Days Without Alcohol -52.
Off to Cardiff today and the tour is in full swing. If I end up with a speeding ticket this time I will know that the country is conspiring against me as I drove super sarcastically slowly all the way through this speed camera covered country. On the way back the traffic reduced to one lane and the speed limit was 50. I stuck rigourously to this even though a car behind was flashing me to get a move on. Bad luck Welsh-o. If you lived in a country that was more lackadaisical towards car based misdemeanours then you might have got home slightly quicker. Thinking about it you might well have been English, as you were heading out of this Godforsaken place, but if my driving discouraged you ever visiting again then that would be a good thing and a just revenge for the 9 points I have received from the officious Welsh authorities in the last four years. I will bring you to your knees Wales. You will regret tangling with me. Please don't give me any more speeding fines.
Last year on the Welsh leg of the tour I had been properly miserable. The shows had been going well, but I had been lonely and tired and just split up with my girlfriend and it was all a bit too much. This year I am enjoying the whole thing immensely (though admittedly it is early days). Camberley aside the audiences have been of a good size and tonight I had sold about 300 tickets. "You'll be pleased to hear that we've sold so many tickets that we've spent the last half an hour searching for extra chairs to put in the venue," the guy at the stage door told me as he led me to the venue.
"Well you could always put me in the big room," I joked. I was playing the sizeable bar at the venue, though the main auditorium is 1500 seats and can be arranged to fit 2000 - we played there as Lee and Herring (or Herring and Lee as the Guardian called us today - that was there wording not mine, though I may start calling the double act that from now on), to much less than 1500 people. In fact I probably played to more people tonight than we got back then.
"If you had sold a few more we were thinking we'd have to do that," he came back, which blew me away a bit. If numbers continue to increase year on year then maybe I would get to play that room again by about 2018. That would be awesome.
It is, of course, much easier playing to 300 people rather than 50 and I massively enjoyed the gig I was playful and naughty and everyone seemed to go with me. There is a place in the show where I argue that there are worse places to be depressed than in bed after having had shallow and soul destroying sex with a stranger. And
based on my own experiences last year, I add, "like Swansea", which was where I was at my lowest ebb on the last tour. It would be easy for me to turn this into a cheap local reference in every town I go to - I could have said "like Guildford" when I was in Camberley last night or Liverpool in Manchester and so on. But I have decided not to do this. I have said Swansea in every gig. Because it is , in my experience, the worst place to be depressed. It's the kind of place where they
put a toilet in the same room as your bed.
But I feared the people of Cardiff would think I was just pandering to local rivalries and this would thus make the joke less amusing, rather than more, so I added, "I want to make it clear that I haven't just said Swansea because I am in Cardiff. I say Swansea wherever I am, because it is the most depressing place in the world!" The audience who had not really laughed too hard at the initial reference, really appreciated this candour and I got a big laugh. So I chance my arm by attempting a joke that I had thought about mentioning, but had resolved beforehand was too risky and might turn things against me, by adding something like, "I could understand it if everyone was killing themselves
there." This not too oblique reference to local troubles in South Wales luckily went down well. There were a few "ooooohs" but a lot of laughs and a general feeling it seemed that this sick joke had been appreciated. I explained that I had really been unsure about doing it and they laughed more. They understood where I was coming from with the gag and that I wasn't really making light of the awful and almost inexplicable things that were happening amongst young people in Bridgend. When you get something like this right it can be a good release to be able to laugh at something so raw and relevant. It felt like one of those. Also I suppose you have to slightly admire my balls at taking the chance. Ultimately we were only laughing at Swansea. But it's great when the performer and the audience are so on the same wavelength and the comedian is trusted enough for this kind of dark humour to work so effectively.
Someone left me a packet of Werther's Originals on stage during the interval and I joked about the implication that I was an old man, but later I realised I should of course have thrown them to the man in the front row who I had accused of being a paedophile (with "a pocket full of sweets") saying, "There's some more ammunition for you." Damn. But part of the way you become a better comedian is to replay these things over later so that next time something similar happens you are forearmed and forewarned.
I drove home (slowly, at least on that side of the Severn Bridge) feeling tired but really happy. Last year perhaps I would have hung around in town hoping to go out and get drunk and have an adventure (which would not have happened and would have left me feeling more unhappy) but to be going home, having done a good job, with a bigger audience than last time and a better performance, felt incredibly satisfying. I could get to really love this job.
