8068/20999
After Ally unexpectedly pulled the To Be or Not To Be speech out of his arse in this week's Twitch of Fun and the discussion as to whether Twitch of Fun is better than Shakespeare I was reminded that I actually very nearly played Hamlet on a West End stage in the early 90s.
Hard to believe, I know, but I was cast as Hamlet and rehearsed the piece for a couple of weeks before the answer To Be or Not To Be was unequivocally answered. It was not to be.
At the time I was very keen to do some acting as well as some comedy, having had some success in the admittedly small pond that was University drama. I'd had my confidence punctured by the disastrous Edinburgh Fringe in 1988, where (as I've written before) I felt bullied and cast out by the whole of the stand up scene. I am still processing the trauma of this time and haven't yet written a definitive account, but I think it will probably explain much of my subsequent career when I finally get it right.
My own stand up in the early 90s had not been successful or good enough to take to the Fringe, but in 1990 or 1991 (probably the former) I had auditioned for a revival of Beyond The Fringe. I was not sure that it was a great idea to revisit this material with people who weren't Cook, Moore, Bennett and Miller, but it was a chance to get back to the Fringe after a two year absence and maybe my skills as a sketch performer would be noticed.
I am not even sure which of the four I would have stood in for, but it didn't matter as I did not get the part, which probably wasn't too much of a disaster in the long run. The director had, however, been impressed with my audition and so a few months later got in touch to say they were going to do a series of sketches about Hamlet (again pre-existing material from other authors) in a West End Theatre at lunchtime. She wanted me to play the part of Hamlet
So it wasn't quite the accolade that I had made it sound, but still very exciting for me. I hadn't made a splash as a stand up and having been very much seen as a performer at University was in danger of just being seen as a writer (not a bad thing in itself, but not what I wanted) and I was thrilled to be a part of it.
The problem was that, as OK as a comic actor as I was, Hamlet was the straight and serious part in nearly every sketch. I wasn't really being called upon to make anyone laugh and ideally was going to be as good a Hamlet as possible. I wouldn't say that was exactly in my skill set. I am no Ally Sloper (who did a beautiful rendition of the famous speech if you haven't seen it yet).
I don't remember too much about it now. I do know that future fierce Scotsman comedy reviewer Kate Copstick was in the cast. I am not sure if she ever realised it was me who was in this show. If so she kindly never mentioned it. There was another actor, who I guess had played Peter Cook in the Edinburgh show, who I thought was one of the naturally funniest people I'd met - shamefully I can't remember his name now (it's on the tip of my tongue, pretty sure he was an Ian - he would have fitted right into the Fist of Fun cast if we'd stayed in touch), but I think I tried to blank this experience out once it all went wrong. It's crazy that because this happened pre-internet that it seems to have not a single mention online.
We'd done a fair few rehearsals and the first night (or lunchtime) wasn't very far away and we had got to the point where we rehearsing sword fights. This was pretty serious stuff and I'd never done anything like it and I was well out of my depth, but I probably was with everything. I remember spinning my sword round behind my back at the end of one hit we'd rehearsed and everyone went crazy at me. No one had been nearby, but you don't dick around with swords apparently.
I think I knew it wasn't working, so it wasn't a surprise when the director rang me that night to tell me that she was really sorry and it wasn't my fault, but I'd been miscast and for the sake of the production they were going to have to go with someone else. Just as with the reboot of Beyond the Fringe, the lunchtime Hamlet sketch show did not set the world alight and it's doubtful that anything would have come out of it.
But I could really have done with a success at this point - Stew was already an award winning comedian and I hated doing stand up and was largely failing at it- and being sacked from something is never a pleasant experience, especially at the beginning of your career, where you're already feeling everything is against you. Though I got unceremoniously sacked from a writing job a few years back and that was devastating too - I suppose that one felt like a career ending (which aside from one final season of Relativity it's proven to be so far).
In spite of these setbacks (the 1990 ones anyway) my career didn't end before it started and whilst that director never asked me to do anything with them again, we found relative success elsewhere. It was undoubtedly the wrong decision to cast me and the right decision to replace me, but it would have been cool to have Hamlet in the West End on my CV.
I did get cast in a radio show shortly after, a pilot called "That's Wiggins' Yard!" written by Lee and Herring, Peter Baynham, Julian Dutton, Andy Parsons and Henry Naylor. We'd all go on to have varying degrees of success, but the pilot was not picked up.
I do remember being so excited about this job that I ostentatiously looked through the script whilst sitting on the tube, like some kind of Alistair Green character, hoping people would notice. How I thought that they'd recognise a Radio 4 script I don't know. Hubris thy name is Herring.
I also got to play the voice of a spider in a School's programme that Stew and I wrote. I recorded the whole thing in a professional studio. Sadly the producer came back to us to say that the recording had gone wrong and they couldn't afford to pay me to come back and do it again, so my TV acting career was also strangled at birth. Did the tape go wrong or did I just do a shit job?
Based on my other projects there does seem to be a common theme.
So much of this job is based on self-confidence overcoming self-doubt and sometimes confidence is enough to compensate for lack of talent. Somehow I still retained enough confidence or just determination to compensate for my lack of talent and within four years of all these failures I had a TV show on BBC2 at 9pm on a Thursday evening. For a bit. Until they realised I was rubbish too.
I suppose managing the failures is part of the journey to success (and also part of the journey to managing to muddle through and keep working), but the failures hurt. Not so much the Hamlet one, funnily enough, which just seems like a weird footnote in my career and which I had almost forgotten about. Rejection is hard (ask Tim Minchin who wrote that song about his only bad review in a year of extraordinary success) and writers and performers are sensitive babies, but you can turn your inadequacy into something more interesting and in hindsight it was a good thing that I wasn't a success in the field of performing other people's sketches. I got to do my own. If I'd been the world's finest Hamlet then you'd never have had Twitch of Fun or Self-playing snooker or stone-clearing or.... oh fuck. I blew it.
Oh and I did get to play Hamlet eventually. I did the speech, which became a dialogue with my own interjections, in We're All Going To Die.
Download it for a fiver here. 
