Another slightly close to the edge Collins and Herring show on 6 this morning, where for once Andrew was in the most trouble (ie not very much) for saying "camel toe" ( which is surely only rude if you know what it means, making you somewhat complicit and in any case what was most wrong was that he used it about a man - he should be sacked for not using it properly). But my favourite thing to come out of our stream of consciousness ramblings was the promise that my dad and Andrew's dad would be fighting each other with no trousers or pants on on the next show. I hope we can make it happen. We may have invented a new Olympic sport.
It was producer Henry's last show with us and we went out for a lunchtime drink, and foolishly, certainly in terms of my diet which has been going quite well, we ended up having 3 pints each. I expect as usual that Andrew claim the alcohol had no effect on him, but I was a little tipsy as I made my way home. I had hoped to do some work on Christ on a Bike this afternoon, but that went out the window and I suspect this week's previews may be somewhat shaky. And involve me reading things off bits of paper. I have too much on. I will hopefully rise to the challenge, but this year will continue to be stupidly busy for me. It's probably good that I had some down time and enjoyed a drink with my friends (well my friend Henry and my colleague Andrew).
I was sober by the time that I went out to do my two gigs for this evening. As I walked through Trafalgar Square on the way to the first one a young man shouted at me out of a passing taxi, "Hey, tell us a joke," before recognising that there was a very small window of opportunity and adding, "Quick!"
This wasn't the ideal medium for comedy for me. I don't have many one liners and most of my stuff is about taking an idea and running with it. Having maybe seven seconds to entertain a man and his friends in a passing cab is not what I am primed for. I should probably have just shouted "Cumpkins!" But what if they weren't AIOTM fans? Even had the man beewn standing beside me with time on his hands it would have seemed weird to give him a joke out of context, but he was moving along, albeit at not great speed and poking his head out of a car window. I suspected he wasn't really expecting much so just shouted back, "I don't know any jokes!"
"You've lost it mate!" he shouted with a smile as the car move away.
"Perhaps!" I conceded.
He hadn't got a joke, but we had taken part in a short comic play and we both went on our way smiling!
After my first gig, which was OK but unspectacular (perhaps I had lost it and that stranger had identified the exact second of my decline and fall) I had a couple of hours to kill. I wandered around Trafalgar Square again, wondering if I could do something for AIOTM about the statues own the plinths. I had rushed out a bit and brought nothing to read with me and didn't have my iPad and my phone had run out of juice. I was a bit lost and realised that I could have used this time to start thinking and making notes for the show. So I popped into a newsagent on Shaftesbury Avenue and bought an overpriced new gizmo called a pad. You can do pretty much everything on it that you can do on an iPad, but even when you're being overcharged it only costs £1.39, meaning you can buy about 500 of them for he cost of the iPad. And I did manage to get enough down to justify the expense.
I then headed to my second gig at the Leicester Square Theatre where Stewart Lee was on stage as I arrived. The room was pretty packed and it looked like it would be a fun gig and it was cool to see my old pal again and have a chat. It seemed rude not to have a couple of glasses of wine and over the course of the next hour or so I got tipsy for the second time in the day. Again this was probably the right course of action, despite the calorific disaster. All work and no play makes Homer something something.
At the first gig I had been considering how young the crowd was. There was a couple who were a little older than me on the front row, with, I am guessing, their grown up daughters. But nearly everyone else was in their early 20s, half my age and I wondered if we had convened the exact same audience twenty years ago, when I had been doing my first foray into stand up, what would I have seen from the stage. A lot of babies and toddlers staring back at me, with the occasional teenager and a couple of people in their late twenties, but mostly seats that would appear empty, but on closer inspection would be found to have a sperm and an egg there waiting to get together. And if we took it back to my first Edinburgh, some 23 years ago, the numbers of living humans in the room would be less still. The other comics and the man running the gig might not even be there. I have been doing this for a long time. But don't feel too sad about that. In fact I think it's almost entirely a good, if somewhat unsettling thought. So it was apt and cool to be hanging out with another comedian later who had shared exactly the same beginnings as me and who was still rolling along, both of us interestingly touching on those times of two decades ago in our sets. There will come the point, I guess, when we will be the oldest people in the room and where the parents of our audience might not have existed at the start of our careers. I hope so. I was glad I didn't have to play to an audience of babies and spermy seats though.
And I hadn't made the connection until now, but I guess the other day I was thinking of where those early audiences would be now. Obviously a bit of a theme developing. Most of them have moved onwards and some stopped moving no doubt and yet here we still are, in the same rooms, fatter, greyer, older and despite what men in taxis may jokingly state, funnier too.
I've probably played to over half the audiences that I am going to play to. But I am looking forward to entertaining the contents of your ovary or testicles over the next three decades. Just don't put them on the seats just yet. My material is not suitable for gametes.
