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It’s three months til I turn 50 and I’ve finally decided to give up the pretence and ditch the preposterous wig, that was surely fooling no one and gone in a bit of a different direction with my comedy.
Check it out here.
It’s a lot more fanny based stuff as you’ll see. Which is what I think was missing from my comedy. It's a step up from Me1 vs Me2 Snooker though.
I posted off nearly all the ebay stuff. One of the winners worked in Shepherds Bush so I decided to deliver it to his place of employment by hand, chucking in a couple of bonus DVDs to make up for the postage cost. It would probably have been easier to send it from the post office with the others (sadly the Shepherds Bush post office is being moved even with the campaign to keep it and has already run out of its stock of envelopes etc), but I got to see a part of the Bush that I’d never been to, on the other side of the roundabout from the Westfield. Just as I am about to leave the Bush I discover a whole new part of it. Though to be fair there wasn’t anything very exciting over there, but there was a different access point to the Westfield. So that was exciting.
So my resolution to sell over 100 (or 100% in the case of the one venue with less than 100 seats) was under strain today as I headed to Camberley. I had sold 81 tickets as of two days ago. Would I get 19 more and put the pressure on tomorrow’s gig in Radlett (which to be fair is pretty unlikely to get anywhere near the century, so today’s efforts might well be academic)?
I didn’t think I had been to Camberley before. but
checked Warming Up and discovered I’d been here 9 years ago. As a timely reminder how much things have improved on tour, I only sold about 50 tickets that time and my high numbers in towns I did well in were around 200. Today I could afford to pretend that this was a disaster, but back before my podcast based mini-resurgence, well over half my gigs would have had under 70 people at them. Now I will nearly always get over 100 and sometimes over 500. It’s been a long, slow battle with some ups and downs, but encouraging to see that I am better known here now (even if my 2008 hope that the theatre might have me back took nearly a decade to happen). And given I have already played nearby Aldershot and Fleet (there have been some crazily close gigs on this tour, Radlett and St Albans are more or less the same place) this was pretty impressive. I like to give my 300 fans in this area a choice of which over sized venue to see me in. Much better than filling one medium sized one up.
I was still hopeful that we’d pass the arbitrary figure of 100. And it was looking good. Before the gig the house manager said there’d been some walk up and he was pretty sure we were on 100. Justice!
I had though been moved from the big theatre to the function room. This kind of mild humiliation used to happen a lot more often too. But I didn’t mind that. It was a nicer room without the high stage and it would enable me to make some jokes. When the audience gasped at me apparently drinking monkey semen (even though it was clearly just water) I said, “That’s the magic of theatre… or the magic of the function room.â€
And the 100? people who showed up were very good value. I had fun. After what felt like ages away from the show (though only six nights) it felt really fresh to me and I was instinctively finding new and funnier ways to deliver familiar lines. Hooray.
It was only on the drive home that Bex, my tour manager, informed me that sales had been 98. Ooooo, so close. That’s the pressure off Radlett though. History will record that it was Camberley that broke the impressive 42 gig run. Maybe next tour will be the first 100% 100+ tour. Or maybe I have hit my touring zenith.
But I count my lucky stars that it seems likely that I will be able to keep touring for the foreseeable future and that things are so much better than 10 years ago. Let’s check in again in 2026 and see how my next Camberley gig goes down.
