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Paul Hocker on Twitter posted an old playbill from Up The Creek with my name on the line-up for 22nd December. He wondered if I could help him out with the year. I knew it had to be 1990 or 91 (outside possibility of 92) because I had only done stand up for a limited time back then.
As it turned out it was pretty easy to work out because Steve Marriott died in the spring of 1991 and also 22nd December was a Saturday in 1990.
So that’s what I was up to almost 30 years ago today. Almost certainly dying on my hole in front of a boozed up Christmas audience. December gigs are notoriously difficult and add to that the fact that I was shit at stand up in 1990 and you can be pretty sure that nobody had a good time. I remember doing Up The Creek, and whilst not all the gigs were awful, most of them were and I suspect that this was one of the shockers. I don’t remember seeing Rob Newman (or even gigging with him) or Geoff (presumbly Jeff) Green, though I did end up on the bill with Chris and George quite a lot (sadly we lost George this year). Malcolm Hardee has of course been dead for 15 years. I was almost certainly an open spot - I am not sure I ever did a paid gig at this venue before this millennium. I will have been heckled and I will have done my time regardless and then probably slinked off into the night and missed Rob Newman as I made the long trawl home from Greenwich to Acton with the lack of laughter failing to make any ringing sound in my ears.
What depressing times these were.
I didn’t fit into the stand up scene back then. It was only two years after I’d been booed off stage at the Gilded Balloon by seemingly every stand up comic on the circuit and understandably I didn’t feel very welcome. But I wasn’t good either. And I was 23 years old. How dare I think I could entertain grown-ups at Christmas?
But nice to see this bit of history and the names that were made and the names I hadn’t thought about for 30 years. There was plenty of exciting stuff going on back then, but one tends to forget the misery and humiliations that you had to go through.
Other than that the usual fun of researching my guest for RHLSTP and finding out lots I didn’t know about the remarkable Marek Larwood, not least of which, he has invented a new sport that looks genuinely good. I also recorded another Peter Dibdin sketch (though it’s for a Christmas ep, so I need to do some more for the next couple of weeks). It’s feeling like it has the legs though.
RHLSTP with Kiell Smith-Bynoe is now up on
audio
