After tonight's show in Worcester I sat in the bar of the pub we're staying in with Reliable Pete, having the first pint of Guinness I have had in almost eight months. I am trying to ease myself gently back into drinking - this was the first alcoholic drink of this tour. I realised with a start that we had only done four shows in this thirteen night run. It already feels like we've been on the road for at least a week. I also didn't know what day of the week it was. Touring quickly disorientates you. The days meld into each other and you're never quite sure which town you are in. I always fear saying the wrong town name on stage (especially with the Birmingham and Cardiff Glee clubs where the rooms are very similar in size and layout and came on consecutive days) and of course have done that in the past.
It had been a pleasant enough day. We had left our Cardiff hotel at 11, stopping off back at the Glee club to pay in the SCOPE collection money at the Natwest next door (the wonderful Cariff idiots had donated a little over 535 pounds which is incredible - though heavy) and then we shot off to Worcester.
We were there by lunch and staying in rooms above a pub. I could see a Nandos directly outside the window as I sat on my tiny single bed. I was hungry. I have been very good so far this tour. I decided to treat myself to the first Nandos of the tour and of 2011. "If it's not extra hot, then you're a twot!" Why haven't Nandos used that as an advertising slogan yet? I mean it would mean they were calling a lot of their customers twots, but surely it is more important to be truthful. I added some of the XO extra extra hot sauce to my chicken. "If it's just extra hot, then you're a twot. If you add some extra extra hot, then you are not!" Come on Ian Nandos. Stick that on your adverts. Or are you scared because like some kind of Andrew Collings you can only eat chicken with the garlic and herb sauce on it. I hate you Ian Nandos. But I love you too.
After a couple of interviews for the gigs that aren't selling so well - including Edinburgh surprisingly. Why hast thou forsaken me? - I walked around the genteel town centre, full of specialist luxury chocolate shops and bridal gown boutiques and authentic Thai restaurants. I sensed that I'd be getting a different kind of crowd tonight than I've had for the last two nights in those jam-packed comedy clubs.
Indeed the average age of the 200 people who turned up might well have been 25 years up on last night's. The gig was in what had once been
a Methodist church, complete with pews and a pulpit. The audience slightly bristled at my early crudity and blasphemy, as if because this had once been a church, God might be paying more attention to what I said tonight. If He was going to strike me down for daring to mock Him for not killing me for mocking Him this would be the night. It was a totally different kind of gig and took some readjusting in my mind. The more polite response was not a sign that they weren't enjoying it necessarily, but after the last two nights it was hard to remember that. As usually happens at the point when I am very comfortable with the script I completely dried at one point, unable to remember what came next. I treaded water and it pretty much came back to me. I have not made a mistake in the genealogy for ages, but I think it is coming soon. I know it too well and my brain keeps on goading me as I say it, telling me I am going to mess it up.
I decided to keep it more theatrical and stuck to the script more than usual, but there were a couple of nice new ad-libbed bits, one right at the end when I asked what we had learned here tonight. I stopped to take a swig of water and found myself facing the pulpit, which I noticed for the first time had something written on it - a passage from the Bible which I can't remember now. I read it out and said that was the message of the show. I then pretended to be an aggrieved punter saying "He just read that message off the pulpit. He didn't have a conclusion at all. He had nothing left to say so he just copied what it said on the pulpit. He does that at all his gigs, just reads whatever is written on the pulpit and pretends that somehow ties everything up. Everyone knows it. He's the pulpit plagarist." It was a fun bit of nonsense, made more enjoyable by the fact that it was unique to this evening. Because despite the claims of that imaginary audience member, pulpits with messages written on them are a rarity at comedy gigs.
In the end the audience had come round to me, laughing more heartily at my awful observations about cherubs than they had about a Turin shroud made of semen. It was great to see the white haired ladies near the front chortling at my silly and naughty jokes, but just because someone isn't in their twenties any more doesn't mean they lose their sense of humour. It's strange how we have this stereotype of our more senior citizens as prudes who hate rudeness or fun. After all most of them nowadays would have been young in the sixties and they got up to all kinds of naughtiness. So it's pleasing to see that even in genteel Worcester they will still laugh at a poorly executed cartoon drawing of a penis. It's a delight to watch.
But as with most of my material I copied it off a pulpit.
