Can't Stand Up for Sitting Down (6 page)

The
upshot of this was that the production company asked me to come back two days
later and do some more material, as the pathetic amount I’d produced was not
enough for my allotted slot on telly.

Knowing
that all my material had been used up, this meant that the material I’d have to
do two days later would all have to be new stuff. This was terrifying, because
normally new material takes at least five live shows to work in and to give you
the chance to dump stuff which is crap. I didn’t have the luxury of this time
available so I had to write some stuff and do it for the very first time in
front of an audience of 3,000 people whilst being filmed for telly What a
fucking nightmare. So off I went two days later to the theatre and just trotted
it out to the best of my ability Lenny Henry was compering, the audience was up
for a good night and thank God, on the whole the material worked. It didn’t storm
it, but I would never have expected it first time out and I was just relieved
that they didn’t stare at me for fifteen minutes without laughing.

One
concept comics are very familiar with is that of ‘getting on a roll’. This is
when the audience seems to laugh continuously throughout the whole performance,
and as the laugh dies down from one joke or remark it starts to build up for
the next bit. Not only do they laugh at punch lines, they laugh at the build-up
to jokes as well. It’s a glorious thing to be a performer in a show like that.
It doesn’t happen all the time and on many occasions you get a sort of
stop/start response to your jokes. Laugh-silence-laugh-silence is the pattern,
and once it’s been set up it’s hard to break. ‘I never really got on a roll,’
is the lament of many a comic at a difficult gig.

Encores
are always lovely too, but it’s important not to expect them. There’s nothing
better as you walk off stage than to hear huge applause, and then the shouts
start to build gradually for ‘More!’ until they become a roar and feet are
stamped too, and it’s so great to go back on and bask in it. It doesn’t always
happen, but I suppose it is always the aim of the comic to get as many encores
as possible. I think Billy Connolly is the King of the Multiple Encore. The
most I’ve had is three.

I discovered information
about each town I performed in by reading the
Rough Guide to Great Britain,
and
during the gig I would tell the audience, ‘Well, the Fucking Rough Guide in
your case.’ Worked every time!

Basingstoke

Very hung over after a
night in Hastings the night before. Had to stare straight in front of me on
stage to avoid being sick.

Bedford

Bedford has a delightful
entry in the
Rough Guide to England
which states,
The town need not
detain you.
I’m sure the people of Bedford are mighty impressed by that.

My
favourite night at Bedford involved the sound and lighting man being quite
pissed and falling over onto his desk, cutting the sound and lights at the same
time. It was a real
Carrie
moment and I was expecting a bucket of blood
on my head at any second. As well as this, a woman in the audience asked me to
sign one of her bosoms: something that has never happened before or indeed
since. She informed me that she wanted to show it to her husband.

‘Where’s
he tonight then?’ I asked.

‘In the
nick,’ came her reply.

Birmingham

Birmingham is always a joy
People are friendly welcoming and happy to see you. It’s always lovely to get a
really big cheer when you come on, with no holds barred. Many towns and cities
withhold their initial reaction until they’ve had a look at the goods.

Birmingham
is also under the jurisdiction of King Jasper Carrott who, every year, does a
huge show at the NEC (12,000 seats — ooer!) There is normally a cavalcade of
interesting stars and I worked with Jack Dee, Dame Edna, Manfred Mann and some
sweeties off
The X Factor.
Someone attempted a rather over-intimate
massage to relax me before the show (he was actually a professional masseur),
and I left the massage area as soon as was humanly possible.

Brighton

Vibrant, cool and good
fun. The Dome in Brighton is the only time a rather disturbed punter found
their way back stage and demanded to be put on the show to do five minutes.
Typically, John the tour manager was right over the other side of the building,
but I managed to phone someone called Joe from Off the Kerb and leave a
message. Atypically, Joe called me back just at a critical moment when this
bloke’s face was about an inch away from mine. Not only that, he’d obviously
not realised quite how disturbed this guy was and was laughing uproariously at
the end of the phone, saying, ‘Shall we give him five minutes? Do you think
he’s any good?’ I was terrified that the intruder would hear what he was saying
and deck me, but thankfully, at that moment John appeared behind me and our
friend was ‘escorted from the premises’, as the euphemism goes.

A
slightly more pleasant experience involved Sir Ian McKellen, with whom I took
part in a benefit at the Dome. I was sitting at the mirror in the dressing room
back-combing my hair to produce The Bride of Frankenstein look, which I loved
in the eighties, and Sir Ian went past. Spotting me doing my hair, he said,
‘Ooh, can I do that?’

And he
did — the one and only time I’ve ever had an acting legend sort my hair out for
me.

Bristol

I love Bristol. One of my
first big gigs was in a venue called the Bierkeller, which was obviously a
music venue. The dressing room contained one of those wrecked, scuzzy settees I
have already mentioned, and the stage was carpeted and looked well manky. It
was. When I stepped on it my feet stuck to it as if they had been glued and
each step towards the mic was accompanied by a tearing sound as I tried to lift
my foot off the carpet. The audience was enthusiastic and drunk.

You can
tell how long ago it was because I had some material about the Chippendales,
the delightful male dancers/strippers who were flavour of the month back in the
early nineties. As I progressed through my little five-minute routine on the Chippendales,
a voice heckled from the back in a perfect West Country accent:

‘They’re
all queer, they are.’ Well, there were still a few steadfast pockets of
homophobia round the country.

‘How do
you know that?’ I asked.

The
reply came, again in that gorgeous accent. ‘I ‘eard it down the Colston ‘All.’

The
Colston Hall was a venue a little distance away that was bigger and I hadn’t
quite progressed to it by that point. But I was interested in the fact that it
seemed to be the fount of all knowledge on sexuality Years later, I actually
made it to the Colston Hall and related this event to the audience, asking
them, ‘How do you know?’

A voice
floated back across the crowd, ‘We just do.’

Bromsgrove

Bromsgrove is a little
town lying just outside Birmingham. I came out of the dressing room to stand
outside on the pavement just as three police cars, sirens blaring, swept up. I
immediately, of course, thought they were after me. They weren’t. One of the
theatre staff had laid into a female relative outside the stage door. A very
surreal night indeed.

Cambridge

Oooh, posh as you like in
Cambridge, comrades. Tried to get the audience to guess what my ‘wife leader’
was. (It’s a woven stick with an elasticated end to attach to your wife’s
finger and lead her round by, used in the Caribbean 300 years ago.) Fantastic
woman in front row threw out the suggestion, ‘Is it a cassava juice extractor?’
Blimey, what sort of kitchen shops do you have in Cambridge?

Cheltenham

Cheltenham is dead posh,
no doubt about that. Performing at the Town Hall is like being in a museum,
surrounded as you are by marble busts of various luminaries, giving the whole
thing a bit of an historical feel. This doesn’t mean that the audience are
staid and stuffy, even though they look it a bit, and any trawl I have done
through the local papers there has always been good fun, obsessed as they seem
to be with parking and dog poo. Oh, the great British sensibilities — you can’t
beat ‘em!

Derby

Derby seems to me like a
bit of a scary old town. The gigs I have done there have always been good,
apart from having a bomb-scare at one all-women’s gig from a disgruntled male
punter. However, there is a street in Derby which is full of pubs and clubs,
all the doors fiercely guarded by bloody massive bouncers in dicky bows and
evening jackets. (Always seems so weird to me that they are dressed up posh yet
ready to punch your lights out.) After a show one night we went down this
particular street to have a Chinese, and just walking down it terrified the
life out of me. I take my hat off to anyone who is brave enough to actually go
and have a whole night out there.

Hastings

My home town, where I grew
up as a teenager. Always a pleasure to be there, despite receiving a letter in
the dressing room once, saying:

Dear Miss Brand,

Please do not come back to Hastings again.

Yours faithfully etc etc.

I
recently did a benefit for my nephew’s football changing hut which had been
burned down, and took the piss out of a bloke’s hair in the second row, without
realising it was my brother’s mother-in-law’s bloke.

Note to
self:
wear glasses on stage.

Ipswich and Norwich

I have put these two
cities together, not because they are particularly similar but because they
suffer the misfortune of being in an area of the country which, for comedy
reasons, is full of interbred people and very flat, and therefore the
inhabitants doubtless are regaled endlessly with jokes about cousins marrying,
fingers in dykes and being able to see your friends standing fifty miles away
Consequently, I steered well clear of this when I was up there. They didn’t
seem particularly grateful though.

Leicester

By the time we hit the
brand new pristine council venue in Leicester, the smoking ban had kicked in
big time and there were signs everywhere demanding
No Smoking
throughout
the venue. It was in Leicester that we experimented with the idea of putting a
condom over the smoke alarm. Worked a treat.

Maidstone

Maidstone, sorry, you had
the worst toilets of any theatre 1 have ever been to, and the dressing room
wasn’t much better. It seemed rather fitting then that I forgot my smart shoes
and had to wear flip-flops on stage instead.

Manchester

I’ve performed in
Manchester loads of times. The audiences there tend to be cynical, clever and
discerning. I made a huge faux pas at the Free Trade Hall once, which
interestingly was the scene of Bob Dylan’s metamorphosis from acoustic to
electronic music, during which a member of the audience called out ‘Judas!’ I
came close to knowing how that felt.

At the
time, our tour manager John was doing some security work and had a bullet-proof
vest in the boot of the car. So for a laugh (how much trouble has that phrase
prefaced?) I put the vest on, and when I went on stage, remarked that I was
wearing it because we were quite close to the notorious crime area of Moss
Side. BIG MISTAKE. The booing started at the back and swept forward in a great
tidal wave towards me.

Bloody
hell, I thought. I’m going to have to get off now and I’ve only just come on.

The
only thing for it was to apologise, which I did, and it seemed to pour oil on
troubled waters. The audience accepted it and I carried on, and getting to the
end of the hour, I felt that I had managed to claw the evening back. However,
it taught me the lesson that some towns and cities do not like having parts of
their whole having the piss taken out of them, and it’s important to know which
those places are.