Say what you like about the Travelodge - and this is, I believe, the last time I will ever stay in one - but the Cambridge one was very quiet. Perhaps the bogey on the shower curtain is a way of frightening away the more discerning customer, meaning that the people brave enough to stay are not troubled by other guests. It's like the equivalent of staying the night in a haunted house, though I'd rather do that because bogeys are real, whilst bogey men are probably not. It would take an awful lot of bogeys to grow one. Perhaps the smear of the shower curtain was just the beginning of such a creature. Perhaps shower curtains are where bogey men gestate.
In any case it was a little hard to sleep, thinking of the unwelcome extra guest that I had in my bathroom. I imagined it was glowing fluorescent green in the darkness. And part of me feared that it might somehow come to life, fly round the room, home in on me whilst I dozed and deposit itself in my hair, or in my mouth or worst of all perhaps up my nose. I would think it was one of my own bogeys, but it would be a cuckoo in the nest of nasal hair, sapping nutrients from me that should by rights have been going to my own baby bogeys, bogeys that would if fertilised on a shower curtain go on to create my own army of bogey men to do my bidding. But with this Midwitch Bogey amongst their ranks, the army might mutiny and turn against me....
Maybe none of this was too likely.
In the morning I braved the shower of snot (which doesn't sound as bad as I have made it sound) though without touching the curtain, so the floor got pretty wet. Should I have tried to clean the curtain myself? Perhaps I could have tried to shower it off and down the drain. But it looked pretty stuck on and the shower head did not remove from the wall and I would still know that a bogey had been there. And if at any point I accidentally touched the bogey I would be infected with the stinking bogey disease, which I wouldn't be able to shake off until I touched someone else and passed it on to them.
On Tuesday I had been informed that I had sold 59 of the 275 tickets for Uppingham, but today news came through that 260 had in fact been sold. So my predictions of playing to no one had come to naught. Was my popularity spreading so far? Had 200 people in this small Rutland town heard the news of my fame and rushed out to buy tickets. Not quite. It turned out Uppingham Theatre is attached to Uppingham School and most of the tickets were sold to parents and pupils internally.
I was a bit worried about doing my filth laden show in front of youngsters and an audience where there were only going to be about 70 "members of the public" and 200 people who probably came to everything and knew nothing of my strange ways and many of whom would be 15-18 years old. But the guy from the school who had booked me claimed that he had seen the show in Edinburgh and so knew what he was getting. Though the technician told me that this fella had remembered there being a projector and screen in the show, which there hadn't been. I wondered if he'd seen something else and misremembered it.
Though it all went pretty well on, afterwards this man who said he'd seen the show looked a bit pale. "There's some extra stuff that wasn't in there before," he said. It's true there is extra content in this longer tour version, but actually all the more shocking stuff was in the Edinburgh show.
I did point out though, when arguing with my younger self that rather than doing movies, like I could if I wanted, I like to tour experimental shows, mainly about paedophilia and insist that I will only play school theatres in order to make the material more challenging and needlessly offensive.
It seemed weird doing a rude show in front of so many young adults (partly because I wonder how much they will enjoy or understand my embarrassment and chastisement of my younger self) and yet thinking about it, the 15 year old Richard Herring had sublime comedy taste and a sophisticated humour and loved nothing more than the disgraceful Derek and Clive tapes (Peter Cook and Dudley Moore's disgusting alter-egos). And I think I understood what was going on and enjoyed the exquisite naughtiness and inappropriateness of it all. So hopefully I didn't mentally scar anyone too much!
Because the show started at 7.30pm I was out of Uppingham before 10 and at home before midnight. Tomorrow is my only full day off of gigging/driving or podcasting until the 29th. I have to get on with writing my book, but it was cool not to have too late a night. And the drive home was easy, mainly well lit and not too exhausting. 24 more to go. Two days worth of shows if I could run them back to back (including interval).
