And we're off. The Christ on a Bike tour is now underway and off to a great start at the oddly named Gulbenkian theatre (
Named after this guy? Maybe not) in Canterbury. It's on the University campus, which means going through the usual discomfort of mingling with students when I arrive and realising how very, very old I am. But it makes me wistful rather than depressed (or sexually frustrated) these days. They all look like five year old children to me now and I can't believe that any of their parents have allowed them out into the world unsupervised.
Maybe this is why when I looked at myself in the dressing room mirror this evening I realised with a start that the face looking back at me bears almost no resemblane to the 18 year old me's face. I wasn't thinking that I was looking old, or less attractive (if anything, with my fresh tan I thought I looked pretty tasty for an old geezer, probably more attractive than I was back then anyway), I just couldn't see any points of common reference. I am not sure that if the 18 year old me met the 43 year old me he would even recognise me as the same person. So different am I that I actually started worrying that I might have been unknowingly replaced with a bad lookalike at some point in the intervening years. Plenty of people on Twitter told me that pretty much every cell in your body is replaced every 7 to 10 years, so I am a different person in a way, but one would still expect the new cells to be rough approximations of the old ones. I think the young me might have been kidnapped. And so complete is the brainwashing of the replacement that I actually feel sorry for him. Wherever he might be. I think Stewart Lee is probably keeping him in a basement and making him write jokes for him. Just like he used to in the 1990s. Poor young Richard Herring.
It was my first day with my new tour manager Pete (not the same Pete who briefly tour managed me after Arrogant Simon Streeting and Humble Dave Taylor). This is the first time we've really spent any time together and we haven't worked together before and there's a long way to the end of the tour, so I was crossing my fingers that we wouldn't discover we hated each other or had annoying habits that would drive each other up the wall. It's just the two of us in a car for most of the next three months.
But so far, so good. He seems like a good guy. But he only has to be less annoying that Simon Streeting, so I think he's on to a winner. And it felt very luxurious after four or five years of touring alone to have someone to help me lug all the equipment around and drive the car. It's about 1000% less stressful already. We had a few technical teething problems, which is to be expected at this early stage - it's a complicated show to take on the road and we have to set up the projector and screen in a variety of rooms, from massive theatres to tiny comedy clubs. We have also introduced an explosion into the show which turned out to be hilariously pitiful.
It felt like a long time since I had done the show and as always I was worried about remembering it all. But as always as I ran it in my head in the car I got bored and decided it would all come back to me. It pretty much did, although I was a bit jet-lagged and it felt like I was performing with a slight fog inside my brain. Plus there were over 300 excited people in the audience, who were up for it right from the start. This was brilliant for me, but after two weeks on the beach and three weeks off stage it was actually a little bit frightening and alien to have to be up on stage. My throat also struggled to cope with all this talking all of a sudden. But I settled back into it OK and there was a terrific atmosphere in the room and it was very encouraging to be practically sold out in a largish space (and I haven't gigged very much in Kent, so that is also a good sign). A lady after commented how cool it was that the audience was so mixed in terms of age range and indeed there were students mingling with pensioners and everything in between in the bar afterwards. It is great that I have such a diverse audience, no doubt coming to my work from different media. It's probably most encouraging for me that the young people are still coming (especially when they seem like the eloi from the Time Machine to me), but I am always chuffed to see people ten or twenty years older than me chortling at my childishness.
So after those dark days in London at the start of the year the tour gets off to a very positive and playful start. There is a long way to go, but that's one down and only about seventy to go. Hope you can make it along.
