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I found myself breakfasting next to Kevin Rowland and his fellow bandmate Big Jim. I still was too shy to talk to them, but noted (as I sat in my jogging pants and T shirt) that even at 8am these gentlemen dress in their swanky stage gear (current incarnation is influenced by 1930s Paris, I believe). The bandmates’ small talk about the weather and toast seemed incongruous, but they are my new heroes. Not that I will ever tell them. Hobbled as I am by my own self-consciousness.
I had been both pleased and amazed that I staved off illness throughout Edinburgh and my holiday, but today the lurgy was starting to strike, thanks I think, to doing a phone interview right after my last long run whilst sitting in my damp sports kit. This evening was my first stand up gig since the Fringe ended and I was worried that my sore throat would not be up to the job, as well as nervous that I might have forgotten my show by now. I half-listened to the recording of the last performance and hoped it was seeping in. But ultimately I trusted that my brain, which seemed quite unfamiliar with what I was listening to. Hopefully it would come back to me. It felt like a long, long time since I’d done any performing. And it was hard to tell if the material I was listening to was funny at all. It was certainly performed with a rapidity that suggested that I thought that if I could get it out of the way I would be allowed to go home five minutes earlier. People were laughing on the recording, but my confidence has taken a bit of a knock.
But people showed up (I was more popular than Dexys in this tiny Welsh town. Someone go back in time and tell the teenage me) and they found it funny and it pretty much all came back to me. I really enjoyed myself. Having been a but shut away for the last day, not feeling too well, it was just nice to be out and amongst people. Afterwards I cracked open a bottle of bitter. And then another. Though I pretty much know that I operate on a two drink maximum these days, I got chatting to Chris Evans (not that one) and risked a third. We watched Mitch Benn perform his excellent show “The 37th Beatle†(based on a similar conceit to an old Lee and Herring sketch, but independently arrived at and very differently executed). Clearly passionate and knowledgeable about the subject (as well as tangentially connected to the band) he made it funny for fan and non-fan alike. But I was quite pissed by now, so what do I know?
I then went to see Robin Ince interview the writer Jeremy Dyson in a dimly lit church. It’s very much a niche festival and I suspect the same group of two or three dozen people are going to see every show, but it was a fascinating chat about horror films and the League of Gentlemen. I was sitting in the row behind the actor Kevin “Penfold†Eldon and across the aisle from Graeme Garden, like the audience itself was a little museum display of mildly notable comedy figures from the last 50 years. In a church, in the middle of Wales. That was pretty hard to get to. I liked that.
I went back to the bar and chatted with Kevin and the others whilst having a whisky, just like Dylan Thomas had done in the same place before me. Keith Allen did not show up and ask anyone if they wanted to see his cock. I felt happy and glad I’d made the trip: the sense of isolation and self-doubt having dispersed. The talk turned to Ian Charleson and the extraordinary power of his last stage performance as Hamlet, when only he knew that he had a few months left to live. One of the people around the table’s friends had written a letter to the actor to say who incredible Charleso had been and only later found out that it was informed by his own understanding of mortality.
But then the conversation swung round to Dangermouse and Eldon’s part in bringing this iconic cartoon back to life. I said, “Of course no one knew it was Eldon’s last role, he knew he was dying and when you look back you see his performance of Penfold it is embed with his understanding of the fragility of life.â€
It seemed funny at the time. But luckily Eldon will never die.
