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Even after 35 years in show business I am far from having played every venue in the country or even in London. Due to the public not appreciating how amazing I am (only possible reason) I haven't played lots of the big ones. And I don't think I'd even been to Cadogan Hall before. But tonight I was on a mixed bill with Dylan Moran, Jen Brister, Sindhu Vee and Olga Koch - a pretty impressive line-up!
The train in was too efficient and I had time to kill and walked from Victoria to Sloane Square (which was a bit further than I'd realised), but I love walking through London. I miss those long walks home to Shepherd's Bush. If you're in town do consider going by foot.
On arriving at Cadogan Hall I got to the stage door and a security guard asked me who I was, whilst displaying all the names on his list and the right way up for me to read. I guess anyone wanting to pretend to be any of us could just have read the poster. I had a feeling that this security guard wouldn't know any of us from Adam, even if you told him one of us was in the film Notting Hill and another one was in the film of Matilda the Musical and another one of us was on Never Mind the Fullstops.
He asked if I wanted to go to the stage or the dressing room and I said the latter as it was still nearly an hour to stage time. He told me to go downstairs.
But downstairs was like a ghost town. There was a door marked "Green Room" (traditionally where you'd congregate before a gig) but no one was in there and no sound coming from anywhere but the stage. So I went back upstairs to see if the comics were waiting in the wings.
It's pretty unusual not to be greeted at a gig and to be allowed to wander around backstage at a venue. It was a bit eerie, but I could hear the muffled sound of a stand up on stage and an audience laughing. Signs on doors seemed to contradict each other with arrows pointing to the dressing room through doors saying not to enter. I was finally behind the stage and there was a door saying "Stage Right". Usually you'd go through a door like that and find yourself in the wings, behind curtains, but I opened the door to see the audience looking straight back at me. I only opened the door a crack and only a few people on that side noticed, but it could have been much worse if I'd bouldered through.
I tried to find dressing room one, but with little luck and was about to return to the grumpy security guy when finally someone from the production team found me and I was guided into the womb of the dressing room.
It's a rare thing to be in a dressing room of comics these days and I had fun chatting to Jen about our similarly aged kids and then Sindhu came off stage and 15 or so of her friends came backstage from the audience, which is quite an unusual occurrence.
It's a very big venue - a Christian Science church with the highest of ceilings (never what you want for comedy) - but it was packed and the audience were well-behaved and for the second time in two weeks I got to perform to a sizeable crowd comprised of people who were almost certainly not there to see me. I had to do five more minutes than last week, so had dusted off another bit of the Bollock show and it all seemed to work (sadly I forgot to promote my London gigs). Lovely crowd who seemed delighted that I didn't die either tonight or after my cancer).
Off stage I can never quite believe I am going to go on and make strangers laugh (especially if I haven't been gigging very much), but I transform into a different person once I step out there and that person loves being up there and is confident enough to think he's funny. Once offstage afterwards it doesn't feel like that was me at all.
Is it possible I actually am two different people and walking on to stage makes the everyday me disappear and the stage me appear (and vice versa). If not I still haven't managed to get over the weirdness of my job, even after 35 years.
If I am two different people then the onstage one might be the real one. I usually feel more comfortable on rather than off and would be too shy to impose my personality on people if they weren't all paying to look at me. What if I'd been born at a time when there were no theatres or comedians? I would have assumed the dull, over-sensitive and insecure man I was off stage was my actual personality. But I know that for the 23 hours and 40 minutes (or longer) that I am not working each day is just the real me having a well-earned rest.
If I could see myself while I was on stage then I think it would freak me out so much that I wouldn't be able to do this, which is why stage me and real me can never exist at the same time. Very occasionally, when things aren't going great, stage me fucks off and real me has to try and do the gig. Those are difficult times for all of us, like I've shown up at school in pyjamas.
So when real me almost wandered on stage by accident, it felt horrendous.
Is there a chance that I just fall asleep when I am backstage at a theatre and all the stuff that happens on stage is a dream? Why would I keep getting booked though?
Maybe I am not Richard Herring - maybe he is an actual comedian and I am just someone who goes to all his gigs, pretends to be him and then falls asleep when I step backstage, he goes on and I have one of those dreams where you can hear what's going on in the world and it's part of the story.
If so, I have to say, the real Richard Herring is brilliant. He gets big laughs, even when, like tonight, it's not his crowd. I am surprised his career isn't going better.
Seem far-fetched, but finally Me 1 vs Me2 snooker makes sense. No one has been able to explain how I pull that off, but if there's two of us then that explains it.
And that would also explain why the talented Richard Herring can write dogshit blogs like this one. Sorry Rich. I think I'm holding you back.
