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It was my first Happy Now? tour date, but only my second full length crack at this show and almost a month since I last did it. Usually when I do the Frog and Bucket in October (as I have for the last 11 years running) I have done the show around about 40 or 50 times and am experimenting by turning that 60 minutes into a 90 minute show in two halves. Today I would support myself by doing a first half of my favourite bits from the 12 shows, and a second half of Happy Now? I realised that this was a bit of a risk, as I’d start of with an assured set of honed routines and finish with a bit of a stumble through the new stuff. I hoped the Frog audience would cut me a bit of slack, but I’ve nearly always had a fantastic time here, so I hoped for the best.
I had been very happy with the London show of Happy Now? (certainly as a first performance) but knew I had been carried along on a wave of adrenaline and the support of a crowd who knew the difficulty level of what I was attempting and aside for road-testing a bit of the material in stand-up gigs I hadn’t done any more work on the show. Luckily it had been recorded, but as I listened to it on the train on the way up I knew there was a lot of work to do and was regretting not having done a bit more in the interim.
I do like coming back to the Frog each year. I commented that it’s a sign of my failure to progress that I am still doing so, but it’s also a sign that I haven’t got any LESS popular. And it’s one of a handful of venues that I think I would still be playing in the unlikely event that I was a stadium filling superstar, because they’ve been good to me here over the years and always give a warm welcome. Colin the technician has been there every year too and it’s always good to see his mildly scary face. I’ve had a lot of fun on and off stage here. I recall a late night gig where I had to get pissed and perform, with Jason Cook handing me shots, which was a ridiculous experience and ten years ago, the gig would finish and the audience would hang around and we’d get drunk and so on. Tonight I came back to the venue just 15 minutes after the show was over and it was almost completely empty. And I was glad of that as I wanted to go to bed. My audience has got old with me.
The show itself had been fine. Predictably the first half zinged along, but I was not as assured in the second half and struggled slightly to remember what came next. There were a couple of older guys on the balcony (as I would later comment in almost exactly the same position as the two old guys from the Muppets) who were talking quite loudly, proving a distraction for the rest of the crowd and for me. It was hard enough keeping my train of thought together and eventually an opportunity arose for me to break off and ask them to be quiet. They seemed a bit affronted by my suggestion that they shouldn’t talk during the show and told me they’d been chatting about their own kids, which was nice for them, but I posited that they might want to wait until after the show. It was slightly tense and I didn’t want to make it about them, so I just asked them to be quiet which they were for a bit, partly because Colin was giving them evils from his box above the stage.
The show was ticking along fine, though always tough on myself (as I think I have to be), I was a bit disappointed that I wasn’t a little more on top of it and I missed out a couple of links and lost my way in some of the newer stuff. I think this has the makings of being my best show yet, but I do most of my work on stage and I haven’t had enough time on this one yet. I had tried to learn the “Grand Children” door mat routine in the dressing room, but it’s dependent on being really on top of the language in it and having the correct synonyms for “haughty” in the right place. Although the routine got some laughs, I was annoyed that I hadn’t got it down yet and I petered out a bit at the end. One of the old guys chuckled mordantly as I mildly floundered and sarcastically said “Observational comedy”.
I pointed it out that it wasn’t really observational comedy, which was more about pointing out something that is fairly universal that everyone else has noticed without really noticing that they’d noticed until you notice it and offered up the example of a man who has drunk too much booze for someone of his age and is embarrassing himself. That’s an observation. It was quite a cruel one, but he deserved it. This was more grammatical humour, something that most people wouldn’t have noticed and most observational comedy is less mat based. Even though his equally drunk friend was trying to stop him talking now, the man persisted in trying to chip in and I gave him some opportunities to comment, but like all drunk people he was too out of control to make use of the gaps. It left me with a slightly bad taste in my mouth, because I wasn’t too happy with the stuff I’d done and this had interrupted things further. But I think most of the audience was behind me and had enjoyed the show. I just know that it can be and will be better. And was annoyed with myself for having left my work on the show a little bit late.
But they’d had a good night. They’d seen 40 minutes of slick comedy, nearly an hour of new stuff and got to see me testing my wits against a man who had drunk himself almost into insensibility.
I headed back to the hotel. These nights away were always dull and lonely, but made more so by missing my family.
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Photo by Alan Roberts
