I feel like I haven’t been home for a month. And yet a check of my diary shows that I was in fact in my own bed just five nights ago. Touring is taking its toll physically, psychologically and emotionally and there’s still over a month to go. It is harder than I remember it being, but that is a timely reminder as I am still trying to write my script about a double act on the road, so it almost counts as research. Though if I were to chronicle an exact account of what touring is really like then I would be responsible for the most boring drama ever to be put on TV. In the first two episodes of my fictional account there are two incidents involving the police, an attempted suicide, a suspected kidnapping, a car crash and the destruction of a dressing room. If only it was really like that. Hopefully though it is a little unrealistic in terms of the drama, the relationship between the characters is a bit more believable. The most exciting thing that happened on all the Lee and Herring tours was when the tour manager’s sunglasses accidentally fell off the dashboard of the van. Suffice to say that I have had to draw on my imagination and the examples of more incendiary partnerships to come up with something interesting. Whilst it was hard to distance the “You Can Choose Your Friends” script from my own family, I have had no such problems fictionalising the double act in Double Act. I was forced to due to the completely dull nature of any tour I have ever been on. Some of it is loosely based on stories I have heard or read about other comedic partnerships, but the only thing in it that happened to us is a bit based on when Richard Thomas (the opera writer) saw I had left the card on my door for breakfast in my room and proceeded to tick every single item on the menu (you may be able to read this by looking through the 98 tour diary which is up at
www.leeandherring.com. If you are expecting a blow by blow account of my relationship with Stewart you will be sorely disappointed. In fact you should be sorely relieved as only about one dramatic thing ever happened to us when we had a bit of a pushy girly fight in our office which lasted all of thirty seconds. I suspect that on tour the others all waited until I went to bed and then got involved in orgies with prostitutes and smoked crack and threw televisions into swimming pools. But I have no proof of that and the truth as far as I know it is that the Lee and Herring were the most boring and un-rock n roll affairs in the history of touring. That is, until the Richard Herring tours, which are so dull that they are in danger of going all the way round past infinity and coming out interesting again.
I got to my hotel in Blackwood early and so had time to do some work on the difficult second script in the bar. After a month or so of stultification and only about four pages written, I found suddenly it was all coming together. I wrote solidly for two hours, tripling the length of the script and feeling I was really getting somewhere. Then, typically, an error message came up on the screen and my script-writing software shut itself down. I let out an audible moan. I hadnÂ’t saved once during the whole process. ItÂ’s so long since IÂ’ve written anything that it totally slipped my mind to do so. Surely it had been autosaving. Please God. I know I donÂ’t believe in you, but you wouldnÂ’t be so cruel surely.
Of course when I got back into the file it had reverted back to the pathetic state it had been in at the start of the day (and ever since that
one hour of inspiration back at the beginning of the tour) and I laid my head on the table and felt like crying. But instead I made a valiant attempt to remember all the stuff that I had just done and cracked on with recreating it. I also put on the autosave function and kept saving the work – even so it crashed twice more and I lost tiny bits of work. Mostly I think I recreated what I had done and sometimes a script can come out better when you do this. But things had flowed so naturally on the first attempt that I knew there were bits that weren’t coming out as well. I managed to get to the same point and actually a little beyond though, which was a small relief. I am hoping to complete the draft before I head to Spain next week. Then I will only be a month and a half late for the deadline.
Finally this script is coming together, after a long time of me staring at a blank screen with a blank brain. Suddenly I seem to be in the mood to do it. I wish I understood what makes this happen and I wish I was able to just do two hours work a day, every single day, then I wouldnÂ’t go through this Hell. But I come to realise that this Hell is all part of the process. If both these series get commissioned though I am not going to have months to waste doing nothing. Of course there is always the chance that neither of them will get commissioned and then I can stare at a blank screen for as long as I want. ItÂ’s going to be feast or famine in the latter half of this year.
I didn’t know what to expect from the Blackwood Miner’s Institute, but it didn’t turn out to be filled with men with dirty faces in helmets with lamps on. Though it was quite a mixed audience with a wide age range and plenty of more elderly patrons who I thought might not like what they were about to hear. Indeed the first few minutes were quite hard work and when there was an audible gasp the first time I said “fuck” and an audible tut when I said “monkey semen” I started to mentally edit the show working out what I should jettison. It was a bit dark, but there was a girl in the front row who looked about 13, though she turned out to be 20. I was relieved to hear this and I relaxed a bit and things picked up and I decided I would do the full show. Even if most of the crowd wouldn’t like it, I owed it to the people who did to not change the set. About half an hour after talking to the girl who looked young but wasn’t I realised I had missed a chance to do a joke about the Blackwood Minor’s Institute and discussed my failure.
The Jesus stuff was predictably controversial and one woman moaned in disgust when I concluded (as I have started to do recently) that Jesus was a cunt for hanging around all the time where he wasnÂ’t wanted. Then I asked her if calling Jesus a cunt was worse than discussing having sex with a vagina in his leg. She felt it was. I thought that that was interesting.
After the shaky start it turned into one of my favourite shows. I think in the past I would have given up early and had a miserable time, but I persisted and tried hard to make things work and it came out all right. In the second half the old people on the bonfire told the audience that what I wanted to happen was for a miner to put his coal-flecked cock into my mouth. “By which I mean someone who mines, not a minor, He doesn't want to get arrested,” the old man who looks to the right explained. Thank goodness that the miner/minor joke had finally unexpectedly paid off.
