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The toughest part of touring is leaving my girls behind. I am only staying away for two and a half days this time, but after a good few months of mainly being at home in the evening, it's a wrench to know that I will be spending a couple of nights away.
But we had a fun morning as it was show day at the Little Gym and I went along to see Phoebe messing around on balance beams and a little climbing wall. At the end all the kids received what I felt was a somewhat arbitrary medal. They can't all have won. Come on Little Gym, having the courage of your convictions and choose one kid to win the prize. Phoebe seemed pleased to have got the nod though, almost like she didn't notice that literally all the kids had got the same, even the ones who barely did any stunts at all, preferring to hang on to their parents' legs, crying.
After an early lunch together they were off to see friends and I was off to Nottingham Playhouse. Excitingly I had sold around 500 tickets for the show, meaning the stalls and the front few rows of the circle would be more or less full. One of the unexpected benefits of the level I have reached is that I get to play to all kinds of different audiences. As fun as Margate and Fleet were, it was going to be a very different atmosphere tonight. And I think I appreciate these “big†(for me) crowds all the more because they are still the exception rather than the rule. As much as reviewers think that they can judge a comedian by any performance, it is so much easier when there are loads of people and the energy from the crowd raises the whole show. But you become a better comedian by having to play to rooms of 30 or less, year after year.
Would I become used to these bigger gigs if they were the norm and less excited by them? Or if I got to play to 3000 a night, would 500 seem like a tricky gig again. I am not sure about that. I think that 500 might be about the perfect number to play to. Certainly enough to make a very comfortable living, but also intimate enough to connect with everyone. I'd give 3000 a go, in the unlikely event of that ever happening. But accidentally I feel I have lucked out and found a very interesting niche for myself. And it still blows my mind when so many people pay to see me. I don't even understand how that has happened.
For now a 60% full Nottingham Playhouse is an exciting enough playground for me. And though I still haven't shaken off my cold, this time Doctor Theatre kicked in pretty much straight away. I had to cope with the rolling laughs that a big theatre provides and with that security you're able to find additional laughs in a pause or a look or an aside. The first half was five minutes longer than yesterday, even though it was basically the same stuff.
I was a little dubious about doing a Best of show - would it hold together as well as a themed show and would people want to see it?- but it has come together really well and I like the way that the first half is generally lighter and frivolous and an extended stand-up set, whereas the second half gets into meatier and weightier routines. My stand up is non-award winning and I rarely get asked to do any of the TV shows that showcase it. I don't know why though. I am fucking extraordinary.
At least I felt that way tonight and as always this drug-like boost of confidence made my appreciate why so many top stand-ups become egotistical nightmares, who if they became politicians would make Donald Trump and Hitler look like grabbed pussies.
I sat in the hotel bar after the show, having a purely medicinal fine malt whisky and thought about my extreme good fortune. My comparative failure (of where my ambitions would have liked to take me) have made me a success. I am lucky to have a wife and daughter to miss so much, I am lucky to have a career that means I get to occasionally play gigs like this, but also means I can sit in a Nottingham hotel bar on a Saturday night and go completely unrecognised by everyone else in there. I thought of the many sad nights I sat in hotel bars on previous tours, where I felt lost and alone and hoped that some beautiful woman might come in and talk to me (never happened, I just sat alone as a couple of sales reps did the same). Now I am thrilled to be alone, basking in the glow of a successful night, knowing I had earned this little oasis of calm. The wall of the bar was covered with signed photos of many of the stars who have played the theatre and stayed in this nearby hotel. I knew that nobody at the hotel would be asking me to give a photo for the collection. Fifteen years ago that would have bothered me, but now, again, it just feels like such good fortune. To have the fun of playing to 500 people, but then to melt back to anonymity. I felt like I had somehow got away with a bank robbery.
A big group of people who I imagine were on some works do (they seemed more like colleagues than friends) were getting drunk at the bar and the tables next to me. They drank and joked and laughed. Someone made an in-joke about someone they all knew and a man near me threw back his head and guffawed with delight for over a minute. Laughter is a powerful thing, though it struck me how strange it was that here in this bar, it was being handed out for free, just for the fun of it, whereas I had managed to convince people to pay for it. I doubt anyone laughed at me as heartily as anyone laughed at that joke at the expense of someone's hairstyle (or something like that). Then again had the woman who made the jon tried it out in front of 500 strangers at the theatre she might not have got such a good response.
All this good fortune and happiness I was feeling tonight has come due to the kind of sheer bloody-minded persistence that has seen me write this blog for so long and the refusal to give up and the willingness to keep on learning. And also from a double Talisker.
I am a work in progress both personally and professionally. It took a long time to meet the people who would turn my life around (and I could never have predicted then that one of those people would emerge from the other like in a sci-fi film) and I've built up my audience person by person over the last two decades.
All the shitty and lonely bits would have been work it had I known about today, where I would see my daughter's delight at being given an arbitrary medal and a stranger laughing at someone else's joke.
I hope because of all the shitty bits and poorly attended gigs that I've had (and let's face it will almost certainly have in the future) that I won't start taking the good stuff for granted.
Maybe the tide is slowly turning my way or maybe I was just a lucky Cnut all along and didn't even notice it. I can't imagine I can maintain the tricky balance between being popular enough to sell tickets but anonymous enough to sit in a hotel bar alone for very long…. one way or the other.
