Can't Stand Up for Sitting Down

by Jo Brand

  One of the blokes was a reasonably attractive tall thin thing, and the friend was OK, but not in the slightest my cup of tea as he appeared to be slightly to the right of Mussolini and was steadfastly making cracks about Native Americans for our entertainment. Waggly was missing all this as she was engaged in flirty banter with the mate who, for some reason, was not a psycho and maybe was doing his bit for the community by accompanying his friend round.

  Pissed as I was, I knew I had to get out of there before I either tipped my drink down the Canadian fascist’s front or worse. This is a constant dilemma for friends, I think, when one of them has met someone they’re quite keen on and their mate has just met the social equivalent of Jack the Ripper. Given that we were thousands of miles from home, I didn’t really want to leave Waggly on her own with her one, as for all I knew they were a double act of perviness hoovering up naive foreign ladies to lock in their cellar. I could not find the opportunity to have a word in Waggly’s ear without being heard, so I had to think fast. I decided fainting was probably the best thing to do, and then once we got outside I could give her the option of going back if she really wanted to.

  So faint I did. Usually when you faint, your body goes floppy so you sink to the ground and tend not to get injured. This was not the case with me. So worried was I about it looking convincing that I stood up first and said something like, ‘I don’t feel well,’ and then did my best to plunge to the ground in true drama-school-end-of-term-play fashion. On the way down I hit my head on the side of the marble table and nearly went, ‘Fuck, that hurt,’ but managed to stop myself. Waggly panicked slightly whilst I, with my instant migraine, attempted not to laugh.

  I reckon I did a pretty good impression of coming round in a woozy fashion and Waggly helped me up and took me outside for some fresh air, promising Mr Chatter Upper she’d be back in a minute. Mr Pervo looked completely disinterested and out of one slightly open eye I noticed him scanning the bar for fresh stoutness.

  Waggly supported me outside, and as soon as we were out of earshot I told her that my ‘partner’ was a complete tosspot and I had to escape. I immediately apologised to her and said I knew she liked hers and if she really wanted to stay she could, but I felt worried about leaving her. Her reply, ‘What are you talking about? He’s a complete wanker — I was only staying because I thought you wanted to.’ Oh how we laughed, oh how we legged it, oh how we didn’t look back.

  If our ‘friends’ are reading this, I apologise for our unannounced exit and I hope you are both happily married with patient wives (one quite fat) and lovely children.

  To be perfectly honest and no offence to the people of Canada, but it just wasn’t in my plans to marry a Canadian chubby chaser.

  Australia

  I toured Australia in the early nineties and found it strange travelling to the other side of the world and staying there for six weeks. I am not a natural traveller as I tend to prefer journeys in my head which are so much easier, and I missed home, friends and family hugely.

  We were lucky that the Australian tour company paid for a first-class air ticket for myself, my friend and support act, Jeff Green, and John, our tour manager. We didn’t have to sit squashed for hours in tiny seats shoulder to shoulder with each other but could stretch out, watch a film and see ourselves fly over the edge of the world as the sun came up.

  I had known Jeff for a long time and we were good friends. He is from Chester and has a cheekiness that is associated with nearby Liverpool. His material is great; it has a familiarity to it and an easy rhythm, as well as being enormously funny Jeff is a prime example of someone who, in my opinion, should most definitely be a household name by now.

  Right, back to Australia. I was slightly surprised when we landed and someone got on the plane and processed down the aisle spraying us with some sort of disinfectant as if we were lepers.

  Our first port of call was Sydney said to be one of the more sophisticated of the Australian cities. We were bunged in a very nice hotel and had a couple of days to chill out before the first gig. The time of year was May so I suppose we were heading towards their winter, but it felt pretty damn warm to me.

  To some extent, once you are in a city there is not a huge amount of difference where you are in the world. Hotel rooms all look the same and you find the same products, especially the posh ones, pretty much wherever you are. Likewise, again to some extent, the audiences.

  I did quite a bit of telly to promote the tour. Firstly a talent show with a very camp American comic, Scott Capurro. Between us we agreed that for a laugh we would give really shit marks. Anyway the first act up was a very cute little girl who sang a very cute song and did a very cute dance. Scott went first on the judging panel and gave her one out of ten. There was uproar and it looked like he might be lynched. They moved on to me and I declared, ‘Ten out of ten … she’s so cute.’ Well, I was nearly hoisted onto their shoulders and cheered to the rafters. I don’t think Scott was too happy with me for a bit though.

  I’m sorry if I upset Scott, because he is very likeable and good fun. He is also extremely filthy and has an ability to make people in audiences do sharp intakes of breath every few seconds or so.

  Recently, my friend Betty’s seventeen-year-old son went to see him with a mate, and the fools sat in the front row, which I would never advise — especially if you’re seeing Scott or Julian Clary — because you will get the piss ripped out of you. The friend had to endure an elongated assault on his appearance and I think it taught him to sit well back in the future.

  I was a bit apprehensive about the first gig. Would the audience understand the references, the Bernard Manning joke about racism, concerns like that? I needn’t have worried. The audiences were keen, warm and appreciative.

  After Sydney we proceeded to Melbourne: warm, friendly and very laughy gigs, which we all enjoyed. I did notice though that, much to my surprise, there was quite a bit of racism knocking about, particularly amongst younger people. I suppose I just expect older people to be racist in that rather naive way that they have. But to hear a Goth girl who looked like a radical leftie say ‘Fucking Pakis, they get on my nerves,’ was a bit of a shock, particularly as the peer group around her didn’t bat an eyelid.

  We had a little break in proceedings before we went to Perth, our final destination, so I decided, dragging my co-conspirators along, to go to Tasmania to visit a friend and ex-flatmate of mine, Gabe, who was by now a GP with his wife, also a GP, in a small town in the north; as a sideline, he had a deer farm. When we arrived, it was pissing with rain. We spent a very enjoyable, if soaking, night hunting for platypuses, not spotting a single one.

  We flew back to Sydney and from there went on to Perth, which is isolated — and feels it — right out on the west coast. The gigs there were great, with cheery, enthusiastic audiences.

  After that, even though really we had done bugger-all, we felt like a holiday, so we hired a boat with a man who knew what to do with it and toured the Whitsunday Islands up in the North-East for ten days. The heat was tropical and my ankles turned into footballs which wasn’t terribly attractive, but we had a good laugh even though John, our tour manager, kept us awake most nights with his titanic snoring.

  I also hadn’t realised that toileting was such a palaver on a boat. Don’t read this next bit if you’re slightly squeamish… but we didn’t know that if someone’s just had a poo, it’s not a good idea to go in for a swim at the same time. The sight of Jeff swimming through a patch of little plops and the look on his face, gave me one of the best laughs of the holiday It was idyllic though most of the time, turtles swimming past the boat, snorkelling (us, not the turtles) and admiring the fantastically coloured sea-life in a clear azure sea and lounging on the boat as the sun set … it was pretty much perfect.

  Holland

  The great thing about the Dutch is they speak really good English and watch lots of BBC programmes. The only problem they had with my set was ‘panty-liner’ but they soon got the gist
as I did an award-winning mime.

  Harry Hill was over there too, and it was to him I recounted my huge sense of disappointment when, at the end of the day I reached for a well-deserved Toblerone in the fridge in my room, only to find someone had already eaten it and stuffed screwed-up paper back into it to make it look like they hadn’t.

  Of course, the attraction for a lot of people in Amsterdam is the red-light district. Those people do tend to be of the male variety though. I found it quite surreal and rather disturbing to wander along a street with women all dressed up in the shop windows trying to entice customers in for a quick one. Added to that I’ve never been a prodigious dope smoker, so cafés selling every variety of the stuff didn’t really attract me, populated as they were with glassy-eyed gigglers. So two days was enough for me.

  The Shetland Islands

  I know that, in theory, the Shetlands aren’t a foreign country, but they certainly feel as if they are at the end of the world. Once you arrive at Edinburgh airport you have to change planes and get on something that looks like it worked as a back-up plane in the First World War. As we queued to get on, I couldn’t avoid listening to two blokes chatting. One said to the other, ‘You know one of these crashed last week, don’t you?’ To which the other replied, ‘Yes, they’ve got a terrible safety record.’

  That’s not really what I want to hear as I’m just about to get on one. The gig in the Shetlands was in a tiny theatre and the audience seemed to be so pleased that we’d made the effort to travel in the Plane of Death that I got the feeling we could have said anything and they would have laughed their hand-knitted little socks off. Jeff and I both had absolute stormers and came away from the show with a warm glow. This soon dissolved when we discovered the next morning that we were locked in by fog and it was too risky to take off. Still, better to wait until the fog clears than to enter a lighthouse without having to climb the stairs … No, I don’t know what that means either.

  Stavanger, Norway

  Stavanger is a pretty little town with quite a lot of oil stuff going on (she said knowledgeably). Consequently there are quite a few English and Americans knocking about. We went on the day after the General Election in 1997, and one of the friends who came with us was still pissed from the night before when we knocked on her door, and sat through the flight in a haze of drunken joy at the thought of Blair getting in. She was in good company though. Shane MacGowan of the Pogues was on our flight looking like my friend was going to feel in about three hours’ time. He gave me that weird nod that people on the telly give each other. I suppose it’s like a fireman bumping into another fireman.

  Customs at Stavanger consisted of a trestle table manned by a bloke in a cap, and as we filed past I noticed that poor Shane was the only one picked out of our bunch and was standing with his suitcase open on the trestle table looking like a naughty ten year old.

  I didn’t really like the gig. There is something about ex-pat types that makes my hackles rise, although I can’t really put my finger on what it is. So I presume I stepped on stage with the wrong attitude and it all went downhill from there until the heckles and general hubbub sent me off slightly earlier than I’d intended.

  Ireland

  Because the Irish speak English, I had assumed that culturally it would be very similar to Britain. That is definitely not the case. It is indeed a foreign country and they do things differently there.

  Northern Ireland

  On my first trip to Northern Ireland, I carried all the preconceptions that most of us do, when all we know about a place is what we’ve seen on TV or read in the newspapers. The cab driver who took me from the airport to the hotel jokingly told me at the time (early nineties) that quite a few people, mainly businessmen, bob down on the back seat for fear of being picked off by a sniper or a bomb going off. Whether or not it was a figment of my imagination, I certainly found the atmosphere over there to be imbued with an underlying sense of danger, but I am sure that was all self-generated. (Although it is somewhat disconcerting to be told you are staying in ‘the most bombed hotel in Belfast’.)

  Many people wanted to go and gawp at all the infamous areas of Belfast where the Troubles were focused. I couldn’t bring myself to do so, because I felt it was a bit voyeuristic, so I let them get on with it and stayed at the hotel.

  My first gig ever in Northern Ireland was at a mainly Protestant university in Belfast, and I wasn’t prepared for how pissed and lary they would be. It was like a duel with the audience, and I ended up doing none of my prepared material at all, while they chanted ‘Fuck Off You Fat Lesbian!’ in unison and seemed to be enjoying themselves enormously So I pretty much let them get on with it.

  I graduated to a bigger theatre in the centre of Belfast some years later, and this was the only occasion on which I’ve had a piece of clothing thrown at me. About twenty minutes into my set, a pair of light blue, slightly baggy Y-fronts landed on the stage in front of me, having been lobbed from the balcony … quite an impressive throw. I picked them up gingerly because I was planning to display them to the audience. They were still warm and a shiver of something went through me and I flung them immediately to the floor. Most unsettling.

  I also did a bit of TV in Northern Ireland and appeared on a satirical show which, it turned out, the viewing public there wasn’t really ready for. After the episode I appeared on, the series was cancelled — for once nothing to do with me, but down to an impression of Ian Paisley which I think was just too near to the knuckle.

  One thing that happens when you do this job is that you tend to meet comedy heroes quite unexpectedly and it was while a few of us were sitting in the green room watching an old Monty Python episode that the door opened and Michael Palin himself popped his head round.

  What a surreal moment! Along with Terry Jones, Michael Palin was always my favourite and I was overcome by that fannish-will-I-say-something-stupid moment and just stared at him as if he was a recently landed alien. He gave us a chirpy ‘Hello!’ and then disappeared again.

  Republic of Ireland

  In the late nineties, I toured the Republic, going from Dublin to Waterford to Cork to Limerick. The audiences seemed really shell-shocked by my material and I began to wonder whether I should tone it down a bit. Having done a few gigs before in Ireland at the Kilkenny Festival and a comedy club in Cork, I was quite surprised by the reaction, but it may have been that the theatres I was appearing in had a slightly muffling effect on people’s exuberance. Or perhaps they just didn’t like me.

  During the tour I visited the castle in which the Blarney Stone is situated. Legend has it that if you kiss the Blarney Stone, it will give you the gift of the gab. However, it’s not quite as simple as you think because it is attached rather awkwardly to the castle, and you have to sort of shuffle out on your back looking down over a huge drop. This, and the fact that someone told me that people occasionally piss on the Blarney Stone, rather put me off deciding to snog it.

  Edinburgh is comedy Mecca and the city towards which all we comics face in blind obeisance (although blind drunkenness might be a more appropriate metaphor).

  It soon becomes apparent that Edinburgh is where it’s at if you want to advance your comedy career. The Fringe Festival there gives you the opportunity which you don’t get in London, to showcase your wares. Because there are so many clubs in London, your average producer/TV exec can’t be arsed to flog round all the little clubs but prefers to go to Edinburgh for a couple of weeks where all the eager comics are grazing. Plus, because it is a festival, the execs have the added advantage of many many reviews — which enables them to weed out the rubbish, so they needn’t even bother to go and see the crap shows.

  There are hundreds of venues in Edinburgh and hundreds of comics vying for the attention of the public. Bank balances are severely under threat if you are a less experienced comic whose show doesn’t sell well; in fact, thousands can be lost by comedians who are either naive or a little too over-confident.

  In my d
ay (yes, I know I sound like your grandma, but it was a long time ago), one aimed to appear at one of the top three venues, because they had a guaranteed audience.

  The first was the Assembly Rooms — always considered the poshest venue, containing small stages and big ones like the Supper Room. Sounds stuck-up, doesn’t it? It was a nice venue and I performed there one year.

  Unfortunately because of the lay-out of the place, you cannot get on to the stage unobserved, to appear, like the Bad Fairy, from back stage, so you have to plop yourself round there before the audience is allowed to enter, fifteen minutes before the show. As nerves are an unwelcome accompaniment of any stand-up show, one needs a wee roughly every ten seconds, and this is just not possible once you have sited yourself behind the curtain. This leaves you with the unwelcome choices of holding on to it, wetting yourself or pissing in a receptacle — boys in lager bottles and girls into something with a wider rim. Sorry to plant this unpleasant image in your minds, but it’s a necessity unless you want to appear on stage with a wet patch sullying the front of your attire.

  The Assembly Rooms attract the more upmarket, lazier comedy audience who only ever go there and nowhere else, figuring that eventually every good comic worth their salt will appear there. The Assembly Rooms is presided over by one William Burdett-Coutts. Yes, just as patrician as he sounds, but a softly spoken, quietly humorous individual who I liked immensely and with whom I never had cause to fall out.