Look who it is! (25 page)

I don’t know why I expected television to come knocking. I’m not one of those comedians who took up stand-up comedy solely to get on television. But I get so bored so easily that the thought of just travelling around the country doing my routine in different cities until I died made me feel depressed. Already, I wanted more stimulation.

Edinburgh had in fact the complete opposite effect on my career – my workload had actually gone down. So I found myself at home a lot of the time, and I shouldn’t be left alone in
the house with time to think because that’s what I do: think and think and think. Questions seemed to come out of the ether and buzz about my head like a bluebottle. I started wondering whether I’d made the right decision leaving Barclaycard. Was I good enough as a stand-up? Was that the reason why I wasn’t getting any work? Sitting at home most days, you do wonder why anyone would choose to be unemployed. And believe me, some people do choose. Being off work is so soul-destroying. Everyone else is at work, and what do you have for company?
Diagnosis Murder? Flog It? Cash in
the Attic?
Christ. I’d rather go back to the factories, personally.

My financial position at the time meant that any work that did come in I grabbed with both hands. When I was asked to perform a New Year’s Eve show at Just the Tonic in Nottingham for
£
300, I nearly balked. The money was amazing and for me the equivalent of a fortnight’s stand-up gigs, plus it was New Year’s Eve and everyone would be in high spirits … wouldn’t they?

I arrived at Just the Tonic to find that the other comedians on the bill were Justin Moorhouse and the Voice of the Carphone Warehouse, Ed Byrne. This should be fun, I thought. For some reason, the men urinating in the queue outside and the women with the inflatable cocks chanting ‘Show us your dick’ didn’t register as potential hazards and I walked through the door of the comedy club like a lamb to the slaughter.

‘I’ve never done a New Year’s Eve gig before.’

Ed Byrne and the promoter Darrel Martin smiled knowingly at me. I didn’t take this as a sign either, and carried on
going through my jokes in my notebook while the compere introduced Justin to the stage.

I got suspicious when Justin Moorhouse re-entered the dressing room, looking visible flustered.

‘They’re fucking animals. Just do ten minutes and get off!’ he said to me.

In my arrogance I thought to myself, you can handle this, they’re just excitable because it’s New Years Eve, once I’ve got into my flow they’ll love it. As it happens, the only way I could have controlled that crowd was if I’d mounted the stage on a police horse in full body armour and twatted the pissheads with a baton. They were indeed animals. Now in the early years I used to just go on stage and do my set and try not to get too wrapped up in what was going on externally, but when a woman runs on stage, getting her tits out mid-routine, you have to put the jokes aside and say something. I can’t remember what I said, but whatever it was it didn’t assuage the jeers. If anything they increased. My
£
300 fee was looking more and more like danger money.

Then I felt something hit me on the head and fall to the floor. Someone had wrapped a cork in tin foil and had thrown it at me. I was outraged! I was only trying to make them laugh.

‘Throw it back,’ one rough-looking Nottingham woman screamed. Without a second thought, I picked it up, aimed it and threw it at the gang of lads that the missile had come from. I threw the cork up underarm, it hit a lampshade and fell limply to the floor.

‘YOU THROW LIKE A GIRL!’ YOU THROW LIKE A GIRL!’ the whole crowd chanted. For a split second I was
transported back to Weston Favell Upper School’s playing fields. I couldn’t compete with this and left the stage to cheers, cheers that I was leaving presumably, rather than that they had enjoyed my anecdotal tales of life in a call centre.

After that response I decided to get pissed – hey, it was New Year’s Eve. I got a bit too pissed, however, and the promoter Darrell had given me a bag of party poppers to distribute, which I did. However, he never specified when – I didn’t realise he meant at midnight. I’m sorry to say that the moronic crowd starting popping them all through Ed Byrne’s act. Poor Ed, they were hard enough to control as it was and I hadn’t helped things.

Darrell snatched the bag out of my hand and shouted angrily, ‘What are you doing?’ and I started crying. I didn’t really care, I was just, like the audience, very, very drunk. It was the perfect ending to a perfect night.

* * *

My agent was adamant that I should do the Edinburgh Festival again.

‘It’s the place where stars of the future are spotted,’ Steve proclaimed. ‘It keeps you in the forefront of people’s minds.’

I wasn’t convinced, but then again, what options did I have? No comedy promoters were knocking on my door, BBC Manchester definitely weren’t, and my diary was giving me snow blindness with all its empty white pages. Could I be bothered? Staying up there again on my own, being at the mercy of critics and audiences, wasn’t very tempting, especially
with the real possibility of losing another three grand or more if this show was a turkey. But eventually I decided to go for it again and started writing a new show with a new title. My agent set those all-too familiar wheels in motion – venue, time, accommodation, blah, blah, blah.

And to be fair, it was blah, blah, blah a lot of the time. I arrived up there in the August of 2003. I was performing at the Cavern, right at the rear of the Pleasance Courtyard; it was a sombre venue that resembled a bunker. It was dark and damp and seemed to me no place to perform comedy. Like the previous year, I got good reviews, but unlike the previous year, I wasn’t the new kid on the block any more. The BBC New Comedian of the Year Award had gone to the ventriloquist Nina Conti and her monkey. I didn’t have that all-important hook to draw people in, and some nights it showed. Monday and Tuesday were particularly grim, sometimes as few as twelve, thirteen people would shuffle in to the 120-seater. That was depressing, to say the least, especially when you could see they’d only come in because it was warm.

It was a great show, so I was naturally disappointed about the audience figures. We tried everything, even a two for one. But then people would come with the free ticket and, because they hadn’t invested anything in the show, they would sit there and open sweets loudly, slurp their cola, chat. Thank God the Cavern was so embedded in the ground they couldn’t get a reception on their mobiles, or they’d have been ordering pizzas. I wouldn’t have said I’d do Edinburgh again if I’d known I would feel this underwhelmed.

When I had first arrived, I had sneered over-confidently at Geoffrey from Rainbow’s show across the Courtyard, which was based on his favourite anecdotes about Zippy and George. How shit did I feel? He was selling out every night. People wanted to see him over me, it was like Bungle was giving me the wanker sign – shocking. What could I do to get people through my damp, dank door?

Sometimes I tried unconventional methods, which I’m not proud of. I photocopied a headline from a review of Jimmy Carr’s show – ‘THIS CARR IS THE ROLLS ROYCE OF COMEDY’ – and pasted it on my own poster. He was furious (quite understandably) and was seen in the Pleasance Courtyard yanking them off my posters in a rage. Sorry, Jimmy. I just thought family should stick together.

At the beginning of the week, I used to dread turning up at the venue and seeing how many punters were lining up to come and see me. It was affecting my confidence, especially when I popped to the toilet opposite the Cavern and saw a pile of my flyers in a urinal with someone pissing on my face. It really was the final insult.

It was a pretty grim time for me up there that summer of 2003. That same old feeling came to haunt me, that everyone else was having fun without me, that I’d been left off the all-important guest-list. Even my parents seemed to be enjoying more exciting evenings. My mother had told me that Dad had passed out at the local Chinese restaurant and had had a near-death experience. Initially, I was distraught, but when I learnt the facts, my sympathy started to evaporate.

Ever the prankster, Dad had taken his remote-control fart machine to the restaurant. Unbeknownst to his friend, my father had slipped the sensor into his friend’s pockets, and as his friend had bent over to look at the all-you-can-eat buffet, Dad had pressed the button and a huge fart sounded out across the room – much to the disgust of their fellow diners, but to the huge amusement of my father. Dad couldn’t stop laughing – so much so that he had a whitey and passed out. He slumped forward motionless at the table, and Mum, horrified, started screaming, ‘Graham, Graham!’

Thankfully, it was only for about twenty seconds that Dad was heading towards a bright light. I know it sounds harsh, but a bit of me thinks that it served him right.

* * *

Dad’s near-death experience raised my spirits a little, but it wasn’t enough. Going back to my apartment that night, I rang my agent and said I needed a pick-me-up. He rang round and got me some extra-curricular gigs. If the punters weren’t coming to me, I would go to the punters, and it proved to be just the tonic. Steve and Mary had put my name down for ‘Late N Live’, the dreaded bear-pit I had experienced the previous year. What was I thinking? Underneath all the nerves, I knew I needed this. I needed to prove to myself that I was funny, that my jokes were good enough for people to come to the Cavern and see the show.

I arrived at ‘Late N Live’ at around midnight. I was on at half twelve, and I could hear the roar of the drunken audience
already baiting the acts beyond the dressing-room wall. Daniel Kitson was the compere, and I really wanted to do well in front of him. I’d been so impressed with him the year before and didn’t want to look the second-rate chancer that I was back then. The night started. Daniel went on stage and instantly started getting heckles from the pissed-up crowd. I didn’t really know how I would cope with a heckle. At my show in the Cavern, it was like pulling teeth getting a smile out of them, let alone – heaven forbid! – prompting any banter.

Finally it was my turn and, do you know what? I loved it. Yeah, they started shouting abuse, but although I didn’t say anything witty or Wildean, I held my own. Looking back, I think I could only muster, ‘Oh shut up or I’ll fist you,’ which, strangely enough, seemed to settle them down. I deliberately played it cool. Audiences can smell fear at a thousand yards. One sniff and I would be a goner, so I never let my guard down once. I strode nonchalantly about the stage, looking as if I didn’t have a care in the world, working the audience, which numbered in the hundreds rather than the paltry twenty I’d had to endure most nights.

Why shouldn’t I be up there performing? I had every right to. I persevered, shouting over the pessimistic voice whispering in my ear that I wasn’t a proper comedian. I pumped out my best jokes like a well-oiled machine. I was nearly put off my stride when a rough woman to the left of the stage shrieked ‘Faggot’, but I ignored her and glided nicely to my final joke. I had reached the end of my set – alive – and got a huge cheer for my troubles. I’m ashamed to say that all the
devil-may-care attitude I had tried to muster on the stage evaporated when I screamed out at the end, ‘I’ve survived Late N Live!’ and skipped off. How uncool is that?

My success at ‘Late N Live’ had whetted my appetite for more late night comedy. The wonderful thing about Edinburgh is that it is a melting pot, where comedians good and bad, famous or infamous get thrown together and are forced to rub shoulders under the grimmest conditions. I turned up all excited to one late night comedy in the bowels of the Pleasance Dome. I at first thought that I’d got the wrong night because I couldn’t hear any laughter from the auditorium. Looking through the glass I could see that the audience were agitated and shouting at the tall skinny man with big hair on stage. I shuffled to the back of the auditorium and said to the organiser:

‘Who is he?’

‘Russell Brand,’ he replied.

‘Never heard of him.’

To be fair, Russell was at a bad place in his life that night as he will tell you himself. Back then he hadn’t morphed into the hifaluting, huge-barnetted Victorian persona he is today. At the time you would probably call him ‘late Georgian’.

Probably annoyed with the lack of audience interest, he announced:

‘Do you want to see my cock?’

No one replied but he still got it out and waggled it at the audience. Sadly his penis fell on deaf ears, but who’d have thought that on that very night I would get to see such a celebrated willy? OK, I know I hadn’t joined the most exclusive
club in the world, but nevertheless it provided me with a bit of light relief and an Edinburgh anecdote. I can think of worse things to dine out on than Russell’s willy.

I
went back to Manchester knackered, swearing that I would never go up to Edinburgh again. That was it. Finished. Kaput. Over. On returning, my agents dropped a bombshell – they would be leaving Manchester to go to Ireland, but they would still like to represent me. They reassured me that everything would still be the same as it was, it’s just they’d now be in Ireland.

OK, I thought, everything’s done over the phone and Internet, you can be anywhere in the world these days, and anyway Dublin is a vibrant, funky city with its own comedy scene. So what was I worrying about? The problem was it wasn’t Dublin they were moving to – it was Roonagh Quay in County Mayo, on the other side of Ireland.

I know, I hadn’t heard of it either. Basically they had moved to the last house in Ireland before you get to America. The nearest shop was half an hour away and even that was a Londis.

When I finally visited them in this Roonagh Quay place they spoke of, it was so barren and rugged that, bathed in the late afternoon sun, it looked like the surface of Mars. It was a lovely house, with a beach at the end of the road and fields that seemed to roll on and on for eternity, but it was hardly the
epicentre of the showbiz world. There weren’t any power lunches happening in Roonagh Quay, let me tell you. But I was happy for them, and their son Cormac seemed excited by the surrounding fields and deserted beaches ripe for exploring.