Can't Stand Up for Sitting Down (13 page)

Second Edinburgh, 1989

This year I worked at the
Gilded Balloon with comics Kevin Day and Michael Redmond. We called the show
Sean
Corcoran and Phyllis Holt Present
because I had a character called Phyllis
Holt in one of my jokes at the time, and Michael had a character called Sean
Corcoran in one of his.

Michael
was a lugubrious Irish one-liner merchant whose delivery was slow, measured and
expressionless, whereas Kevin Day was your archetypal London cheeky chappie
whose jokes always had a sting in the tail and belied his laidback style.

We
always performed a little play at the end of the show about Sherlock Holmes,
and our main aim was to get as many puns on the phrase ‘Elementary, my dear
Watson’ as we could. Sounds crap? Dear reader, it was, but we loved it. We
worked our way through A lemon entry’, ‘alimentary’ and many others which
mercifully I cannot remember. Weirdly, though, I do remember, word for word, a
review we got from a student magazine. No, I don’t have a photographic memory.
It seared itself into my brain …

Because
…

a) It
was short

and

b) It
was horrible

The
review stated:
Michael Redmond is Irish, Kevin Day is a cheeky Cockney and
Jo Brand is fat.

And that
was it.

Third Edinburgh, 1990

My third Edinburgh was
also as part of a trio. Patrick Marber, James Macabre and I styled ourselves as
a band, The Holy Cardigans. Each of us did a stand-up bit and came together at
the end as a musical combo. In terms of who did what, the only true musician
amongst us was Jim (James Macabre), who played guitar. Patrick couldn’t play
anything so he had to be the lead singer, and I played keyboards very badly
since having given up the piano when I was twelve, I was pretty crap.

We were
at the Gilded Balloon, in a small sweaty room with a low ceiling. By this point
I was having an on-off relationship with Jim, which didn’t make things particularly
easy He was more serious about the music than me and Patrick, who were just mucking
about. There were many dirty looks slung across the stage as I plodded very
badly through my keyboard part like a depressed Liberace. (Hey! Google him,
kids!)

I
shared a rented flat with Jim and a couple of other comics. There was endless
partying and a constant stream of comics in and out, day and night. Our
downstairs neighbour, a man who I think worked on a building site, must have
been driven mad by it. He used to leave his heavy work boots outside his front
door, and one day someone, on their way down from our flat after a marathon
partying session, strolled past his flat and nicked them.

I
assume this was just some sort of silly prank and not meant maliciously, but
the owner of the boots went absolutely mental. We were woken by the most
terrifying banging on the door at about seven in the morning, to be confronted
by one of the angriest people I have ever seen — and having worked in a
Psychiatric Emergency Clinic, that’s saying something. He was incandescent with
rage and I honestly thought he was going to beat the shit out of us, if not
kill us. Of course, the boys’ attempts to reason with him just added fuel to
the fire, and he left saying that if his boots weren’t back there by the
evening or some money to replace them, he would ‘fucking kill’ us.

I
sheepishly poked some money through his door, praying he was not in and would
not come to the door to ‘thank’ me.

Fourth Edinburgh, 1992

Against my natural
instinct, I was persuaded for my next Edinburgh to strike out on my own, and
was offered an hour in the aforementioned posh-sounding Supper Room at the
Assembly Rooms. I say ‘against my natural instinct’ because I have always
preferred to be on a bill with other comics.

This is
for two reasons.

Firstly,
I am a gregarious person and I like being with other people. This means you can
chat in the dressing room, discuss the audience and all go home together and
get pissed afterwards, whereas the solo gigs I have done tend to have been
rather lonely affairs … especially if I’d had a bad one.

Secondly
doing a show on your own demands so much material — a whole hour or more. Now I
know some stand-ups manage to blah on for ever, but I am not one of them. My
material tends to be fairly spare and one-liner-ish. I envy those comics who
can ramble at will in a conversational style as it seems to fill up much more
time. I was approaching this Edinburgh with, if I’m honest, only forty minutes
of material, and I needed an hour.

So I
decided to pad it out with songs. This wasn’t a great idea for someone who
can’t sing very well. Comedy songs are always a bit risky anyway although if
you incorporate up-to-the-minute topical material, that seems to give them a
bit of a boost.

Subtlety was never my
strong point and the songs used to get big laughs or gasps, either of which was
acceptable to me so that was how it had to be. Weirdly, as I wasn’t
particularly pleased with the show I was doing, I got nominated for the Perrier
Award, a comedy gong for what a panel of judges considered to be the best
stand-up/comedy show.

The
nominees for the award my year were:

Me

Steve
Coogan and John Thomson

Mark
Thomas

Bruce
Morton

John
Shuttleworth (real name Graham Fellows)

I didn’t think I had the
slightest chance of winning but nursed the dream that I would, by some quirk of
fate, receive the ultimate accolade. On the actual night I was unable to attend
the party which I was secretly relieved about, because I’m not a big fan of
awards ceremonies. It’s not that I can’t make a nice face and be genuinely
pleased for the person who has won, I’m happy to do that. There is just
something I don’t like about the atmosphere of them. Normally they are a bit
boring, people are pissed and annoying, and I’d rather be at home watching
telly.

So I
deliberately agreed to a live radio interview on Radio Forth and asked one of
the organisers to give me a ring when the prize was announced at about 11 p.m.
so I knew one way or the other.

Well,
I’m sitting there talking bollocks like one does on those sorts of radio shows
and the clock ticked tortuously past the time of the announcement. I received
no message and then the news came on — at which point they announced that the
winners were Steve Coogan and John Thomson.

I had
known Steve and John for a while by then. I met John Thomson with Mark Lamarr
when we did a gig up in Manchester and he was on the bill. We all did OK. John
was an impressionist at the time but had tried very hard to turn people’s
expectations on their head. For example, he did a very good impression of
Bernard Manning, which started as if he was going to do the usual Manning type
of racist material and have a go at one ethnic group or another, but at the
last minute he would flip it upside down and say he had used the ethnic groups
to illustrate cultural harmony The character’s name was ‘Bernard Right On’.

When I
first met John I found him a bit cocky and irritating. He was really young at
the time, barely twenty and too in-yer-face. However, over the years he’s
turned into a really good laugh, a nice bloke and fun to be with. I don’t see
him that often, but when I do it’s always really great to catch up. I had a
huge laugh with him on
Fame Academy
and I found the tabloid hounding of
him some years ago really distasteful and undeserved. (It’s not like
journalists don’t fill themselves full of booze and drugs, bloody hypocrites.)

I
always thought Steve Coogan was a huge talent right from the kick-off. He was a
brilliant mimic and his characters were marvellous. My favourite was the
student-hating Paul Calf who would slag off anyone and anything in his orbit.

So I
found out I hadn’t won the Perrier Award live on the radio … slightly
disconcerting, but still infinitely preferable to being there. The interviewer
probed for signs of disappointment, envy and homicidal feelings, but to be honest,
there weren’t any I was genuinely pleased for John and Steve whose show was
brilliant —so that was the end of that.

However,
my show sold out every night, and to me that is a better indicator of success
than getting some daft award. Also, at this point, I was beginning to be
recognised on the street by people, and as most people in Edinburgh are pissed
for the whole three weeks of the Festival, they let me know in no uncertain
terms by shouting, trying to kiss me or just aiming some abuse in my direction.
I suppose it was at this point I began to curtail my social life. Whereas
before I had been pretty relaxed about going into any old pub, I now tended to
hang around places that were slightly exclusive like the Assembly Rooms bar,
because you needed some sort of pass to get in. It sounds wanky, I know, but in
all honesty it did make life easier because I knew I would bump into someone
there that I knew and could talk to, and hopefully the sort of people who would
try to ruin my life would not be allowed in.

I chose
to lay off Edinburgh for a bit after that. The pressure of writing enough fresh
material to persuade the critics that I had an entirely new show was too strong
and I decided it was better not to bother.

I did,
however, go up to Edinburgh for a one-off show at the Playhouse a couple of
years later. The Playhouse is massive, seating about 3,000. Mark Lamarr was
compering and there was a line-up of the most fashionable comedians around at
the time. Memories of this show include Mark Lamarr coming on stage with absolutely
no clothes on whatsoever — much to the delight of the audience.

But
sometimes you can die on stage. This might happen to a comic at any time, even
when they are storming the gig and surfing on a wave of undying love. It’s such
a fine line in comedy between laughs and boos sometimes, and it all hinges on
such trivial things.

I made
a big mistake in Scotland one night. A two-part gig to raise money for charity
had been arranged so that a set of comics did two gigs, one in Edinburgh and
one in Glasgow on the same night. It’s about a forty-five minute trip between
the two. I did Edinburgh first and then hopped in a car and set off for
Glasgow. Glasgow audiences are mythically difficult and there have been many
legends about comics dying horrible deaths at the Glasgow Empire. It did not
exist by the time my generation got round to working in Glasgow, but the
residual fear still remained.