I was on at a really great venue in Maidenhead tonight called
Norden Farm. It was a lovely theatre space and they also have a gallery, a cinema and a cafe. It's a shame for them that the sandwich rating system has gone out of the window, as they did me a very nice bit of steak with vegetables, as well as a very generous rider with fruit, homemade salads and lots of drinks. They treated me like a king, which is especially impressive as I had only sold about 60 or 70 tickets.
So if you live in the Maidenhead area (and even if you don't) please do check out this venue. They've got some good shows coming up in the next few weeks, including TV's Chris Addison who I can heartily recommend.
Thanks to my stand up experience the Hercules show continues to get looser and more chatty. Though I was struggling a bit to remember the words after a month or so off the show, when I relaxed the audience visibly enjoyed it more.
Though the denizens of Maidenhead did seem a little shocked by my being bitten in the cock metaphor. But then laughed when I pointed this out. There was also a bit of an audible gasp when I first said "fuck", but they soon got used to my charming rudeness. One old man sitting on his own didn't seem to be enjoying the show at all and left in the interval. I commented this was lucky, given that I knew that there was stuff in the second half that was much more offensive. Indeed my dead baby pie stuff was a little too much for some people. Maybe it's something to do with this section of the country off of the M4 between Slough and Reading. Possibly a lot of babies have been killed in witch/pie related incidents. It might not have made the papers.
I had some relatives in the audience. Not anyone I had met before, but someone who had emailed me to say she was coming to the show and was my first cousin, twice removed, or my second cousin once removed or something like that. Why can't they just leave cousins where they are instead of moving them, then re-moving them and then re-moving them twice? If they re-move them enough they will just end up where they were in the first place anyway.
I was conscious that the show might be a bit strong for someone who knew nothing more about me than the fact that we shared a great-great grandfather (William Herring, if you are interested). My great-grandad was Tom, and my relation descended through his sister Amelia. Tom Herring was a methodist minister, who also used to do a ventriloquist act and the puppets he used were passed down to me and I used them in an act I did in my first ever Edinburgh about a ventriloquist who covered his mouth every time the dummy had to speak - "So what have you been up to today, Ally? But before you answer that question, I'm just going to put this bag over my head"). I am not convinced my great-grandfather would have approved of my act, or my subsequent career based mainly on blasphemy, but it's nice to know that the dummies were still entertaining people thirty years after his own demise.
My removed cousin had brought along a family tree and some photos and articles about the family. She had tales about the Herring clan that I did not know, including a maiden aunt with a secret illegitimate daughter. It was fascinating to see all that stuff and to meet her and her daughter, both of whom had something like a sixteenth or a thirty-second of the same blood as me in their veins - presuming none of our ancestors in between had had affairs and broken the blood-line. I had been looking out for them in the audience, wondering if there would be some Herring quality that I could recognise in their faces, but the woman who looked a bit like my sister turned out not to be related. Or if she was she hadn't brought along a family tree to prove it.
