The London shows continue to go well. It was another sell out tonight and it should be again tomorrow. There is talk of doing another run at the theatre after the tour is over, but I don't know if that will happen. The theatre manager told me that I had sold twice as many tickets in this run as I did the last time I appeared at the Arts Theatre, which is incredible and there was a real feeling of excitement amongst the crowd as the show began. When you get a big laugh with a crowd this size you certainly know about it. It's both wonderful and terrifying sensation to be standing there on stage, having created this storm of merriment before you, especially when you have to wait for several seconds for it to die down enough for you to continue. Sometimes merely by waiting the laughter fuels itself and after a slight dip will reignite into a second wave of guffawing. If I'd known at six years old when I was doing that puppet show behind the sofa for my mum and my gran, and loving the fact that I had made them both laugh so hysterically, that my quest for creating laughter would lead me to this, then I would probably have been quite scared. But excited.
I was even at 41 quite scared and excited. It's still an almost unbeatable feeling though. And I am not convinced that it would get better with an even bigger crowd.
Even at 400 seats this is an intimate space and everyone is reasonably close to the action. With a 1000 seater theatre it must be very hard to connect with everyone in the same way. After the show I was discussing with a friend what it must be like to play the O2 arena and though it's got to be an incredible experience as a performer, I can't imagine it's all that good as a punter. You'd be so far away, just watching a distant figure on stage, or choosing instead to view the action on a screen and thus you're immediately distanced from the event. Why not just wait for the DVD. Tonight in this medium sized space I really felt I had the focus and attention of everyone. And that everyone was able to connect with me and see what I was doing.
I am really enjoying doing the show, in case you can't tell. The only on stage experience that I think tops it, was doing Christ on a Bike in Edinburgh and having the audience at a point where they were all laughing so much that I could see many of them were in pain and having difficulty breathing, and yet I knew there was something even funnier about to come up, which would leave them nowhere to go. That kind of routine maybe comes along once in a lifetime, but it gave me a tremendous feeling of power, in what was my first completely solo show. It gave me an understanding of why some stand ups can go a bit crazy and become self-centred and over confident. Because in that situation it is hard not to feel almost godly. It's an awesome power. Thank goodness that I'm not able to do that all the time and have to work at it, otherwise I'd be a nightmare and this blog would be full of self-aggrandising entries like this one, rather than all those hundreds of ones where I fucked it up and stuff went wrong and
people set themselves on fire to try and escape.
Luckily I have seen too many of the lows and experienced the roller coaster ride that my career has been to allow any of this to go too much to my head. And after drinking a bit too much with some friends I went home on the night bus. I might not have done so if I could have found a cab and if it hadn't just pulled up beside me, but it's a cheap, relatively efficient and terrifying way to get home and as I think I've observed before I don't suppose many of the performers who had been starring on the West End stage tonight would have been making their way home like this.
But I did and felt safe enough to twitter about it all from my iPhone. Yesterday an audience member had been astonished to see me going home on the tube, joking that she expected me to go home in a limo. But I am a long way from having the kind of profile which means that it makes it impossible for me to travel on public transport. In fact I wonder if more than a handful of people actually have that kind of profile. I think Londoners are too cool or self-absorbed or polite or unimpressable to make any kind of a fuss. Though maybe those autograph hunters from Broadcasting House might start lurking like zombies if they thought Elton John or Bono might turn up at any second.
In the Beatles Anthology Paul McCartney keeps going on and on about how much he misses travelling on the bus. I still have that pleasure. As well as still performing to a manageable and smallish crowd. So who is the real success here? Me on the N207 feeling slightly afraid or him on the Mull of Kintyre protected by a hundred bagpipers in kilts, with more money than he could ever hope to spend, however many gold-diggers he might choose to marry in the future.
It is him.
But has Paul McCartney ever been on the national news?
Yes he has. Loads of time.
Well so have I now. I thought it was going to be on the Channel 4 news, but it looks like I got bumped by some elephants (that says bumped. If you listen to the podcast you'll know what I have given up for lent). But I suspect I had just misunderstood and the report was always only going to be on More 4 news. Which is still cool, but not as col obviously. Collings somehow made it on to the segment, trouncing out his silly lies about not wanting to get paid, but I was on it more, along with me and my frizzy hair -
You can watch it here. I didn't think I was in shot when I was eating that bun! And if I needed any proof about how badly my diet was going and refused to acknowledge the fact that my jeans no longer really fit me, then this bun eating monstrosity would surely be it. For a second I though we were back on the Channel 4 news with the elephants.
