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Off to Birmingham today to host an awards show, a small step towards paying off my Edinburgh debt, but often a difficult kind of gig to play. Usually such corporates involve a room full of uninterested, drunk people, who have no idea who you are and no massive desire to listen to you. I’ve found the award ones can be more fun as people are at least invested in the evening in the hope that they might win something. But I know from the (rare) awards nights I’ve been to as a guest that I have been more interested in getting pissed and having fun with the people on my table.
I used to eschew corporate gigs (though to be fair that was pretty easy as I wasn’t getting offered any), but now I will take the occasional one, trading off a night of potential humiliation with the rationalisation that I can use the money to help pay for my internet based work and over-ambitious play projects. I think I used to have an ethical objection, but now it’s just another gig in front of another audience and the only reason to be reluctant to take the work is that you might not have a great night. And I suppose there’s a danger that the lure of reasonably well paid gigs might tempt you in to forget about the more interesting work and just go for the money. But knowing that by working for one night I free myself up to do a couple of weeks of podcasts, it feels like a good compromise. I am being forced to do some jobs that I might have turned down before because of my Edinburgh losses, but I would have done tonight’s gig regardless. I am not so much attempting to justify my actions as noting the way that our priorities change with age and responsibility. I was probably a fool to (theoretically) turn down these kind of gigs as a younger man. My point is that I think it was more to do with fear of failure than anything to do with wanting to bring down capitalism.
Tonight’s gig was at Aston Villa football club (not on the pitch thankfully) and I had a weirdly early call time of 3.30pm, even though my stage time was 9.30pm. Had I spotted this before last night I might have been able to do something about it, as I knew I would need very little time to rehearse this - it was just a matter of checking the mics and the autocue and working out if there were any difficult to pronounce names. I arrived a bit late, but (as I suspected) the crew were still setting up and wouldn’t have been ready for me at the right time. There was a friendly team from the magazine who had set up the awards and together we sorted out what was required. It took about 30 minutes and so then I had five hours to kill at Aston Villa. My dressing room turned out to be one of the directors’ boxes overlooking the ground. It was a long walk from the venue for the event, down cold corridors. I had work to get on with so didn’t mind being isolated and it was fun to look out at the empty stands and the hallowed turf with its lush carpet of grass. I couldn’t get out and run down on to it. They leave the scoreboard and advertising hoardings on even when there’s no game on, which surprised me.
The room was a bit chilly, but the radiator was working to begin with. But after an hour or so I found myself feeling especially cold and realised that it had gone off. Sitting in a cold room for five hours, a good three minutes walk from everyone else was not the best preparation for a gig. I was also trying to work out what I could do as my ten minutes of stand up that would be short enough to appeal to a drunk and mixed audience, but which wouldn’t be offensive to a drunk and mixed audience. I didn’t have much. The awards were for people working in housing and I wondered if I could come up with some jokes about that, but it was tough. I had to hope that they were in the mood to play and that I could conjure up comedy from thin air. It’s a difficult balance as you want to be amusing, but this is people’s big night. If you take the piss too much then that can spoil their evening, but if you just read out the lists of names and present awards then that’s a bit boring.
Luckily a guy turned up to see if I was OK and I told him about the heating and ordered some food (I was cold, I was hungry (though thankfully not naked) were you there, were you there?). He couldn’t fix the heater but he sent for another man who couldn’t fix it either, but rang someone who could. A nice plate of food arrived. Even if you factor in the four hours of driving, the five hours of waiting and the hour of performing this was still a good day. I am not complaining, just lifting the curtain on the strange world of show business. To be isolated in a small cold room, surrounded by tens of thousands of empty seats and an arena standing idle, before being projected into a hot room full of excited people who were indifferent to me who I had to try and make laugh made me feel like I was in an art installation about the nature of the performer.
The job part of the day was acceptable. The crowd were not massively paying attention when I started, but I made them laugh and got their attention with a couple of the shorter gags (though later would try a longer story that they had literally no interest in). I wanted to keep the awards themselves running as quickly as possible, because they’re exciting for the people who win, but not so much for those who aren’t up for that award and actively a bit depressing for those who lose. And there wasn’t much opportunity for banter with the people handing out the awards. So I got through the first section in double quick time. I tried to slow things down a bit for the second set of awards, but by now the audience were a bit drunker and their attention span shorter and there wasn’t really much I could do to spin things out. It had not been a humiliating disaster and maybe it wasn’t the kind of gig where anyone was really going to shine. Perhaps I did my job just by reading out the names on the cards (lightly taking the mickey and trying to whip up competition) and then getting on with it. It was a novelty for me and I enjoyed it, but I am glad that this isn’t my day job. I could envisage a future where my moral compass has shifted further and this kind of job became the norm, rather than a way to pay the bills. Perhaps the Richard Herring of 20 years time will be as comfortable with that idea as the Richard Herring of 20 years ago would have been uncomfortable with what I was doing tonight.
One of the winners said that he was hoping I would say “Moon on a Stick”. So I said it and he and one other person in the room cheered. Which would be a good analogy for the rollercoaster ups and down of showbiz if our stuff had ever been popular in the first place. But it would have got the same reaction in this room in 1995. The crowd didn’t have me pegged as a faded star of yesteryear, because they had no idea who I was at all.
But I wanted to do a good job and I enjoyed the challenge of facing a tricky crowd that was not my audience at all and pretty much getting away with it. To use an Aston Villa analogy, it was an away draw, which is pretty much all that I could have hoped for. Perhaps it is important to do gigs that are outside my comfort zone every now and again. I am spoiled with my own audiences. And I am glad that I am professional enough to want to do a good job.
I left them all to dance to the band as I completed my long day of inertia, with a burst of energy in the middle, by driving home through the rain, feeling the beginnings of another cold taking hold.
