As I was arriving at the Enterprise in Chalk Farm for my first full hour preview of my new show ( Keep your eye on
my gig guide to find out if I will be playing near to you. Read it carefully - I've had two people berating me for not coming to Manchester who don't seem to have noticed the five gigs I am doing there over the next few months), a man who I think a rubbish comedian would call a Chav (and don't say I did a joke about Chavs the other week, because that's different... for some reason) approached me, wheeling a bicycle and said, "Would you like a mountain bike? It would cost £700 in the shops, but I'll let you have it for forty!"
I thought to myself, "What a rubbish salesman. After all if you want to make a living selling bicycles then it is very inefficient just to approach random strangers on the street and ask them if they want one. You should set up a shop or an internet site or something and then people who are interested in buying bikes could contact you. And if you carried a range of designs and sizes, rather than just offering one bike you might get more business. On top of that his pricing system must surely send him on the road to rapid bankruptcy. The bike is worth £700, it must have cost him at least £300 (even with trade discounts) and yet he's offering it to me for forty. No wonder he's only selling one bike - if he sold dozens at that price he would be losing thousands of pounds a day. Unless he was somehow getting a supply of bikes for free from somewhere, but the only possibly way I could think that that would happen is if he has a little team of elves in his house, who he leaves food out for each night, along with the constituent parts of a mountain bike and when he wakes up in the morning the food is gone and a new bike has been made. In which case his overheads are low - provided he just provides the base metal for the bike and doesn't have to buy all the parts. Elves can be fed handsomely for under a pound. So this unscrupulous man might well be making ten to fifteen pounds profit a day selling these bikes. More if the elves can produce more than one bike a night (though my guess is that they only make one, which would explain the fact he only had one to sell). Perhaps it would create too many overheads to have a shop or a website for that.
But I don't want to be a part of anything that exploits elves so ruthlessly and I think I made it clear in the look I gave the man as I said "No, thank you" that I didn't approve of him or his manufacturing methods. I could see he was ashamed of what he was doing, but was addicted to the 70-105 pounds a week he was making from this enterprise.
He went into the pub to see if he could find anyone in there who would buy his elf-labour bike. As he passed me a second time I handed him a tiny steak and kidney pie that I had baked in a thimble and said, "Look, that's for the elves", just to show solidarity with them. But as the man walked by the window I saw him with gravy running down his chin. Some people have no shame.
The gig was very encouraging. Usually I wouldn't be at such an advanced stage til late July (ie I wouldn't have more than a third of the final show written). Hopefully this is going to be my year.
