by Jo Brand
He skidded up to me, patted me on the back and said, ‘Well done, you were brilliant tonight.’
So my innate racism was finally revealed and I felt ashamed that I had just assumed he was going to do me harm. Still, it taught me another lesson about London’s inhabitants. They are often not what they seem.
North and South
Given that it is split by a river, I suppose it was inevitable that rivalry would develop between Norf and Sarf Londoners. And indeed it has, to the point that it became a huge cliché for a while that black-cab drivers legendarily would not go south of the river after a cut-off point at night, for fear of the crime-ridden alleys full of murderers and muggers. South Londoners think North Londoners are stuck-up nobheads, whereas North Londoners think themselves more sophisticated and intelligent. North Londoners think South Londoners are rough as old boots and chavvy (I hate that word so much), whereas we South Londoners see ourselves as edgy and interesting.
Who is right? Well, it’s completely dependent on where you live. And let’s face it, no one outside London gives a toss. As someone who was born in South London and returned there aged twenty to work in Camberwell, I am shot through with loyalty to the Sarf. It’s less crowded, there are more green open spaces and a more mixed, chilled-out and generally more attractive community.
North London never has anywhere to park and North Londoners think they’re great. Well, someone has to.
But it has to be said that the vast majority of comedy clubs were and are in North London, with a smattering of slightly grubby ones down South. I didn’t mind that, as I like grubby And having lived North of the river for a bit and never being able to park less than half a mile away from my flat, I felt the pull of the South in my heart almost from the kick-off and returned relieved and ecstatic a year or so later.
The ‘C’ word
‘Cunt’ was a forbidden word in the early days of the circuit. When alternative comedy developed away from the traditional circuit, the unspoken (but known by everyone) rules discouraged racist or anti-women jokes; the ‘C’ word was considered to be offensive towards women.
My friend Alan Davies remembers it as being a real taboo in the early days, and Mark Kelly recalls a comic called Tony Morewood being one of the first to bring it back into the fold — in reference to a member of the audience. From this point it seems the ‘C’ word was reclaimed by various comics, most of them men, ironically, until it began to enter the arena of words that were once offensive, but now have lost their bite.
It seems though that it has not quite been rehabilitated, and perhaps still needs to be said by Holly Willoughby on This Morning or someone on Springwatch, maybe, before it completely loses its bite. I have mixed feelings towards the dear old ‘C’ word. I know it can be offensive to women, but there’s nothing quite like the primitive ejection of it into the universe when one is at the height of anger or frustration; nothing else quite replaces it. So, what I’m really saying is I’m a hypocrite. I don’t think people should use it, but I do.
As the comedy circuit developed and grew, the commercial possibilities on offer caused the more fringey acts to drop off the edges. Clubs started to open that could be real money-making business opportunities for hard-nosed promoters, rather than the idiosyncratic comedy wannabes who had hitherto run clubs. So the Comedy Store and Jongleurs were born and the small, odd clubs started to disappear along with the small, odd acts.
And, with the new clubs came new and different types of audiences. From your stereotypical beard-strokers (‘and that was just the women,’ many comics I know would have remarked) suddenly there were audiences from outside Town who didn’t have an allotment or a solar panel to their name. They wanted a GOOD NIGHT OUT and they weren’t prepared to put up with any polemical nonsense, comedy mime or poems about the political sitch in Peru. They wanted clever, slick stand-ups with a joke rate to equal Mr B. Connolly’s, and they were ruthless in their disdain of the gentle drama-school wordsmith.
There was an influx of Irish blokes onto the London circuit when they realised they could actually earn a living. London said hello to Sean Hughes, Michael Redmond, Dylan Moran, Patrick Kielty and many others. The comedy circuit in America seemed to be faltering slightly too, and that meant that Bill Hicks, Emo Philips, Steven Wright, Will Durst and Dennis Leary all ventured across the Atlantic to have a crack at the English.
The comedy circuit in America sounds far more hierarchical than it is over here. (I’ve never been.) Comics have definitive places on a bill and have to work their way up the ladder to be ‘the closing act’ who earns more than the rest. In London it was different in the early days. There was no such thing as ‘Top of the Bill’. Most bills at London clubs in the mid-eighties were interchangeable. However, things started to change as audiences began turning up to see particular acts. My friend Mark tells me that at ‘new material’ nights, audience members would ask if certain comics like myself were on. God bless him, he had to say that or I would have chinned him.
For a long time, everything was centred in London, and although there were one or two far-flung outposts of comedy like a tiny club in Bungay in Suffolk run by Malcolm Hardee, all comedy was Londoncentric. Of course this has changed enormously since I started; now every town and city has its comedy club, while Jongleurs has spread like a virus round the entire country.
The Tunnel Club
The Tunnel Club was run by the inimitable and chaotic Malcolm Hardee whose catchphrase ‘Oi oi!’ would preface any interaction he would have with the audience. He would shamble onto the stage looking like a cross between a tramp, Frank Carson and a little boy with Eric Morecambe-type glasses. The audience absolutely loved him and didn’t care that he did the same material week in and week out, to the point that they could repeat it along with him.
Whenever an act was on who was struggling, the cry would go up from the scary heckly bit at the back on the right-hand side… ‘Malcolm!’… and if it started to build and everyone started shouting Malcolm’s name, he would have to come back on and shoo off whichever poor sod was doing his best against a tide of derision and no laughs.
Malcolm’s other catchphrase was ‘Fuck it’, which he would liberally sprinkle throughout his compering. Malcolm would often resort to getting his genitalia out for a laugh and occasionally would place a pair of glasses on the top of his bollocks — his impersonation of General De Gaulle, and an unsettlingly accurate one at that. People always said he had the longest bollocks on the circuit (it’s not like there were loads of other pairs of bollocks on display), and although there was never actually a competition to find out the truth of this statement, I think they were probably right.
The Tunnel Club was the modern equivalent for comedians of the Roman Coliseum. If you got the thumbs-down from the audience, you were dead — no empathy no support, you just had to get off. As you made your way to the stage, you could often hear members of the audience shouting, ‘Crucify her!’ or similarly reassuring supportive comments, and it did really feel like you were being fed to a baying mob.
On the whole, it was a non-violent place and you were reasonably safe apart from a bruised ego, but one incident there heralded the beginning of the end. The female half of a double act called Clarence and Joy Pickles was hit in the face by a heavy plastic beer glass and cut quite badly Following this, comics were urged by Arthur Smith to boycott the Tunnel. Quite a few did, and it was a while before things got back to normal. All this only increased the Tunnel’s reputation as a scary gig.
One night, an American comic juggler — you’re in a coma already, I know — attempted to involve the audience in his act by throwing his skittles (or whatever they’re called) into the crowd, to be returned when he asked. He soon discovered to his cost that the Tunnel audience didn’t play that game, and one was aimed back at him with the ferocity of an Olympic javelin-thrower, whistling at great speed past his head and causing the audience to send up a massive, bloodthirsty cheer. However, as the next one sailed towa
rds him with breathtaking acceleration, he actually managed a body swerve and caught it. Suddenly the audience loved him and he could do no wrong and went on to storm it.
It was because of the completely arbitrary nature of the punters at the Tunnel that most comics feared its power. Add to that a clever audience whose ability to place a well-honed heckle was second to none, and you did face true humiliation. However, if you got through it, the rewards to your self-esteem were tremendous and you felt like a hero.
My approach was to step on stage and just stand staring at the audience while they roared, railed and abused me at the top of their voices. Eventually they would get bored, and as the noise died down I would launch into my set at a hundred miles an hour and pray I must have done the Tunnel four or five times and am proud to report I have an unblemished record and was never booed off.
However, to wheel out a cliché, all good things must come to an end, and the Tunnel did not last. Details are sketchy in my head, but there was a police raid following a stabbing in the car park, and the Tunnel was forced to close. My friend Mark remembers looking back over his shoulder as he left during the chaos of the raid, to see Malcolm stark naked on stage holding a dog on a lead which was trying to bite him on the bollocks. A fitting image, I feel.
The Comedy Café
The Comedy Café was our refuge after shows. It was a place where we could drink, hide and chew over the night’s stand-up, as all the comics who met there had come from every end of London to relax and get a bit pissed. Initially the room above the club itself, in Rivington Street just on the edge of the City, was slightly bare, but Noel Faulkner, the endlessly generous and sweet overseer of the club, allowed us to do pretty much what we wanted to the place to make it more homely We got hold of a few grotty old settees and Alan Davies tells me I forked out for a pool table, although I don’t remember this, and it became a little private club for us to meet at the end of a Friday and Saturday night.
The core group was myself, Alan Davies, Mark Lamarr, Andy Linden, Keith Dover, Jim Miller (aka James Macabre), Hattie Hayridge (Holly from Red Dwarf to you), Simon Clayton, John Gordillo and Andre Vincent, plus an ever-changing cast-list of comics and performers — Ross Noble and Jools Holland among them. I wasn’t particularly young and sprightly then as I hadn’t started stand-up until I was thirty but Alan Davies, looking back, can’t believe how young the core group were, mainly in their early twenties. Alan remembers going on at the Comedy Café gig one night just after Mark Lamarr, and a bloke in his forties with a couple of similarly aged mates saying very loudly to them, ‘How old’s this one?’
We also used the Comedy Café room during the World Cup in 1990. Noel got a massive telly in for us and we watched the Germany game there. Alan recalls being slightly miffed that a load of extra comics turned up and all the decent seats were taken when he arrived. It was, of course, the semi-final in which Gazza was booked and cried, and Waddle and Pearce missed their penalties. Huge depression and England’s inability to deliver the killer blow has been repeated endlessly throughout many World and European Cups.
We were young, we were attractive (ish) and we had enormously good fun — and I think about those days as a time of mega-laughs, a few fights and making really good friendships.
It was strange not being a nurse any more and having virtually no responsibility apart from writing jokes and managing to drag myself out of the house in time for a gig in the evening. At the time there was a thriving comedy circuit in London. Each club had its own, very personal characteristics — to do with the nature of the venue, the type of audience that came there and whether there was a regular compere or not. Here, in no particular order, are a few of my favourites:
Best Comedy Clubs
The Chuckle Club
The Chuckle Club was and is run by someone called Eugene Cheese. (I don’t think that is his real name!) When I performed there, it was in a pub just off Carnaby Street, which was quite unusual as lots of comedy clubs, apart from big ‘uns like the Comedy Store, didn’t tend to be in the West End but flung out towards the fringes of mainly North London with a sprinkling East, a few West and hardly any South.
I liked the Chuckle Club because despite the fact that it was quite a small club, Eugene always paid top dollar and was very fair with the door split. The crowd were mainly regulars who had developed an audience personality of welcoming bonhomie so it was always a joy to do.
The Red Rose
The Red Rose Labour Club in Finsbury Park in North London always felt to me like a spiritual home of some sort. Compered by Ivor Dembina, who was my flatmate for a while, it had a left-wing feel. Although it’s possible with hindsight that I have imposed such a trait, and that the audience didn’t give a toss — they just wanted some good entertainment. It was run by Joe, a lovely Irishman who was into comedy and very happy to have us all there.
I had some great nights and some fairly appalling nights there, which is par for the course.
We also tried to start up a Comics’ Union there. The fundamental problem, of course, with doing that is that comics tend to be loners who don’t naturally fit into a unionised environment However, Ivor and I sent out a message and were hugely impressed that more than 150 people turned up at the first meeting. We had called it mainly because we felt that some clubs were discriminating against less experienced comics and paying them much less than other comics.
As you can imagine, a room full of that many comics was quite something to behold and there was much heckling (well, how often did we get the chance?) and pissing about.
At the initial meeting, various issues were discussed and it was agreed that we would meet a month later, and that Ivor and I would do some groundwork to start sorting some of the problems.
Of course at the next meeting there were only thirty comics and at the following about twelve, so the Comics’ Union I’m afraid went the way of many altruistic projects, under the heading of Just Can’t Be Arsed.
The other disappointment I had at the Red Rose was one Christmas Eve when I parked right outside, intending to do a gig and then drive straight on to my parents’ for Christmas in Shropshire. During the gig someone smashed the car window and nicked all my presents which I’D VERY STUPIDLY LEFT ON THE BACK SEAT Christmas cheer evaporated out of me immediately and I did hold it against the Red Rose for quite some time. Although I hope they liked the satin thong I’d got my dad for Christmas.
CAST Comedy Clubs
CAST was a left-wing organisation which ran comedy gigs at various venues round London including the Hackney Empire. They put on an eclectic mix of performers, ranging from a South African woman in her sixties called Terri who did paper-tearing, to hard-nosed old lefties who slagged the government with every last fibre of their being. The main reason I liked them was because of the couple who ran them, Claire and Roland Muldoon. Roland was a bearded Cap’n Birdseye-type, full of bonhomie and humour, and Claire, a witty, straight-talking feminist.
I still try to keep in touch with them and do gigs for them when I can. In fact, I recently went to the small village in which they live in the wilds of Buckinghamshire to do some stand-up in the village hall. I had been dubious about it because the weather forecast predicted very heavy snow, and I didn’t particularly want to get stuck on the motorway and have to eat my own leg while I froze to death. I mooted this idea with Claire, who sounded so bereft that I was considering not coming, that I steeled myself and got in the car.
The gig itself was a laugh, a lot of pissed villagers shouting, heckling and enjoying themselves. My dressing room was the disabled toilet, which was perfectly all right and even had a chair if I put the lid down.
I came out of the show to face bitter cold and thought I’d better get back to London as quickly as I could. I hit the motorway twenty minutes later and within seconds it had started to snow. Because it was so cold the heavy snow settled immediately and I was forced to slow down to ten miles an hour because I couldn’t see a bloody thing, owing to what I th
ink is called a white-out. One’s driving skills go out of the window on these occasions and I immediately started driving very badly I’m sure I was straddling two lanes as I couldn’t see the road.
Eventually I settled in behind a massive lorry and kept on his tail, limping into London where the snow had melted immediately, due probably to the fact that London is such an evil place, and arrived home four hours later. Yes, cheers, Claire.
New Material Nights
New material nights were a good example of comics cooperating and working together. Originally they started in a pub just off Tottenham Court Road and were an opportunity for comics to try out new stuff they had written. It’s hard because on its first outing, new material is so obviously new that if you do it at a booked show you have fifteen minutes of polished, funny, well-tested stuff with five minutes of absolute crap in the middle.
The new material nights gave us a chance to socialise, try stuff and hopefully give the audience what they wanted. We always employed a proper compere and paid them, so that at least if all our bits were really shit, the audience got some good jokes out of them.
Comics who did new material nights were Jim Tavaré, James Macabre, Hattie Hayridge, Simon Munnery, Stewart Lee, Mark Thomas, Alan Davies, Ivor Dembina, Patrick Marber and many others. We eventually moved to a more permanent home in Islington and would do the gig then all drift along the road to Pizza Express for some laughs, arguments and occasional bad behaviour.
Screaming Blue Murder at the Leather Bottle
The Leather Bottle is in South-West London, and Screaming Blue Murder was run by two delightful brothers called Pete and Phil. The regular compere was Eddie Izzard, who had come into his own after what some people on the comedy circuit considered to be a shaky start. But here he was in his element, and his surreal flights of fancy lifted the audience to dizzy heights of laughter. Those of us who were waiting to go on split our thoughts between marvelling at Eddie’s skill and hoping the determinedly pro-Eddie audience would like us too.