I made the mistake of asking him what he thought of the show we were making. It was my own fault; I was fishing for compliments.

He didn’t bite. Or, rather, he did. He said it wasn’t really his kind of thing, he preferred stuff like
Blackadder
. Well, so did I! That’s what we were trying to do, stuff that might be as good as
Blackadder
; we weren’t deliberately setting out to make something bad. There was sympathy in his voice too – he was speaking from a position of comedic superiority. One could be forgiven for thinking he’d actually
made
Rowan Atkinson and Co.’s masterpiece, not merely joined the rest of us in watching it.

Anyway, here he was in bloody Greenwich, on the one night that I happened to get up on the stage and suffer a ritual disembowelment. As I approached him, his face twisted into a sympathetic smile that took Schadenfreude to new heights

‘Hiya, Rob! A baptism of fire, eh?’

Bastard.

Five minutes later, I was in the car driving home. Oh my God, I was low. I was devastated. I was traumatized, and I was depressed. By now I was making a very comfortable living with the voice-overs, but on that long drive home I convinced myself that I would never earn another penny through performing, through art, through any branch of show business. I told myself that it would be best to spend none of the money I had saved up; there would be no more coming in. I had been a fool to think that I could be a comedian, an actor, a writer, a voice-over artist, indeed any of the above. I was humiliated and defeated. I really cannot convey to you how desperately low I felt on the drive home.

It was all over. I was bereft.

The morning after has a wonderful way of making what happened the night before seem not so bad; except for when you’ve done something absolutely appalling the night before, in which case the cold light of day just makes things worse. In this instance, it was the former. I resolved to one day return to Up the Creek, be hoisted shoulder-high at the end of my act and then carried through the streets of Greenwich on a triumphant parade of celebration and affirmation, banners twirling and party poppers popping, as those small unfurling paper trumpets are blown hither and yon with gay abandon. And I did. Nearly.

I went back, some months later, more scared than before (if such a state were possible) and proceeded to perform five minutes of material to general disinterest and perhaps the odd lone chuckle. You’d be hard pushed to describe me as a success. But, in my mind, the absence of sheep noises was akin to being presented with an Academy Award.

My ill-concealed glee on leaving the stage must have perplexed anyone watching, leaving them with the impression that I’d somehow set myself spectacularly low standards and then shocked myself at being able to rise to them.

17

My period on the London comedy circuit was mercifully brief. After the first competition gig in Hanwell, I’d come off the stage and been taken aback to be handed a business card by an agent, Paul Duddridge. I wrongly assumed that this happened at every gig and therefore waited a while before calling him, to see who else had been dazzled by my obvious potential. No one had.

A fellow Welshman, Paul saw something in me that others had missed, and he began to arrange a few gigs for me. I played mostly at Ha Bloody Ha in West London, a few times at the Chuckle Club in the West End, and at various Jongleurs outlets. I never made it to the Comedy Store, although I often meet people now who swear they saw me there. At most of these gigs I would go out feeling underprepared. I was lacking in material, and relying on tricks – the impressions and the big finish with the Tom Jones song, which by now was getting longer and longer. Occasionally I would go off script and chat with the audience; these moments would always harvest the biggest laughs, and a feeling began to grow in the back of my mind that this was where I was at my best. Paul would come to the gigs and we would analyse how they’d gone, both agreeing that if I could tap into the kind of humour I produced around friends, when I was just messing about, then we might be on to something. In other words,
be myself
. It was easier said than done.

As I was notching up my modest tally of gigs, I came across a whole host of other comedians also trying to make their way up the ladder. As well as Catherine Tate, I played on bills with Al Murray, Sean Lock, Rich Hall and Mackenzie Crook in his guise of Charlie Cheese. You could never tell who would go on to break through and make it. There were many who stood out as being ones to watch, and it was certainly easy to tell who was going down best in the room that night. But that, in itself, was no indicator of future, wider success – or, to put it another way, who would end up on the telly. I saw acts absolutely own the room at Jongleurs, their audience crying with laughter, struggling to catch their breath, yet these same acts ten or twelve years down the line are still there, still storming it, still living the strangely antisocial late-night life of the circuit comedian.

It was one of the reasons I came to stand-up so late; I would peruse the listings in
Time Out
magazine and read of comedians described as ‘circuit veterans, guaranteed to raise the roof’ and ponder on why, if they were so hilarious, I’d never heard of them. It seemed there was an embarrassment of riches, and I had a great aversion to joining that embarrassment. A large part of it, I’m sure, was a fear of failure: if you don’t join in the game then you can be pretty sure that you won’t lose. So, when I did begin – ever so tentatively – to join the circuit, it was done almost as an experiment while at the same time answering a long-held desire to perform onstage as a stand-up.