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Of course I woke up at 6am. Of course I did. When I mentioned it on Twitter someone inevitably tweeted back to tell me that now I almost knew what it was like to have a proper job. Which I love. Because my job is really easy and I am only on stage for 90 minutes. What kind of working day is that? All I have to do is make a room full of strangers laugh. And luckily everything I say just comes out of my face without any planning so I literally only have to work on stage.
The early start meant that I had even more time to kill before my evening gig in Leicester. I can never work out in a situation like this, with a two hour drive home, if it’s more efficient to head back to my house after a gig or to stay over. If I’d driven home from Sutton Coldfield last night I would have been in bed at roughly the same time and would then have had a morning and early afternoon with my family. As it was I had just an hour’s drive to Leicester and a lot of waiting around.
If I had been well rested it might have been better to stay over. But I had had four hours sleep and was tired. I got a little bit of work done (I am now three Metro columns ahead, largely thanks to having lots to say about Austria) and thought a bit about the show, but it was a boring day of hanging about.
First I sat in the hotel bar, where at least I managed to do one phone interview for tour PR, then I started the drive to Leicester, fortunately I was heading south on the M6 as the north carriageway was jammed after an accident, then I stopped off at a service station, unusually deciding to go for a burger for my lunch. Then I drove to Leicester, parked up and sat in Caffe Nero and tried to work. The hours ticked by slowly and I missed my girls and wanted to sleep.
Finally it was close enough to gig time for me to go and get my stuff out of the car, but I was still there a good 45 minutes before the crew. I nearly fell asleep in a chair in the dressing room.
So would I have been better off staying at home and then leaving home at about 3? My carbon skid mark would have been worse. The additional petrol would have been cheaper than booking a hotel. I could have spent my day with my baby and wife. I might have fallen asleep on the motorway and died. It’s a tough call. Had they been bigger gigs I could have afforded to pay someone to drive me there and back both times and it might have been worth it. But I guess the days would have been tedious either way.
Thankfully it was an early start and I was only doing an hour, so I was on stage at 7.30. All the torpor of the day melted away and I was energised and happy and gave a good representation of the hour of material that I am pretty much on top of. The Firebug is a small room, seating about 100, but the gig had sold out well in advance, even though Reeves and Mortimer are in town. And it whizzed along and I managed to find some new avenues to explore.
The small crowd were great and I had fun meeting them afterwards, before taking my stuff back to the car and hoping I could get home by 11, but I got a bit lost in Leicester and then once on the M1 discovered there was the almost inevitable diversion as the motorway was closed for overnight work (there was another one closer to home too) so I didn’t get back til just about midnight. That’s the problem with the driving home plan. Sometimes a two hour drive can become three or four hours.
I got to bed at about 1, once the adrenaline of the gig and the drive had worn off. I mean, I am lucky, I love my job, but it’s solitary and tiring and even when I seem to only have an hour of work from the outside, there’s a lot more to it.
My family were in bed asleep and I’d have to wait to give them both a kiss. But I had a bowl of Fruit and Fibre and a yoghurt, so life isn’t all bad.
The Ray Peacock podcast has started going a bit ballistic, with the way he dealt with the drunken hecklers being enjoyed by nearly all (but to be fair, the real genius in this was me -I saw what was happening, knew I could stop it by coming down on the obvious correct side, but decided to let it go on, so kudos to me for being too tired to be bothered to help and like a top chef, lightly stirring when necessary). But seriously I am delighted that Ray has got the positive response that he deserves. He’s a fantastic comedian and a fascinating man and more people should know about his fabulous work. He’s doing the show that mentions his suicide attempt one more time (hopefully he might be persuaded to do it again) at the Old Rep in Birmingham on 24th March. Go and see it if you can.
There’s a possibility we might film the DVD of Happy Now? at St David’s Hall in Cardiff in April, but that would mean moving up to the main venue, which would mean we need a lot more people to come. It’d be a massive accolade for gofasterstripe to be filming in one of its home city’s most prestigious venues and also I had a lot of fun in that room when I got bumped up two years ago. I also feel a connection with this place right back to the early Lee and Herring days when our first superfine were Welsh misfits, so I’d kind of love to make this happen. We don’t need to fill it, but we probably need 500 people in to make this viable (which is only about 100 or so more than we got there last year). So if you’re in Cardiff could you spread the word and see if we can make this happen and if you're planning to come anyway can you book early so that we can get an idea of whether the numbers will add up. The DVD record is always a bit special. You can Book here
