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Most of my day was taken up with doing phone interviews for the forthcoming Lord of the Dance Settee Tour - I don’t need to promote it to you, right? You’re already coming. Christ if you’re not coming then what chance do I have?). The first one was with BBC Radio Stoke, to try and encourage people to come to my thus far unpopular gig in Crewe. This was the big one. If you can nail BBC Radio Stoke then the the sky is the limit. It’s also the limit if you can’t nail BBC Radio Stoke. The sky is the limit for pretty much everyone who doesn’t have access to a space shuttle. We are all limited by gravity and the need for oxygen.
This was a live interview, and the first one of the day. I was a bit tired and so had to make sure my brain understood that it wasn’t allowed to instruct my mouth to swear. But swearing is such a part of me that sometimes it can happen without me realising. It’s a tough tight-rope to negotiate. You can’t say anything offensive on BBC Radio Stoke.
Or so I thought. But as I tuned into the show via my phone, waiting for the presenter to get round to me the discussion was all about whether a man should make sure a woman is able to bake before agreeing to marry her. Whilst this was (I would hope) all tongue in cheek and a response to the final of the Great British Bake Off on the telly this evening, I was still a bit surprised by the content. But it allowed me to start the interview in a mixture of mock and actual outrage about the suggestion. Surely there were more important considerations before you make that great leap into the unknown, like whether you had compatible personalities, as well as issues that ironically were not appropriate to go into on a BBC lunchtime show. “Doesn’t it show a certain amount of nurturing and care if a woman is good at baking?” the presenter asked me. “Why aren’t you asking if men should be able to bake then? They are the ones who probably need to demonstrate those qualities more and two of the Bake off finalists are men, so maybe it’s time to switch things around.” I said that I was glad that my tour wasn’t coming to Stoke with this kind of attitude and that I would have cancelled the gig in disgust if it was. It was all in good humour, with an undercurrent of truth. The discussion was halted for a while as the presenter had to play some Rod Stewart. Perhaps the phone line had taken me back in time. Or maybe it’s just Stoke that is stuck in a vortex from which no man can return.
Thank God Crewe is not as entrenched in chauvinism
Nothing can make you hate yourself more than having to sit back and listen to you talking about yourself for four hours, except to start playing yourself at snooker. So by the end of the afternoon I was ready to punch myself in my own throat. I have no idea if what I was saying was interesting to the journalists or likely to get new people into my shows, but it did help solidify what my stand up show is about in my own mind. I think with both shows this year I was maybe a little too subtle about what I was trying to convey. I certainly convinced myself this afternoon that Lord of the Dance Settee is not only partly about my own experience with dance, but also a metaphor for the dance of life and that I have tried to demonstrate that by seeding the show with almost impossible to spot back references to my previous work, which I nod to before building on those ideas. Admittedly not a single person has spotted those themes and maybe the show is, as I claim on stage, just a load of daft stuff that’s happened to me. But I see it as me in a bubble, looking back at my life from what I laughably imagine is the halfway point, wondering where things went wrong and what I should do next, both personally and professionally. Like Jesus in the song (I’m not saying I am like Jesus, that is for other people to say) the dance is our lives and whatever happens to me the dance goes on. It’s a much more upbeat message than the mournful “When I needed a neighbour”. But perhaps I need to work on teasing these ideas out a little bit so that someone other than me might spot them. Or maybe I just satisfy myself with it being a funny show that no one understands because they take me at face value when I tell them I am stupid. And when you listen to the Brendon Burns podcast you will hear him say some surprisingly wise things about this. And the fact that it’s surprising that Brendon is so wise about comedy is part of the point. He’s brash and sweary and you judge him because of his accent. And also a lot of what he says is stupid. But that doesn’t mean he’s not clever.
I am not saying I am Brendon Burns. That is for other people to say.
The free audio of the first RHLSTP of the new series with guest Katherine Ryan is now up on the British Comedy Guide - and will shortly appear on iTunes.
Go Faster Stripe is having a crazy sale on some of my and some other people’s DVDs. Fill your boots here and why not add a monthly badge to your cart too. If you buy two DVDs you also get my best of “10” DVD free too. It usually costs £12 so if you buy two £4 DVDS you are essentially printing your own money. Buy enough DVDs and you could be a millionaire by the end of the day.
