by Jo Brand
Worst Comedy Clubs
The Bearcat
James and Graham, the lovely guys who run the Bearcat Club, which was housed in a lovely little pub in Twickenham, will kill me for putting their club into my least favourite league. It has absolutely nothing to do with them: I was, and still am, very fond of them. They never had a compere as such. James would stand in front of a record deck playing seventies disco hits between the acts while people went to the bar, and one would either step on stage just after ‘It’s Raining Men’ or ‘I Will Survive’. Sometimes I felt I myself only very narrowly survived.
It had to do with the audience who went there. I have no idea why this should be, but I can’t remember ever having a gig that I truly enjoyed at the Bearcat. There always seemed to be someone in the audience who really didn’t like me. Fair enough — I accept that the whole world can’t like me or find me funny — but when the abuse came, as it did from time to time, I never felt the rest of the audience were that bothered. All right then, let the narky cow have it, was what I imagined them to be thinking.
My worst night there was a New Year’s Eve gig. I’ve never been that keen on the forced jollity-cum-psychopissedness of New Year’s Eve when we’re all supposed to be having a brilliant time despite the fact that at least half of us aren’t.
It should have been a great night, but there had been some industrial-strength drinking going on, and by the time I stepped on stage, the atmosphere wasn’t great. Alcohol-induced possibilities filled the air and they’d already been having a right old heckle at the other acts. There was quite a lot of ‘Fuck off, you fat lesbian’ which, to be honest, had become so familiar over the years that it didn’t bother me any more. Then someone shouted out something along the lines of, ‘Piss off, you’re shit.’ I did one of my put-downs, probably about halfway along the continuum strength-wise. Normally it would get a laugh, but they just looked at me like I was a really horrible person.
At that point I knew I had lost them. Although not many people who perform take a huge amount of notice of where they appear on the bill, if you are on last, the audience tends to think you are the headline act and therefore the best. Well, I was dying on my arse and everything I tried to do to counteract it seemed to have the effect of a funeral bell tolling. Absolutely nothing worked. I managed to stagger through to the end of my set without the audience actually dealing the final blow, but came off feeling deflated, angry with myself and really pissed off. And A Happy New Year to me.
The Cartoon in Clapham
The Cartoon was a rowdy pub in Clapham where there was a comedy club for a while. Perhaps it was just bad luck, but every time I went there, it seemed someone was either vomiting over their table, or there was a fight, or a group of stag-night types who wanted to fire a heat-seeking missile of abuse at me. I tried not to perform there too often.
It would be morally wrong to finish this chapter without including a short-list of my own ill-judged remarks while on stage:
1. At a pro-abortion benefit, I made a (made up!) joke about my boyfriend coming to see me, just after I’d had a termination and to cheer me up, bringing a bag of jelly babies.
2. I told a twelve-year-old boy in the front row of a gig, who was heckling me, to fuck off. Which obviously didn’t go down a treat with his mum and dad.
3. I berated a guy walking across in front of me who subsequently went to the bar, bought a pint of lager and came back and chucked it over me.
4. I told a room full of businessmen that they were all wankers (they were), but it finished my evening pretty sharpish.
5. At a student gig I threw a bun, which had been thrown at me, back in the direction of the thrower and it hit some poor innocent woman in the eye.
For these, and the thousand other dodgy pieces of behaviour I have indulged in and subsequently repressed, I am well and truly regretful.
Many comedians believe touring to be a necessary evil, but I really love it. It’s self-contained, straightforward, and when a night’s finished it’s finished and there’s no hangover from it unless you have died on your arse — but a few drinks soon sorts that out.
I have toured many times over the last twenty years, and each town seems to have its own particular characteristics. Rather than laboriously detail each tour, it’s perhaps best to give you an overall impression of touring and then list towns I’ve been to which have had a major impression.
My touring life is divided into two sections: pre-children and after-children. Before I got married and had kids I was free to tour wherever I wanted and for however long I wanted to, which meant that I could be away for several days and do a tour that progressed in a logical way round the country. Well I say that, but Off the Kerb, which is the company I tour with, are famous for throwing you the occasional googly by putting you on in Aberdeen one night, Southampton the next and then Glasgow the next. This means you criss-cross the country quite a few times, and if you don’t like sitting in cars you’re in trouble.
For me, the most important requirements of sitting in a car for ages are good companions, a good driver, good radio and/or music, and lots of sweets. Once all these are in place, on the whole things are OK. The only problem after that is the motorways. These grind to a halt with alarming regularity but I have to say that not once have 1 arrived late for a show, so we have obviously always been sensibly grown up in setting off in plenty of time, although there have been a few skin-of-our-teeth moments.
Support Acts
I toured firstly with my friend Jeff Green for a number of years until he became worthy of tours in his own right, and I was sad to see him go. I then toured for a while with Richard Morton, who was always great to be with. Richard is such a lovable guy, so helpful, friendly and sweet-natured, he almost makes me feel guilty for existing. He’s a Geordie, but an atypical one given that he is small and slim and unmacho. He was unerringly cheerful when we toured briefly, and believe you me, unerringly cheerful isn’t the default position of most comedians.
Richard did stand-up and comedy songs, and can be spotted in the background in a club in that wonderful series Our Friends in the North. He also happens to have the same name as an opera singer and was booked to do a gig at the Sherman Theatre near Cardiff once. However, the audience were expecting the opera singer — and when Richard kicked off with, ‘My daddy was a sperm bank, he came on my account …’ almost the entire audience got up and left.
I have finally ended up with Andy Robinson, with whom I still tour. He is an absolute joy to work with, since he’s self-deprecating, generous, very funny and relaxed — and his cynical attitude towards the business is very similar to mine.
We have such good fun when we’re touring because we get on so well. We like the same kind of music so there are never any arguments in the car about what we have on (Elvis Costello, Morrissey, Nick Cave-type stuff). However, Andy is a big Elvis Presley fan and I’m afraid I draw the line at The King because I am one of those sad people who prefer his later stuff like ‘Suspicious Minds’ and ‘The Wonder of You’, which I think proper Elvis fans consider to be not very good. My main attitude towards Elvis Presley, by the way, is that he was essentially a simple country lad who just happened to be enormously good-looking and a brilliant singer, and who was then sucked into the world of showbiz and gradually chewed up in the most painful and visible sort of way.
Many comics have included either an Elvis fat joke or a dying-on-the-toilet joke in their set but I always felt pity for him — the evidence of his decline was there for all to see as he gained weight through what I presume was comfort-eating born out of his isolation. Elvis fans, if I’ve got this wrong, please let me know.
That’s the problem with excess eating… IT SHOWS. So although alcoholics and heroin addicts can maintain their svelte figures, big eaters can’t, and piss-taking will inevitably occur. Ditto Michael Jackson with his unearthly metamorphosis from beautiful boy into alienated alien. I’m sure the added pressures of being global stars just compounded the
ir emotional confusion.
God forbid I should ever have to tour with one of what I tend to think of as ‘The Ambitious Boys’. There are plenty of these around. Clever, career-minded, pushy little buggers whose only thought is for their own advancement. Bloody good luck to ‘em but they’re not my cup of tea to spend time with, because you feel you are in a constant battle for airtime with them.
Tour Managers
As well as a so-called ‘support act’, one always has a tour manager. He or she drives, liaises with the theatre staff, fights off the adoring fans (yes, that’s never happened), marshals any press people and generally is available for weird showbiz requests should you have a sudden urge for pheasant testicles in batter at 2 a.m. on a wet Tuesday in Norwich. I hope I am not a whim-laden sort of performer, by the way and have always done my best to keep to a minimum these sorts of mad demands. I think the most I’ve ever managed is some fags or a packet of Haribos. Over the years my tour managers have been Mark, John, Jez and Grazio, thankfully none of them behaving hideously badly (Apart from on a few occasions.)
Being a tour manager involves a lot of different skills and at times it’s very boring. First of all there’s a huge amount of driving involved. You’re the first one to start in the morning and the last one to get home to bed once you’ve dropped everyone off.
Mark was tour manager, if I remember rightly for one and a half tours. He was dead easygoing, which is essential, didn’t force his musical tastes on us and did his job efficiently and with good grace. One major worry was that on the second leg of touring he had rather a lot of points on his licence for speeding, and if he picked up another three that would have pushed him over and made him ineligible to drive, so there were a few sharp intakes of breath on various journeys but thankfully we never crossed the point of no return.
John had worked in security before he began tour managing for me and was quite big and scary-looking; this is a bonus, because it puts some people off approaching you even before any trouble has started. Apparently, he looks like David Platt, the footballer, because someone once came up to us when we were in the street to ask for an autograph and I found myself just assuming (Bighead Brand) that this guy was approaching me. As I stuck my hand out to take the pen, he said, ‘No, I want David Platt’s,’ making me feel very small and vain and giving us a good laugh at the same time.
John never felt the need to punch anyone, for which I’m eternally grateful. He just stood there and glowered at them, and nine times out of ten that was all it took.
Jez was a mate of mine, who took over on a tour when John couldn’t do it any more — and God bless him, he had only just passed his driving test, so was somewhat wobbly on the finer details. We had a couple of hair-raising moments on roundabouts, but on the whole managed pretty well. It was slightly difficult at times because we were mates and I don’t like asking anyone to do anything, particularly a friend, but we muddled through and sorted stuff out. However, Jez was great to work with because I knew him so well. He had a brilliant comic brain and timing, and I often thought he should be getting up on stage too.
Grazio is an utterly charming, very helpful and sweet-tempered man who has also toured with the likes of Lee Evans and Michael McIntyre. He is a completely soothing person to travel with, is very helpful, and his anticipatory skills are nothing short of miraculous. He is reliable and calm and in short, probably the perfect tour manager; in fact, he would win an award for tour managing, should there be such a thing.
‘Getting Your Head Down’
When I first started touring, the tour dates tended to be continuous, one date after another with a break of one or two days during which to recover before setting off again. Initially, in the early days one of us comics would drive and we would be booked into cheap B&Bs with suspicious couples eyeing us up over breakfast wondering why we were under ninety years of age.
As the old career progressed, the B&Bs metamorphosed into cheapish hotels which could be terrifying. I remember staying in a particularly scary hotel in Liverpool one night. I arrived at the door of my room, having staggered up there from the bar, to discover that it had been kicked in the night before and had had a piece of hard-board nailed, very badly, over it. In the room next door, a loud argument was going on between two blokes, with the occasional sound of smashing glass or splintering wood. Pushing a chest of drawers against the door, I lay on the bed with all my clothes on and eschewed the communal toilet in the hall in favour of weeing in the sink.
When the tours were longer and more lucrative, we found ourselves in what I would consider to be posh hotels, great big ones in town where you could have breakfast in your room, raid the minibar and hang your clothes up on the trouser press for want of a better thing to do with them if you were a lady.
I used to lie on the bed flicking through the hundreds of channels on the telly necking a lager and thinking, How could I ever get bored with this?
But the weird thing is, you do eventually After seeing the inside of hundreds of hotel rooms, they do begin to merge into one, and you long for the quirkiness of your own place with all the familiar crap in it. It’s even worse when you have a family you can’t go home to see. This was why, after I’d had children, I would go home every night after a gig and start out anew every day This obviously made days longer and tours harder, and meant that the distance I was prepared to go shrank a bit, but I would far rather have done that than stay away for days on end.
At Last — Trying To Make Them Laugh
Once you arrive at a theatre for a gig, normally two hours or so before it’s due to start, you explore your dressing room. These range from sumptuous big rooms with the clichéd mirrors with light bulbs round them and posh sofas, to tiny suspicious-smelling hovels with one small settee that looks as if an incontinent tramp has been sleeping on it for a fortnight. You then have to do the obligatory sound check, which involves interacting with the techies at the theatre — again a huge range of individuals, from cheery blokes who bung the kettle on and are happy to furnish you with local knowledge, to teenagers covered in heavy-metal tattoos who can barely look at you, let alone manage anything approaching a word. It is a huge joy when people are friendly and welcoming. Sadly, some of them decide in advance that you are a showbiz twat and go out of their way to demonstrate this. As someone who goes out of my way to be unerringly polite and friendly I find this a complete pain in the arse.
After the sound check, there is quite a lot of sitting down and talking bollocks until the show starts. I have found I really need this time to get into gear for the show. I don’t get as nervous as I used to (butterflies for a week before a gig), but there are certain circumstances which are more conducive to being in the right mood for a gig. Firstly, I’m not good at socialising before I do a show as my thoughts are on what’s coming up, rather than chatting to a local journalist about how I got into comedy It’s also nice to be somewhere private. I once did a benefit and discovered my dressing room was the same room as the green room for friends, family and press with a makeshift bar, and Andy and I sat in the corner trying to write out our set-list. The changing facilities were a handily placed screen in the corner of the room, and someone peeking round it just as I was taking my trousers off was the last flipping straw.
I tend to write my set out three times, don’t ask me why, I’ve forgotten by now. I also stick some prompt notes on a speaker in front of the mic more as a security blanket rather than actually needing it.
As ‘show time’ approaches, various announcements come through on the relay in the dressing room, counting you down. My favourites are always the old-fashioned stage managers who say things like, ‘Tonight’s concert will begin in fifteen minutes.’ I always want to run round and shout, ‘It’s not a bleeding concert, it’s a comedy show.’
Andy always goes on first. I usually make an announcement from a mic backstage to introduce him, warning the punters that the show will be quite rude — so if they don’t like swearing, they’d better fuck
off now. Audiences who tut at this tend not to laugh very much, as you can imagine. After that, I stand backstage and watch the first five minutes to get a flavour of what the audience is like. Surely you’re thinking, an audience is an audience is an audience — but you’re wrong. There are so many subtle (and unsubtle) differences in the way that audiences behave. The day of the week makes a difference, the weather, the time of year, the size of the theatre — lots of things like that. Also, if there are hecklers, it’s useful to know what they’ve said to Andy so I can pick up on it later.
Once on stage, I kick off with a line that I know works, just to make sure they’re not going to hate me. Again, levels of laughter are quite subtle and I can always tell if they’re not quite there. At this point I might change my plan to improvise a bit of local stuff and replace it with some tried and tested material just to really get them going before I push off into the unknown. However, if it’s all gone well so far, I’ll do some stuff on local news. I always buy a local paper and scan it in the dead zone between sound check and performance. Local papers give you a good idea of what local concerns are, and sometimes in predominantly rural areas I find stuff that wouldn’t even get a look-in in our South London Press. In Hay-on-Wye in Wales, one year at the Literary Festival, I found a story on the front page, Hanging Basket Stolen, which struck me as so sweet.
Audiences seem to really like you talking about their home territory and it usually elicits some responses from them and encourages them to join in, until it feels like they are really involved. On several occasions, people in the audience have actually featured in some of the stories and joined in on enlarging on the story itself. The rest of the audience loves this and it’s so great when it happens.