5616/18636
The Stables Milton Keynes tonight and respectable sales of well over 250. I haven’t sold out a gig for nearly a month on this tour, but in a sense that is a good thing. If you’re selling out every gig then you’ve clearly been booked into venues that are too small for you. A bit of room for growth isn’t a bad thing and aside from a few gigs where numbers have inexplicably declined, most of them have held their ground or sold more. And so my children should eat this year. But what of next when I won’t be touring. Better feed them up now whilst I can. Cos I will be eating them next year. Yum yum.
The audience were very enthusiastic from the start, though at least two people left in the interval because I heard them heading back to their car as I sat in my dressing room. I thus got a review of the performance from their perspective. I think their main gripe was the number of times I said “cuntâ€. I would have thought if the word “cunt†upsets you then hearing it once would be enough, but apparently it was only the 5th or 6th time that got to the man in the couple. I thought I only said it four times in the first half, but maybe I chucked a few more in because it was going so well.
As the show is partly about the impossibility of pleasing all the people and specifically apologises to the people who have taken a chance on it, but are having the worst night of their lives, I didn’t feel too bad. Plus everyone else seemed to he having a good to excellent time. In the old days walk-outs were almost guaranteed, usually from people angry enough to leave the show during the performance and vent their fury for me for ruining their night. Now they are much rarer and much less noticeable. Either I have softened or people are more aware of what they are likely to get from me.
There was a fun bit during the show where I was letting everyone know that Milton Keynes was a shithole (can’t imagine why anyone found this show offensive) when there was a bit of a gasp from the audience and a small amount of ticker-tape fell from the roof of the theatre on to the stage. It was like I’d won a prize for telling the truth. Or whoever was doing the Who Want s To Be A Millionaire finale thought I’d got the right answer, but was quickly told I hadn’t and the ticker tape stopped.
It was the perfect early anti-climax.
