I found myself driving into the sunset, but it was not the end of anything. Far from it. The first of more than 30 gigs all over the country in the next two months was thankfully not too far afield. I was heading down the M3 for a gig at the Theatre Royal in Winchester.
I first played this venue with the Oxford Revue in 1988, as part of our limited tour of "Waving at the Pigeons". It was the happiest date of a rather sad and frustrating run, culminating in a horrible experience of being bullied and pilloried in Edinburgh. But in Winchester we had sold out and the audience loved us and the show. We were in a proper theatre and everything was going well and it gave me the faint hope that maybe one day I'd be doing this as a job. There was even an autograph hunter waiting for us outside, who I would imagine got pretty much the only programme in existence signed by everyone in that cast (myself, TV's Emma "Williams" Kennedy, Ben Moor, future Sunday Mirror Sex Doctor, Catherine Hood and Ben Pope).
Indeed 21 years later, here I was again. I have been back once in the interim - I think for Talking Cock or Hercules, but I can't find mention of it in Warming Up.
In any case it gave me a special kick to be back again and though it wasn't a sell out, there were lots of people in, though most of them were not sitting in the front three or four rows. From the wings I could see one old man sitting on his own in the second or third row and wondered if he'd enjoy it and feared that he might be representative of the crowd and that the sicker moments of my show might not go down so well.
I needn't have worried though as the fine folk of Winchester seemed to lap up the more offensive material and the show cracked along. The old fella not surprisingly left in the interval, even though I had closed the first half by saying that the second part was more heart warming and less gratuitously rude.
It was fun to have more time to play with the script and I've started adding stuff back in that I cut during the previews. The show could be three hours long by the end of the run. Though tonight the first half was 57 minutes and the second probably around 40 (I forgot to ask).
I got to do lots of autographs afterwards, so at least in that sense my appeal has got greater in the last two decades. First in the queue was the very same man who had got our the prized signed Oxford Revue programme in 1987. I think he's called Rupert (forgive me if I have misremembered) and he might well qualify as my first fan. I imagine that autograph hunting is his main hobby, but unlike many of these people he actually comes to the shows (he was one of the few brave enough to sit on the front row) and actually likes my stuff and knows who I am. It's terrific to have that continuity over all those years and I hope that his signed Oxford Revue programme might one day be worth a lot of money - probably when Emma Kennedy is the new JK Rowling. Even if it's not then it's still a rather sweet connection through time.
And it struck me as another satisfying link, when I was having the conversation with the 16 year old me, that the 21 year old me had actually been on this stage, almost as young and green as the imaginary me that I was conversing with. All in this theatre where back in 1988 dreams had looked like they might come true.
It's not exactly how I dreamt it perhaps. But it's still turned out all right.
