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Tour facts- St Albans - 22nd February. St Alban is probably best known for inventing the breakfast cereal All Bran. Using holy powers he was able to make a breakfast dish entirely out of bran and no other ingredient. St Alban was named after the cereal, St Allbran eventually being shortened by the lazy idiots who live in the town. His pre-canonisation name was Ian Weetabix.
But let's not look to the future, the tour started today. My new tour manager Ray came to pick me up early and because I no longer have to navigate my way through London we were in Northampton before I'd even got to the halfway point of relistening to the Edinburgh show. As always the show seemed so unfamiliar after a long break and I couldn't believe I was going to remember it all. Of course I wasn't going to, but somehow most of it got dredged up from subconscious when the time came.
I still can't quite believe that this is my job, or that I am fortunate to be able to tour my stand up and making a living (at least mainly) from this. I know a lot of people on Twitter can't believe it either. But I loved the feeling of being back on the road and mooching around backstage as I tried to familiarise Ray (and myself) with the show. Often times when I listen back to a recording of a show I will find it hard to believe that anyone will laugh at any of this shit (a lot of people on Twitter feel the same), but I was actually quite impressed with the me of August 2017. There's a lot of funny stuff in this show and also, excitingly for me as a performer, bits that still have some more working out to do in them. They work fine as they are, but there's room for development. The kind of development you can really only do by knocking the ideas about on stage for a few weeks and months.
In the past I have perhaps felt like an imposter or someone who is going to be found out and told they have to stop because there's been some awful mistake. But now I feel at home and that I deserve to be here. The three months of mainly not working made returning to work a complete pleasure. Being a dad is OK, I suppose, but being a comedian is unbeatable.
And though there were some missed bits and minor slip ups, this confidence came with me on to stage. Sales had picked up (I was told it was well over 300 people in, when on Monday it was under 200 - but I am a bit dubious that tickets could have sold that fast). Mama Mia was on in the big venue and I felt bad that they were missing that, so I sang a bit of Abba and considered trying to act out the plot of the play, based on the little I remembered from half-watching the film quite a few years ago.
But the audience seemed to want less singing and more zinging, so I pressed on with my own material. It was a very satisfactory start to the tour.
After so much time away the adrenaline high of a fun night on stage pumped me up and I was elated and high. I couldn't sleep. Performance is a drug and this is why so many entertainers lose all sense of reality. Real life cannot compete with the artifice of show business, even when the showbiz is happening in Northampton.
Dorking on Friday to bring me back down to earth.
Though to be fair, our new cooker got fitted today and that might be the reason I felt happy.
And ten years ago today, http://www.richardherring.com/warmingup/1/2/2008/index.html now disgraced broadcaster (he was arrested in 2015 for digging up a Mitford sister and doing something that I can't write about in a family blog) Andrew Collings, came round to my house to record something that was then known as a Poddington Castille (later shortened of course to tontille). It was my first dip into the frigid pool of internet broadcasting, but I got the bug and since then I have recorded over seven podcast episodes (very nearly one a year) and I might do another one in the next year or two if I can find the time.
If you weren't aware of me a decade ago, or perhaps had not yet been born, then you can catch up on the whole journey here https://www.comedy.co.uk/podcasts/collingsherrin/. I can't remember much about the recordings, but all those photos made me laugh, especially the lookalike one.
Of course at that very same time I had recently fallen in love (with Andrew Collings' bum hole, but perhaps more significantly my wife) so it was a momentous time for the future me, a month that turned things around for me (although I had started making some progress with my stand up by then, but the podcast audience made it viable for me). Thanks for coming along on the ride. I hope you've enjoyed a few of the thousands of hours of guff that I have produced betwixt then and now.
