Look who it is! (23 page)

The problem with having such an eclectic mix on stage is the fact that you are only as good as the acts you book, and for every Hamilton/escapologist/sex scandal night there would be a ropy one. Yes, I could come on stage and do my monologue at the top, do my topical jokes and spoofs, but when it came to the other acts it was out of my hands. One night which was a disaster was the one after the success of the Hamiltons. We’d had escapologists, ventriloquists, dancers and singers, so I needed something a bit different. Then it came to me: a clairvoyant! Now that’s different and hasn’t been done before. What a great idea! I got Heidi in the Comedy Store office to ring round, and before long we had found a comedy psychic. Wonderful!

Sunday came and the audience were buzzing, expecting another great night of entertainment. My psychic turned up in good time, which was a relief. He was unassuming but nervous – and quite rightfully so, as he’d never done clairvoyancy at a comedy club before. This was his first time, and after what I witnessed on that stage it would be his last.

All the other acts had gone down really well, everyone was all excited for the headliner, so I went on stage and introduced him. The crowd whooped and cheered, and I left him to do his thing. As usual when the headliner was on, I headed to the dressing room, packed up my stuff, signed the acts’ contracts,
folded up the costumes and basically pottered about till it was time to have a glass of wine.

‘Heidi, have you turned the volume down on this telly?’

There was no laughter coming from the backstage television which shows what’s happening on stage.

‘No, I haven’t touched it,’ she said.

I pressed the volume button. It was up to the maximum.

‘Shit.’ I ran out the dressing room, up the stairs and pressed my ear to the stage door.

‘Boo! Get off. Wanker!’ It wasn’t going well at all. I could see on the television and hear through the door that he was getting through to the other side, but the messages they were giving him weren’t going down too well in the land of the living.

‘Please, watch out for buses … You won’t make it to your thirties … Your dad’s with me and he’s in a lot of pain’ were just some of the gems he was telling the audience. I could see some people were walking out. One woman had shouted, ‘You’re sick,’ before grabbing her handbag and storming off.

I came back on stage. I couldn’t leave him out there to dry. You never know, with me out there on stage it might pacify the crowd and inject a bit of well-needed humour into the proceedings. I came on to a cheer and asked the audience to be patient and let the psychic carry on, and for a few minutes they calmed down.

He then wheeled out a white board and said, ‘I can also analyse handwriting. Please, someone, anyone, write something on the board, and I will use my supernatural powers to analyse it.’

This young man came up to the stage, took the marker pen and wrote on the board, ‘You’re shit!’

Well, that did it! Half of the audience roared with laughter, the other half got up to leave. They’d had enough, and to be fair I don’t blame them. I quickly said the psychic’s name, declared the evening over and watched forlornly as the audience started to filter out, muttering. I don’t blame the psychic – that’s why I haven’t put his name down here. I blame myself. Just because you are told that you can have a night where ‘anything goes’, it doesn’t mean that you can have ‘anything’. I misjudged the evening, and should have realised that punters who have paid their money and come deliberately to the Comedy Store for a laugh may not want to be told about their dead relatives and when they are going to die.

* * *

Although the Edinburgh Fringe Festival takes up all of August, if you want to take a show up to the Festival the decision to go must be made by February at the latest. You need to tell them the title of the show and a short synopsis of what it’s about. This must be finalised in February, which is ridiculous because most of the comedians I know haven’t even started writing their shows at that time, let alone know what the bloody thing is going to be about. What I always do is pick a title that is so oblique that it could encompass the meaning of life, the beginning of the universe and the essence of ‘being’. Then whatever I write can fit nicely in between those brackets. One year I chose ‘Me ’Ead’s Spinnin’. But
why was my head spinning? Hmm! Complex. No, actually, it just sounded quite funny, and I’d let the critics read into it what they wanted.

Although I never got paid for my ‘Ice Cream Sundays’, we never made a profit – don’t laugh! What I’d been doing unintentionally was having to write new material each month to fill up the compere bits, so I was clearing a fresh twenty minutes every month. Now, faced with having to fill an hour at the Festival, this material was heaven-sent. I could cherry-pick the best bits of my monologues and add them to my routine and cunningly wind them into a story. All I needed was the story.

It wasn’t long before my prayers were answered, and God moves in mysterious ways, he even rides on the number 43 bus up Oxford Road because that’s when he answered them. A grubby teenage girl with scruffy hair and a donkey jacket got on the bus. She didn’t sit down on the copious amount of empty seats that surrounded her on the bus, which I thought was strange, she just stood there distracted. When the bus stopped at a designated stop, she grabbed an old lady’s handbag and ran for the door. The quick-thinking bus driver closed the door and it jammed on her neck.

‘I’ve got Asthmaaaaaarrrrr! I’ve got Asthmaaaaaarr,’ she croaked in her broad Manc accent. She managed to squeeze through the door with the handbag and ran off, while some passengers on the bus braver than me took chase. I did my bit and rang the police.

‘An elderly lady has just had her handbag stolen off the bus outside the University on Oxford Road. The assailant is
being chased by some of the passengers. She is a teenager …’ I continued my description.

She told me to hold. I waited about thirty seconds.

‘What’s your name?’ she asked. ‘Can I have your mobile number? Where are you?’

‘On the Curry Mile, outside the Sangam,’ I replied.

‘Wait a minute!’ she said suspiciously. ‘A moment ago you said you were at the University on Oxford Street.’

‘I was. I’m still on the bus.’ What the police officer had thought were gaps in my story were actually the bus stops I was passing through.

The whole robbery and chat to the police officer had not only jolted my sensibilities as a law-abiding citizen, it had jolted my imagination. As I have always done, I took inspiration from what on the surface was a pretty grim situation, neutralised it, and decorated it with comic touches and,
voilà
, a comedy routine for all the family to enjoy. I used most of what happened that day; fact is stranger than fiction, and it’s also funnier.

Audiences have this amazing sixth sense where they can tell if a comedian is bullshitting them. They allow you to be a bit liberal with the truth, but if they get a whiff of an outright lie they can be horribly unforgiving. As soon as I got home I started writing the whole scenario down and using it as a basic framework and hooking certain jokes onto certain events. Obviously, I allowed myself a little artistic licence, and the conversation took on a more humorous tone.

‘There’s a woman who’s been mugged. A girl grabbed her handbag, pushed her on the floor and ran off.’

‘Do you want police, fire or ambulance?’

I was that close to being sarcastic, but I thought, ‘No, there’s a woman lying on the floor dying. The last thing she needs is a lifeboat turning up.’

A healthy dose of over-exaggeration can do wonders for even the most tired routines, and there is nothing more satisfying than watching it fit into place and seeing the beginnings of a new routine start emerging from the page before your very eyes. My home life was becoming a rich breeding ground for material. Pauline’s pink hair and piercings, I’m afraid, were not figments of my imagination, but harsh realities. The mild, timid little doormouse that had walked through the door all those months ago had evolved into a feisty, confrontational tigress. If anyone did not do their washing up, they would wake up to find their dirty dishes outside their door with an abusive note in broken English pinned to their door.

One morning I came down the stairs to see Ruth and Eva shaking their heads on the porch. On closer inspection we found an A4 piece of paper with ‘Which Son of Bitch steal my Shampoo? No Shampoo, no electricity!’ We assumed she meant that she wouldn’t be paying the electricity bill, rather than climbing up on the roof and cutting any cables. We were all horrified at this note. I don’t know whether we were more shocked by the language or the fact that we would want to steal and use any shampoo that would leave our hair in as bad a condition as the straw crash helmet she called a ‘do’.

As it happens, we were all innocent of such a heinous crime. The bottle of shampoo had fallen down behind the sink. I think it had thrown itself down there to avoid making contact with her hair, but that’s another matter. The next
morning there was another A4 piece of paper pinned to the front door with ‘Sorry!’ on it, but after that she kept a low profile, eating up in her room and laughing raucously to
You’ve Been Framed!
She used to love that programme; unlike the rest of the nation, she never used to be able to tell what was going to happen next. A man on a stepladder painting, next to a closed door, she would seriously be surprised when the door opens and he’s knocked off the ladder and the tin of paint falls on his head. She would burst out laughing, completely shocked at the turn of events. I would love to say that her innocent childlike humour was magical, but I found her howls of laughter irritating. After you’ve seen three videos of a cat jumping up to flush a toilet, you get the gist. I would retire to my room indignant.

The preparations for my first-ever full Edinburgh show were proceeding nicely. ‘Me ’Ead’s Spinning’ had been accepted by the board who run the Festival, and my time slot and venue had been confirmed – 9.30 to 10.30 p.m. at the Pleasance Upstairs just off the Pleasance Courtyard, the true hub of the Festival. Wandering around the cobbled square, you are likely to see famous comedians mingling with punters, promoters flyering frantically, and if you’re really unlucky, hear people slagging off your show.

I got on the train at Piccadilly station in Manchester with my suitcase. I knew I’d be away for a month so I packed everything. Dreading what people would say, I packed lots of ‘comfort’ things – my Aretha Franklin albums, photos of my family and Rennies. I knew it was going to be tough, and I wanted these things around me.

The journey up to Scotland was all right. I had my Walkman and listened to that, not because I wanted to listen to the music, but to drown out the inane chatter of a student Drama group behind me, poisoning the atmosphere with their hoity-toity witterings. How quickly I had defected. A few years ago it would have me in a lime green leotard talking with affected camp about Stanislavski, and now I was tutting loudly and turning the volume up so high my ears bled.

There was so much to worry about. Would anyone turn up? If they did turn up, would they like it? What would the critics say? Where was I staying in Edinburgh? That last question was answered more quickly than the other ones, as I was taken straight there when the train pulled up at Waverley station. My agents Steve and Mary had done well, my accommodation was this beautiful apartment on the third floor of this old town house with huge windows that overlooked the Royal Mile at the front and the graveyard of Canongate Kirk at the rear.

I must admit I was a bit alarmed at the graveyard, but it hadn’t been used for a while and a lot of the graves dated back to the 1700s, ancient enough not to arouse thoughts of your own mortality. It was well maintained and, strange as it sounds, I found the graveyard quite relaxing. I would often open the window and sit with a cup of tea and absorb the silence. The serenity was only disturbed a few times by goths having a fumble behind a gravestone, but more often than not it was just the chirping of the birds and my thoughts.

My bedroom at the front of the apartment was above the Royal Mile. At first, it was quite thrilling, living on the same road as the Palace of Holyroodhouse, the Queen’s residence
when she’s ever in this neck of the woods. But the thrill lost its sparkle as I was awoken every morning by a double-decker tourist bus stopping outside my house. The top deck of the bus was parallel with my window, so every morning I would be woken up by the same piece of historical trivia.

‘Robert Burns visited Canongate Church in 1780 to look for the grave of …’

Every morning Robert Burns would haunt my morning dreams. It would be the first thing I’d hear as my head laid on the pillow. On the first morning I got out of bed to see who the fuck was shouting historical facts through my window, and I was greeted by a bevy of German tourists in cagoules staring through my window. I had a good mind to greet them every morning dressed as Robert Burns and tell them to ‘Tak the high rood’.

In Edinburgh you have previews of your show for the first few days just so you can get your show in order, get used to the stage and iron out any creases that may still linger in your routine, but after that you’re on your own. ‘Me ’Ead’s Spinning’, I’m proud to say, was a success. It never won the Perrier, but then again that never appealed to me. It was a success on my own terms. I never cancelled a performance because no audience members had turned up, I never got an awful review, no one walked out of my show. All these fears that had clung to me on the train journey up to Scotland never materialised. I had survived intact and, as Edinburgh’s standards go, that was enough to say your show had been a triumph. To be honest after the first week I got bored and was starting to count the days to when I could return home. The Edinburgh
Festival is too long, if you ask me, and halfway through the run the paradise turned into purgatory – a whole month trapped in a city full of Drama students and poets, unable to escape because you have to perform for one hour in the evening. I felt like a dog on one of those extendable leads. Even the endless socialising and drinking at all the after-hours bars can get monotonous, same old faces, same old hangovers. The exhilaration I had felt the previous year had been replaced by boredom, mainly due to the fact that I had stayed too long, and was beginning to see the sawdust beneath the sparkle.