4829/17488
When you drive to the next town overnight on tour it’s like a little gift. To not have to get up and get out of the hotel and drive through daytime traffic is brilliant. And it’s nice to get a whole day in the place you’re going to be. I had time to have a late breakfast (thanks to the staff of the Caffe Nero who helped me pick up my charity collection coins which fell out of my bag as I got up to leave), pay in the picked up money (thanks to the people of Sheffield who gave £374.77 to SCOPE - maybe slightly more if a couple of the coins rolled under the counter at Caffe Nero), catch up on some admin and put together a Happy Now? podcast. More importantly I went to Debenhams to buy a semi-circular toilet mat for something we’re filming next week (it’s a deadly secret and you’ll never guess,but if anyone if the Greenwich area has a classy looking high-backed armchair that we could borrow, please get in touch). They don’t seem to make the old fashioned semi-circular mat any more, but the mat I bought has a semi-circle in it, where it goes round the pedestal, so I guess it counts.
Before the gig I met up with a friend that I haven’t seen for 30 years. We’d been at the same camp in California when I did Camp America in 1986 and then along with another guy travelled across America by car, ending up in Florida in about 11 days. After that we maybe saw each other once more when the large British contingent from the camp met up for a boozy party, but then we pretty much all lost contact. We were on that camp for about 12 weeks, I think, but like all the memories from the year off, long ago, the time feels stretched beyond that and extra significant, as we made our first steps into the adult world. So it’s terrifying to realise I have ostensibly been an adult for 30 years and it doesn’t seem possible that it was that long ago, but we slipped easily back into conversation and reminisced and caught up.
We realised how little we actually remember about the experience. One of us would recall a name or an incident and generally speaking the other would be searching for the memory. He said “Was there a fire on the last night or something?” which astonished me as there had been a huge conflagration that nearly wiped the lot of us out on our very final day at the camp. We’d all got smashed and the wooden house we’d been partying in got set alight in the middle of the night and we’d been dragged from our beds to try and ferry water up the hill as massive propane gas containers exploded and redwood trees went up in flames in one second. The nearest fire brigade was over a hundred miles away. Luckily we had had the first light rainfall of the summer the day before and we somehow controlled the fire without anyone being killed. So yeah, there had been a fire on the last night. He had been pretty drunk and hadn’t been sure if he’d dreamed it.
But then that’s how we felt about most of it. He showed me some photos where I look skinnier than I ever remember being and like a child. I’ve always meant to write about the experience, but never really got round to it. The story of how I managed to get from Florida to New York and then live there for the week before my plane was leaving on something like 100 dollars is pretty extraordinary. I don’t think I kept much of a diary at the time, alas, so much of the detail is lost. But what heady and insane times we had. And how incredible that in spite of everything I managed to get home with my virginity firmly in tact (and it wasn’t going anywhere for a few months after that).
We wondered what had become of the people we could recall - I have been in touch with one or two of them and marvelled at how dumb we’d been and how it seemed impossible that so many years had gone by.
I had one small beer as we chatted. Maybe it was that or maybe just the tiredness or the distraction of nostalgia or just second show complacency, but I made a few unforced errors in the first half of the show. I don’t think anyone would have noticed and the packed City Varieties was filled with laughter. I did manage to pull it together and ad-libbed a fair amount of stuff. My niece was in the audience and her friends asked her what it was like hearing her uncle talking about his sex life. She said on Facebook that I said worse things during Christmas dinner. I mentioned this after talking about having baths with my dad in the second half and then wondered if she had enjoyed hearing about her grandad’s massive cock.
I did much better with the second half than I have managed so far, though there’s still lots of room for improvement and the show continues to expand even though I am dropping bits. These last five gigs to 300 and 400+ people have been exhilarating and amazing (for me). I think City Varieties is almost certainly the best medium sized theatre for doing comedy in in the country, but the Leeds audience has always been good in whatever venue I’ve been in. Six or seven years ago I was playing the Library bar to 100 or so (admittedly for 2 or 3 nights) so it’s gratifying to be selling out this venue now.
