Off to Wales today to appear at the Machynlleth Comedy Festival. Machynlleth is a beautiful if fairly remote and small town on the edge of Snowdonia Park, perhaps not the first place you'd expect a comedy festival, but it's in its third year and is going from strength the strength, attracting a very impressive line-up of comedians (and Stewart Lee).
With my first Leicester Square Theatre Podcast tomorrow I could perhaps have done without the drive there today and back tomorrow (a mess up on an administrative level meant the podcasts started a week earlier than I had intended), but I had a great time both in the show and before and afterwards that I was glad I'd made the effort. It feels odd and wrong to be bumping into so many people that you know in this faraway and unfamiliar place, but after months of solo touring it was truly great to see so many of my peers and due to the nature of the festival they seemed to be all of the loveliest comedians and none of the idiots. Someone had made a Hollywood style sign on the hillside saying "Machynlleth" which I thought was a lovely touch, though Arthur Smith told me that that morning someone had down a Fawlty Towers style rearrangement of the letters. I forget what Arthur said they'd changed it to but it might have been "Lynch Hamlet" or "Hellcat Hymn" - both pretty impressive anagrams of this unusual and vowel-light name.
Both the sign and the rearrangement were indicative of the fun and wit to be had this weekend. I wished I had come down earlier to enjoy the shows and the atmosphere.
My own show, in the Tabernacle (or as it's called in Welsh "Tabernacl" - I am bilingual), a wonderful intimate room with the audience on two tiers, which felt like a Planet of the Apes courtroom or something from The Crucible. The show went well, even though I hadn't done it for a while, it was somehow all coming out in the right order. But towards the end of the first half, for the first time on this tour, I ad-libbed a bit and then totally forgot what came next. As a kid I used to enjoy disrupting an ant trail by drawing a line across it with my finger and then watching the confused ants having no idea where they were meant to go. What had they done to me to deserve me fucking up their day like this? They were the lucky ones though as I also quite liked to get ants on to a newspaper and then set fire to it or just fry them with matches, like I was some kind of insane and randomly vindictive ant God.
But when I lose my place in a show like this, I know how the ant trail ants must have felt. It's a moment of utter blankness and confusion as an eternity of silence stretches in front of me, with nothing to say. I managed to tread water and then jokily admit what had happened in the hope it would give me time to remember where I was. Within the messing around the right bit of the show popped into my head, but I riffed a bit more and then had to admit that despite having remembered, the information had once again deserted me. Luckily this was all funny and even more luckily somehow some unfrozen part of my brain managed to relay the information to the iced up majority and I staggered blindly back on the the correct path, the scent of secreted ant fluid now in my nostrils and I was away again.
With only two shows to go (at the Bloomsbury in London on 15th and 16th May) I am still really enjoying this show and will be sad to leave it behind. But cocks are waiting for me on the horizon. And ants bent on revenge have laid a trail and I can't help rushing towards them, even if I might become impaled upon them.
I had a couple of pints of Guinness with some of the other acts at the end of the night, but sensibly steered myself away from the bar when I was thinking of ordering a whisky as a nightcap. I have to be up early in the morning with a long drive. I made my excuses and left, heading back up the hill to the bed and breakfast, passing younger comics on the way, telling them I was too old to stay out late.
