I drove over to Essex for the final official gig of "The Headmaster's Son" in Clacton-on-Sea. Additional gigs have been added in Liverpool on May 4th and DVD record in Bristol on 2nd June, so it didn't quite feel like the end, but it's still hard to believe that I have done 46 performances of this show since the whole thing kicked off in late January. Sometimes you're sick of a show by the time you've done it this many times, but I am still really enjoying this one and will miss it when it's gone. Maybe I'll do it again in the future, who knows? It just feels like it's getting really good now! Ha ha.
I'd never been to Clacton before, and knew that I hadn't sold all that many tickets. For a long time only 6 of the 550 possible tickets had gone, but by early this week there were about 60ish, which was still sounding a bit dire.
When I got to the town hall at about 5.45pm everything was locked up and no one seemed to be there, so I decided to walk down the road and see if I could find the eponymous sea that Clacton seems to think is so good that it has it in its full name.
Having spent a lot of time in Weston-Super-Mare in my youth I was not surprised to see that Clacton on an April evening resembles what I imagine the world will look like once there has been a nuclear apocalypse. Slightly feral gangs of bored children were hanging around outside gaudy, but largely deserted arcades. It had, as @eddiepurple on Twitter described it "a tangible bleakness". If you like slaggy looking 14 year old girls then this is the place for you. I don't like that though and anyone who says I do is lying.
It was all a little depressing for no exactly discernible reason. Maybe it's just the forced attempt towards fun and jollity, which doesn't quite match up to the reality. Or maybe just being at the seaside on one's own is somehow wrong. Perhaps it just speaks of a less sophisticated time where a few fruit machines and flashing lights and a pier with a few crappy rides on it was the height of entertainment. Or just the fact that as a child this combination of games and candy floss and chips and crappy loud, but light pop music creating a false image of excitement would have been the most amazing experience. Perhaps I was mourning my own loss of innocence.
I bought some greasy chips and walked to the front and looked at the brown sea and at a young girl dancing to an Alphabeat song excitedly as she headed into the arcade on the pier, which seemed to sum up everything I had been thinking. She was really happy.
I was also amused to see posters for my show up on the sea front, alongside ones for various tribute bands and right next to one for the Best of British Variety Tour, with acts like Cannon and Ball, Tom O'Connor, Roger De Courcey and Bucks Fizz, featuring Bobby G and three other people who might be his children and who aren't even making any attempt to look like the original band. I wondered how tortured those new members of the band must feel if they ever woke up in the middle of the night and considered what their life had become. Surely you would hope for more from you career than this. But maybe I am being too snobby. And I guess if you're the kind of person to appear in a line up of a 1980s rubbish pop band that only has one original member in it, that you probably never wake up in the dark having an existential nightmare. I wish I could sleep as soundly as the man who is not Bobby G in the current line up of Buck's Fizz. Still I think there was a Buck's Fizz band (with David Van Day in it) that actually had none of the original line up in it. It must be worse to be in that one. But I bet all the singers in that version sleep like babies for 20 hours a day.
I noticed that there was an asterix by the Clacton date on the Best of British tour and a note at the bottom explained that Roger de Courcey would not be appearing at this gig. I wondered if that was his choice or Clacton's. Did he know something I didn't know? Or had he committed some crime in the town and was not allowed to return? The Best of British tour was going to some fairly shit places - was de Courcey saying he was prepared to go to them, but Clacton was a step too far down into the sewer of light entertainment?
And more pertinently, would Nookie the bear still be performing in Clacton without Roger?
I wondered if there would be any people in Clacton who would be going to this show and to my show. Is there any intersection on the Venn diagram of Richard Herring and the Best of British II tour? I would love to meet the person who wants to see us both.
But having grown up near a town very like Clacton it just felt so weird to see my face on one of the posters on the sea front. I remember looking at these and laughing back in WSM. What would the teenage me think if he saw his own face staring back at him amongst those posters?
On another display my poster was next to one with Ken Dodd on it, which made me feel a whole lot better than being next to Best of British. Dodd is a legend and an incredible example of a comedian who has carried on doing his job into his old age and never giving up. His shows, by all accounts go on for hours. I hope I am still up on seaside posters when I am his age. And hopefully not as a package show of other 90s comedians. Though who knows what choices I will have to make in the future. No disrespect to the acts in Best of British (no, I can't pull that off, some disrespect), but much kudos to Dodd, still doing it, under his own name.
In the end about 120 people turned up for the gig, which was much better than I had hoped. The cavernous and echoey hall did seem pretty empty, but the crew had set up one block of chairs to make it look like it had actually sold out! I was on a high stage and the audience were quite a long way away and I worried that it wouldn't really work, but as with Jersey I pulled my finger out and didn't let my head drop.
I had worried about doing the Jade Goody stuff in Essex, but decided I couldn't short change these people and suspected that most of them would be a bit pissed off with having Jade being held up as their "princess" without their say so. No disrespect to Jade Goody (see previous parentheses) but I am not convinced by the canonisation and promotion to royalty that some people seem to be conferring on her and if I was from Essex I would prefer someone else to be my figurehead. There must be someone good who came from Essex. Though I can't think of anyone off the top of my head.
I decided I would give Essex more Jade Goody material rather than less and decided to perform a little snippet of what I imagined the proposed Jade Goody musical would be like. I came up with the lyric, "I gave him a blow job under a blanket,
With retrospect it might have been better to wank it."
The writers of the musical are welcome to use that for free.
The people of Clacton certainly enjoyed me taking the piss out of the town, though I suspect many of them had travelled in from elsewhere, as there were no feral teenagers or slaggy looking 14 year old girls in the audience and they were the only locals I saw on the streets. Clacton is a town populated only by the young.
It was a good (almost) last show. And a privilege to perform on the same stage that Ken Dodd will be walking upon and which Roger de Coursey won't be.
Thanks to everyone who came to see this tour. It was definitely the best yet. Hopefully it won't be the best ever.
