Thank God I recorded Hitler Moustache in Edinburgh. I have paid someone to type it all up (and charmingly they've included all my many ums and ahs as if everything was orchestrated to that kind of precision - perhaps it is, but not consciously). But even though it's only 6 weeks since I last did it, as I read through the 24 pages of densely packed typeface this morning, much of it seemed almost totally unfamiliar to me. Although many of the more structured routines came back to me, the more serious parts and the linking arguments were surprising me by their very existence and I felt quite frightened that I was supposed to deliver this script to 400 Brightonians this very night.
Not only that but beforehand I had to do an improvised podcast with Mr Andrew Collinge (I have replaced Andrew Collings with the
moderately famous hair stylist).
Luckily Andrew kindly agreed to help me do a run through in the car on the long drive to Brighton. He was impressed that every um and ah came in exactly the right place and that I had clearly scripted it this way. Obviously I have fallen into more of a pattern with the performance than I realised. And as I found out on Just a Minute I do put in these little pauses into all my sentences without even knowing it.
I got through maybe 60% of the script OK, but there were vast dark patches. It was like a map I had once memorised, but now someone had spilled ink over vast swathes of it and I couldn't be sure what was in the darkness, even if there was some vague record of it hidden in my brain.
Of course I also had my Toothbrush moustache back on my upper lip, but had got so used to life without it that I also totally forgot it was back. People were looking at me strangely in the service station and it took me a few moments to realise why. I caught a glance of myself in the mirror and felt shocked by what I saw. And yet I preferred it by miles to the full and ugly moustache that I've had for the rest of the week. In fact the more I saw of it the more I thought this might be my favourite combination of facial hair. My God, am I going to keep this moustache once the show is over. It was certainly a relief to have the ends of the moustache eradicated, as they always get caught up in my dinner and get in my mouth.
I had no time to fret about my appearance or my lack of preparation for my main show. Once we'd got to my hotel I had to quickly change into my Hitler suit, take my buckets and programmes up to the Corn Exchange and then head over to the "Three and Ten" for our podcast.
It's a tiny and intimate venue, but I think it all went pretty well. Collings clearly felt we were going too far with the sexual stuff, but he had his own attempt at pushing back the boundaries of comedy. It was the first one for a while where I have felt out of control and where my mouth has been running faster than my brain and we were accessing the impish podcast Richard Herring. You really had to be there to appreciate my mimes of what (I imagine) it is like at an orgy, but maybe your imagination can conjure up something appropriately disgraceful (or perhaps
this will help Thanks to Edward Moore for this photo). You can hear us discussing how you can die of being gay, whether it's OK to piss on a German war memorial, whether it's ever OK to punch a woman and why the teenage me was delighted by the 1984 Brighton bombing
here. Also Andrew Collings shows his bitter resentment of my solo podcast, even though he doesn't realise that secretly our combined effort is actually much more impressive. Sometimes even I can't believe we have the audacity to go on stage in front of a paying audience with little to no idea of what we're going to say. And I can't quite believe that we conjure up so much funny stuff under these conditions. I mean I would probably never have considered writing a routine about the practicalities of masturbating two men at once. But now the world has a routine about that. Whether it wants it or not.
I had no time to hang around and bounded off back to the Corn Exchange once the show was over, leaving Collings to try and sell his audio books or get punched in the face by mad fans, or both. In the car I had seriously started to wonder if Hitler Moustache was any good at all. Maybe the Edinburgh success had all been down to hype. As I'd blundered my way through for Collings it had seemed unfunny and preachy and didactic.
And now I had to do it in front of the biggest audience I have ever had for this show. I was a little nervous and glad I had made a few chapter heading notes, as within the first four minutes I lost my place. But though it may have been a slightly nervy opening, I quickly found my feet with it and started remembering why it wasn't in fact a shit show, but a good one. It all pretty much came back to me and I managed to paper over the cracks and really enjoyed myself. We all got caught up in it and I remembered that it's mainly about passion and feeling, something I couldn't recreate as I headed through traffic in my car, but which needs an attentive audience to feed off.
I found myself looking forward to the tour (
all the 2010 dates, apart from the Lyric ones, are Hitler Moustache).
But I was brought crashing down to earth as usual when I headed back to my hotel to sit in the bar alone, with the few other patrons looking at me like I was some kind of weirdo for some reason. And then heading up to bed to discover that my bedroom backed directly on to two nightclubs, including a Spearmint Rhino Rouge (whatever that means - don't know if it being red makes it better or worse than the regular ones). The room was cold and I thought I wouldn't sleep and I practised in my head how I was going to complain to the manager in the morning for the audacity of charging £100 for this crappy room in which no human being could sleep. Someone on Twitter suggested I made ear plugs out of tissue paper and spit - though I wondered why it was necessary to use bodily fluids when I had running water in the bathroom. I tried it, but I didn't like the feeling of cold and wet tissue in my ears and I could still hear nearly all the braying noise and the bass notes and the shouting smoking drunken idiots below. Just what I needed before this impossibly busy weekend.
As it happened I had drunk enough beer to pass out anyway.
