I Used to Say My Mother Was Shirley Bassey (25 page)

I went up to Edinburgh every year for ten years in a row because it's such great fun. It's a comedy summer camp for big kids and it's even a kind of comedy workshop where you learn a lot. It's the first place that comics have to perform an hour show, because in clubs around the UK, unless you're the compere, you can quite happily get by on doing tight twenty-minute sets. Plus there's an unwritten rule that every year you go to Edinburgh you have to present a new show, so without the Festival to spur you along you might just stop writing.

It's not just your own gigs that you do. Lots of comics take part in plays as well. I remember one year there was a production of
12 Angry Men
showing and I was desperate to be in it. It's about a jury deliberating the fate of a black defendant so I thought I was quids in to play the defendant. I got my hopes up. I got my agent to call them. I was beginning to get a bit hacked off that no one was getting back to me so I went out and bought the play. The whole thing takes place in the jury deliberating chamber and you don't even get to see the black guy. It's supposed to be an artistic look at the dynamics of racism, and no black guys are involved. Typical!

It's not just comics up in Edinburgh. You get all sorts of performers and living works of art pounding the streets in August. The world's most pierced woman can often be seen on the Royal Mile fighting her way through the street performers. The circus normally comes to the Spiegel tent where you can see seriously sexy and astonishingly lithe artists getting up to no good. One unforgettable year
La Clique
ruled the festival from there, with their performances nightly followed by a full-on swing dance club-night spectacular. You'd get in free if you came in fifties dress and the troupe would always come down on the floor to jive-dance with the audience until the early hours.

There are some unforgettable people and venues that you encounter year after year. The Gilded Balloon holds its own as one of the big four venues and Karen Koren has been running it since the beginning. She always manages get the rowdy crowds and comics into her venue with the world-famous
Late 'n' Live
, her rambunctious after-hours comedy club. If Scotland had a hurricane season then she would be the hurricane. You'd see her in the old Gilded Balloon, the one that burned down in 2001, at
Late 'n' Live
, drinking a glass of white wine and shouting, ‘Get off! You doughnut!' with the rest of the boys. It's probably because comedians are creatures of instinct and habit that they keep coming back to be heckled year on year, but also it might have something to do with the fact that Karen never disappoints to set up the best bars at the festival. It can turn into a land of booze hounds and cougars until the wee hours and, when nobody had the money to pay for the drinks, I'd hoped Karen would forgo the bill and put it down to karma.

The Gilded Balloon was my home away from home for years and Karen made me the resident host of
Late 'n' Live
on Sundays for years. Some extraordinary things happened on that stage, but I'll never forget losing at a near-naked wrestling match with Daniel Kitson. I still can't believe I lost.

It was outside the Gilded Balloon that I had one of my favourite Edinburgh experiences of all time. After the original Gilded Balloon suspiciously burned down, Karen moved it to new premises in a quirky gothic castle on the huge Bristo Square at the top of the Old Town. It is notable because it's very picturesque, its toilets stink to high heaven (to prohibit cocaine use perhaps) and it has a very overactive fire alarm system.

There was one time when I was halfway through my set and the alarm went off, demanding noisily that everyone evacuate immediately from the building. The next thing you know a thousand people were outside in the vast Bristo Square, milling around in the dark and lamely wondering if and when they'd be allowed back into the venue. I had been on a great roll in my show and I just didn't want to stop, so I got an upturned crate and continued with the gig out there in the square.

The Gilded Balloon has dozens of performance rooms but most of them hold about two hundred people maximum, but now the square was bursting with the audiences from all the shows that had been running in the building. So I had a huge crowd to play to and it was bloody brilliant. Using all of my lungs, I kept the show going to thousands of people and when the other comics saw what I was doing they wanted in on the action. That night we turned Bristo Square into an al fresco free-for-all comedy club featuring Daniel Kitson, Jimmy Carr and Mitch Benn among many others.

In Edinburgh, people sing and tell stories at late-night impromptu gigs. Fights and pints are cheerfully exchanged in a city that has turned the ‘local' vibe to perfection. Arthur Smith still does his midnight city tours in spite of the rain and the odd arrest. I saw a dwarf on roller skates being pulled along by his cock. I saw a couple strip and leap into the sea and swim. I saw a seagull fight a man for a chip and win. You see a lot if you keep your eyes open. And if you do well you could get the chance to play at other international festivals.

After Edinburgh, the best festival going is the Melbourne International Comedy Festival in Australia. What makes it amazing is the audience. Australian audiences are very similar to UK audiences. They are savvy, smart and know how to take the piss out of themselves. Even the rednecks know they're redneck and play up to it. Over there they call them ‘bogans' and no matter who you are you'll be amazed at what they come out with.

I went to a typical Ozzy barbecue last time I was there and the topic of gay marriage came up. I braced myself when the bogan host stood up. But he surprised everyone when he said, ‘I don't see the problem with gay marriage. I think it's great. Because if you're gay and you're married then you can bash each other! And no one ends up in court!' He went on, ‘I don't understand how they can use religion as a reason to ban gay marriage. Religion is full of holes. Take the anti-abortionists. I was listening to talk radio the other day and this priest comes on and says, “Abortion is morally wrong.” I thought, I'm not having this so I called up the station and spoke to him. I said, “Say your daughter is raped . . . I mean theoretically.” They cut me off, Steve, but that's the kind of question I'd ask anybody.'

Then his wife piped up. ‘Don't you know that's an inappropriate question to ask a priest? What were you thinking? Priests aren't allowed to have any children!'

‘Oh yeah. I heard that the Catholic Church doesn't want priests to have kids. But that's just because when a priest dies they don't want any kids to inherit their wealth and their houses. So the Church can just take it back. This has been going on for years and years. Don't you know how rich the Church is? Of course, they are. Cos property prices have gone up a lot since the sixteenth century. Think about it.' Australians are wonderful people.

There are a handful of other good festivals too but for some reason none in the States. I don't know why, but maybe it's because Americans are really polarized and a joke that one person finds funny in New York might get you shot in Alabama. So Americans travel all around the world to see comedy and you always bump into big groups of them.

I met an American couple at a show and afterwards they come up and they were
lovely;
they get a photo and an autograph, but after a minute of two they start looking uncomfortable and trying to get away from me. I said to them, ‘Why are you in such a hurry?'

‘Stephen! We're seeing eight shows today! You're number five and we've got to get to the next one. I half expected them to shout: Go! Go! Go! USA! USA! USA!', before diving into the crowd and army crawling to the next gig.

That's one kind of American. The worldly kind. There is also the other kind who look a bit bewildered being outside of their own country. A bit like deer caught in headlights. I ran into a couple of Americans like that in Edinburgh a couple of years ago. They were easy to spot as Americans because they were large and they were wearing bin bags. A note of advice to the world: Scottish people who live in a country where it rains all of the time will prefer to get wet rather than wear a disposable poncho and I recommend that you do the same.

I couldn't help but have a bit of fun with these Americans. It was a few years ago, when I had my face on the side of some of the black taxicabs to advertise my show. The saw me, recognized my face and came up to me, pointing up at the glistening spires of the Old Town and said, ‘Excuse me, sir! Excuse me! Up there in the distance. Is that Edinburowow Castle?'

I couldn't help it. I said, ‘No, my dear lady. That is Gotham City!'

They said, ‘Oh my God. How do you know so much?'

I said in my finest Nigerian accent. ‘Lady, I am the last king of Scotland.' And went to hail one of my cabs. The moment was somewhat ruined because, did the fucking cab stop? No, it did not. Some things never change . . .

S
OME PEOPLE ASK ME WHAT
it's like to do comedy live on stage night after night and all I can tell you is that it's a completely unique experience. Not everyone can do it and you have to have a thick skin. You can't do it in front of a mirror at home and it's not the same doing it in front of your friends or family. To get behind a microphone and build a rapport with a room full of strangers who don't know who you are is a nightly challenge and it's a sink-or-swim kind of situation.

If you survive the feeling is like nothing else in the world and you're high as a kite for hours afterwards. If you fail there is nothing that can get you out of a venue more quickly – and I can guarantee that there's nobody in the club who'll want to run after you to rub your back and save your feelings. You're just a bloke on stage who thinks he's funny and the crowd can warm to you or they can chew you up and spit you out unceremoniously.

There is a common misconception that heckles make a show. Believe me, any good comic worth his salt does have a set that he would like to deliver heckle free! In the UK, people love to get stuck into you but thankfully you are the man with the mic, and with experience, should have the ability to put a heckler down like a ton of bricks. If you can survive a good heckle then you can get an audience back on side. However, sometimes heckles are funny and can totally get under the comics' skin.

I was doing a gig in York and a newbie act was on stage. He wasn't having the best gig of all time. The crowd weren't going for it and, to make matters worse, someone had brought a newborn baby to the gig. Nobody was laughing, and all that could be heard in between the flailing comic's attempts at gags was the sound of this little baby gurgling and sniffling. Eventually, he said to the crowd in exasperation, ‘Who brings a newborn baby to a gig?' and someone else in the audience shouted, ‘Maybe she's trying to get it to sleep!' Everyone laughed their heads off and so did the comic. But he never gigs in York any more.

You can't let the crowd take control of the performance because if you give them a bit of power then they (of course) misuse it. There was one particularly harrowing time at the Edinburgh Fringe when I witnessed a performer crumbling into a thousand pieces. Admittedly, this occurred at
Late 'n' Live
which is well known as a no-holds-barred beer-throwing gig and many comics go there after their own shows to heckle each other.

Some totally unscripted and memorable things have happened during that show, but I was once witness to an event that nightmares are made of. I suppose it must have started as one of those ‘good idea at the time' moments that spiralled out of control. A journalist had decided to have a go at doing
Late 'n' Live
and then write an article about it afterwards. It was a publicity stunt. But it's the sort of thing that's going to really get up the nose of other comics. The fact of the matter is, stand-up's not easy and not anybody can do it. A great comic just makes it look easy, and there's a difference.

So this guy was going to do the comics' comic gig and he let it be announced beforehand that he was trying out an experiment. A bolshy move, but actually kind of an insult to the whole profession if you think about it. It would be like me going up to a journalist and saying, ‘What? You're just pushing bits of paper around all day. Any dickhead can do that.' (Something I would never do.) Unsurprisingly, nobody gave him the slightest break. He'd decided to jump into a shark tank after cutting himself just to get them into a feeding frenzy.

So picture the scene. This excited journo steps onto the stage with a piece of paper in his hands and announces that he's going to try out a few jokey jokeys from a list (he'd probably meticulously prepared). He gamely launches into his first gag and he gets absolutely nothing. Props to the audience for even allowing him to get out his first attempt at a joke but by jokey jokey number two the whole crowd were shouting out, ‘Boo! You're shit,' ‘Fuck off! TAXI!' and the best of all: ‘You killed Diana!'

As many people would react when faced with abuse from a room full of strangers, he didn't handle things well. You could actually see any mojo that he ever had drain out of him, and he started channelling the persona of Ed Miliband on ketamine. Any normal person would have fled for the exit as fast as humanly possible, but he actually tried to continue with the list. There were cries of ‘Not the list,' and the perverse encouragements of ‘Yes! The list!' as the smell of impending death seized the hyena-like crowd. At one point, a truly surreal moment, he started to utter animal noises as if his human consciousness had retreated right back into the base of his brain (who could blame it) and his monkey brain was coming to the rescue.

He managed to keep his head high until he did something that you shouldn't do. He called an audience member a fat bastard. Not a serious insult by any means but there's an unwritten rule that says you can't swear at people in the crowd. You can say anything you like to humiliate an audience member. You can embarrass them in front of their friends so badly that they'll never live it down and their wife and children will leave them and change their names. But you can't swear at them, especially if you're getting no laughs. That's the biggest no-no. After all, they've paid money so the crowd really turned on him: the compere came out to try and take control of the crowd. But the journalist had not got through his full set and so the compere had to fill in the dead time before the next act. Guess what the hot topic of conversation was? The Scottish weather? The differences between men and women? No, it was how unutterably shit this guy had been.