In the absence of any impending invasions, the fort passed into civil use and over the years became an iconic leisure facility on the island, housing a swimming pool, a mini-golf course and cable cars. These days, it is a proper leisure centre in the modern sense, i.e., a gym, filled with exercise equipment and sports facilities. It is the world’s most secure gymnasium. It certainly has the best-equipped backstage area in showbiz, particularly suitable if your rider demanded sixty weight machines, forty elliptical trainers and three squash courts. It’s at moments like these that I wish I had an entourage.
Instead, I have Damon and, to kill time before the show, he and I went to play pool instead. The informal layout caught us out, though. We never realized that, somewhere between the dressing rooms and the pool tables, we crossed some invisible line called ‘backstage’. Mid-frame, we suddenly found ourselves greeting the first wave of punters coming in.
‘I hope you’re good, I came out in this weather for you,’ said the first.
‘I’m missing the Eurovision for this,’ said the next.
We knocked the pool on the head and retreated to the gym. They’re a feisty lot, the Crappos.
Oh yeah, they have their own nicknames. You can call them Jersey ‘Beans’, which comes from the historical popularity of a bean casserole, but also, and slightly more awkwardly, you can call them ‘Crappos’. It’s from the French ‘crapaud’, meaning toad. It’s a Jersey v. Guernsey thing, but accepted benignly. Visitors are nervous of embracing this, naturally, but the islanders are well used to it, leading me to this line:
‘Listen, I was told what to call you… it sounds rude to me but I was told you don’t mind… so here goes. Hello, Cunts!’
That got a big laugh.
You know the way that if you bring two similarly polarized magnets close together, they repel each other? And the closer they get, the stronger you can feel that repulsion. Now fill an island with English people and put it fifteen miles away from France. You can feel the Englishness radiate through the place. I’m not saying that, secretly, the people of Jersey are French and it’s the similarity that drives them apart, so maybe magnets were a terrible analogy. Allergies! That’s better. You know the way it’s easy to forget that you have a terrible allergy to dogs, say, until you’re forced to move house and live right next door to a kennels. Except that, in this analogy, the French are dogs, so, again, it’s a bad one.
All I’m saying is that Jersey just feels unbelievably English. In fact, like the most English place on the planet. Oh sure, all the road names are in French (or Jèrriais, the local dialect), but it’s not exactly coming down with baguettes. The locals would point out that Jersey, like the other Channel islands, is a crown dependency and not part of the UK. They would note the 2007 agreement with the UK Lord Chancellor which affirmed, among other things, that Jersey has a separate international identity to the UK, and that the UK will not act on behalf of Jersey internationally without prior consultation. They would probably even point to a survey in 2000 in which 68 per cent of islanders supported independence.
But it couldn’t feel more English if it was just off the M25. Jersey is the home counties on a raft. It’s the world’s most scrupulously polite border town. It’s like Tijuana with an excellent neighbourhood-watch scheme.
This shouldn’t sound cold or dismissive. That gig in Fort Regent was easily one of the best of the tour and the audience were chatty and enthusiastic and more than happy to laugh at themselves. It was also littered with moments of unexpected topicality.
I have one joke about how, in Ireland, everyone knows what parish they live in while, in London, I have absolutely no clue, because, as I say in the show, ‘I haven’t caught the priest marking out the boundary with his smell glands.’ I then mime a Catholic priest rubbing his scent on a fence post to alert other priests that they’ve moved into a new parish. Basically, I’m making a terribly clever joke about territory and the pervasive umbrella of the Church, unavoidable in Ireland. Then it just descends into me miming feral priests stealing food from bins and acting out the discussions among neighbours about how to deal with them:
‘Spray them with a hose. It’s the only language they understand. Apart from Latin. They also understand Latin.’
In Jersey, I get about two words into this ‘bit’ when I hit the unforeseen speedbump of the words ‘I don’t know what parish I live in.’ Jersey is broken into twelve parishes and, if you live on the island, you will know exactly what parish you live in. For a start, each parish has its own police force. If you speed in Jersey, these are the people you answer to, often in person, in a local town hall. This was explained to me by an Irish woman drawn to the island by the financial trade whom I met after the gig.
‘We’re all stockbrokers, and we buy nice cars and then we can’t go over 40 mph. And sometimes you do, and if you get caught, you have to drag your arse all the way back to the same parish to apologize to the elders.’
And then she said a lot of rude things about the local police force that I can’t corroborate.
Don’t get me wrong, the Irish love a committee. And the French are known for a tangle of local bureaucracy. But thirteen police forces for an island of eighty-eight thousand people? Just give everyone a badge and be done with it. They can all patrol their own field and set their own speed limits, and we’ll just go accelerating and decelerating randomly round the island.
The massive parallel to England, though, is that small portion of the population who think that what they have is at all times in danger of being destroyed, and mainly by modernizers, or foreigners. BBC Jersey reported during the year on the proposition that the island could be connected to France by bridge, with the Sweden-to-Denmark Öresund bridge touted as the model. A quick scan of the comments on the website shows a healthy debate, but often punctuated with gloriously apocalyptic visions of the future from the type of people who seem to mix up the word ‘immigrants’ with ‘zombie army’. Like this guy:
Peter: Let’s talk about the millions of immigrants just wanting to get our jobs for less money, our life ruined by thousands of cars landing here. What about our life? Our pubs? Entering a pub and just can’t be there ’cause there are too many people around. HELL ON EARTH!!!! BRIDGE? HELL BRIDGE! NO WAY!
I know, I know, all those immigrants, with their low-paid jobs and cars but yet still sitting in pubs all day – how do they find the time? Nothing tops HELL BRIDGE! for a nightmarish turn of phrase, although this came close:
Amy: I don’t think that the bridge is a good idea, don’t just think about how much it might cost think what could happen may-be if one of the French brought over a dog who had rabies and it got passed around or something
Don’t keep that rabid dog all to yourself, François! Pass it around, we all want a go on it.
But surely even the protectionist fringe can see some upsides:
Richard: I think the only benefit is that I could go over the bridge at will and pick up some nice French cheese and freshly baked bread – Yum Yum!!
See what I mean? No baguette shops. There isn’t a single French-bread shop on the island. The smell must float over with the breeze every morning and drive them insane. One half-decent boulangerie and they could save themselves the cost of a bridge.
So it’s the usual English mix of self-styled Defenders of the Way Things Are to normal punters getting on with life. The latter are more fun to drink with and all of them seemed to be gathered around St Helier’s Royal Yacht Hotel when I emerged after the show. Jersey kicks off at the weekend, I can report, and the young and moneyed throw their cash, and themselves, around with some abandon. With the perfect excuse not to drive home for once, Damon and I were happy to join them. We started in the quayside bar but, as the rounds kept coming, we forced our way deeper into the revellers, towards the music. The drinks continued to flow.
Eventually, I had to step away from the dancefloor, and I was in the nightclub toilets, enjoying a moment of quiet concentration, when the man
at the next urinal turned to me and said: ‘Oh, it’s yourself!’
(This existential conundrum is a common form of address for the Irish. It’s a welcoming form of greeting which deftly avoids any possible social death from mislaying a name: ‘Is it yourself?’ is both familiar, and impossible to say no to.)
He, himself, was William McDevitt, an Irishman working in Jersey and brother to a girl who was in my class in primary school. He knew that I had been performing on the island, but Munster had played a Heineken Cup rugby match that afternoon and that had been his priority. After Munster won, though, he and his friends, fired with a renewed patriotism, decided I should get their, by now quite sozzled, support.
‘So we presented ourselves at the theatre and asked for four tickets. And we got the last four seats.’
‘Excellent,’ said I. ‘What stage was I at when you got in?’
‘Not so fast,’ said William. ‘As we were being led through to the theatre, I had a look at the tickets, and the name of the show was “The Sorceror”.’
‘“The Sorceror”? Why would my show be called “The Sorceror”?’
‘Y’know, I just presumed that’s what you call yourself these days.’
And he showed me the ticket. The words ‘The Sorceror’ were written in huge letters. And, underneath it, only slightly smaller, ‘Jersey Gilbert and Sullivan Society’.
‘So when did you realize…?’
‘We were led through the theatre to the only empty seats in the place, and when we sat down and looked up, some woman was onstage in a petticoat. And she started to sing. And we all went, “This is the wrong fucking show,” and just stood up and walked out again.’
‘That’s very funny.’
‘Maybe for you, but the woman in the box office wouldn’t give us a refund. I spent £64 on you today.’
And then we left the bathroom, went back to the nightclub and I tried to buy him £64 of drink as an apology.
We left Jersey feeling a little ropier the following morning. As we drove past the St Helier waterfront, we saw the Ferris wheel, the same as yesterday but with at least four extra carriages bolted on to it. What had been our symbol of decay was actually in the middle of being built.
‘That Jersey Eye is taking shape, isn’t it?’ said Damon.
‘It certainly is. It’ll be ready for the summer,’ beamed the taxi driver.
And we sped past, the needle never going past forty.
Chapter 9:
Tickling the ‘Burbs’
Back on the mainland, we enter the southern suburbs. I’m taking a very broad and loose definition of ‘suburbs’ here, to include new and dormitory towns and anywhere, basically, where a large proportion of the crowd will rise the following morning and get the train into the centre of London for work. This covers a vast swathe of the south-east, whose own identity and independence is swallowed up by the gravitational pull of the giant mass of London nearby. From Tunbridge Wells to Maidenhead, from Watford to Chichester, these towns are anywhere up to fifty or sixty miles away from the capital, and often the audience I get aren’t even from these towns but from the pretty villages surrounding. These are the places that people move to when London wears them down and they want some bucolic approximation of country life in which to raise their families, albeit one with a regular rail service to London Bridge.
Three things make these gigs difficult. The first is the newly formulated Dara’s First Law of Identity. The greater the sense of local identity, the more audiences talk. When we visited the cities, we mentioned the corollary to Dara’s First Law: the presence of a noted local football team makes for a chatty crowd. Here in the suburbs this is particularly noticeable. Any idea how Tunbridge Wells FC are doing? No, neither do I, and neither do the people of Tunbridge Wells. They are more famous for some eighteenth-century baths, and your average spa doesn’t inspire that much loyalty. As I’ve said about the cities, even if you’re not a football fan, you’ll have heard your town mentioned enough times within a competitive context to be used to the idea of it being represented; and, by extension, you will subconsciously represent it when you’re talking to me.
Here, in the south, we can also postulate Dara’s Second Law: the more modern the jobs, the less the crowd care. There is a hard and fast rule about the ‘what do you do for a living?’ question: it works if the audience have any clue what the job involves. Which is great if it’s a policeman, baker or astronaut. The crowd has an automatic emotional response, and curiosity, about those kinds of jobs. Ideally, everyone I speak to would have the sort of job you’ve read about, aged seven, in a brightly illustrated Richard Scarry book called Things We Make and Do.
Less helpful is electronic engineer, insurance fund manager or IT consultant; and the suburbs are full of IT consultants.
The final thing that adds to the challenge of making people laugh is prosperity. What the hell, let’s make it Dara’s Third Law: rich people don’t laugh much. They smile contentedly, they’re happy to be there, they chortle a bit, but you can’t shake that sense that they’re indulging you. ‘Well done, funny chap,’ they’re saying, ‘that is an amusing story you’re telling. You’ve done well; but then so have I, haven’t I? Look at my lovely wife. We live in a big house. Eldest is in Cambridge now. Life is good.’
There was an entire night in Chichester, for example, where a crowd that consisted mainly of architects and property developers smiled benignly but contentedly, and where the only extreme reaction was during the routine where I take an axe to homeopathy, and the crowd sort of shuffled in their seats as if to say, ‘Well, you say that, but whenever little Rupert gets a sniffle…’
My favourite subset of the contented are men in senior management, or the bosses of their own companies. I find these people to be quite a compelling subspecies of their own. They’ve been surrounded by juniors who are obliged to laugh at their jokes for years, and the daily absence of a natural predator has left them quite out of condition, performance wise. I can spot this whenever I ask a middle-aged man in the audience, ‘What do you do for a living?’ and he says, ‘Not much!’ and looks around expecting the laugh it gets in the office. It can be quite disorientating for them to see that this kind of response is neither original, nor particularly funny.
In Aylesbury, we had a foreign-currency trader who looked very happy with himself in the front row, so I spent the night quizzing him about life in the bureau de change:
‘Do they bring you tea, in the little booth?’
‘Which country has the prettiest notes?’
‘Do you ever get jealous, watching all these people going off on their holidays?’
It was all quite gentle, I thought, but clearly far more vicious than the respectful joshing he got from the juniors at work. When I came out for my encore, he walked out, wife in tow.
Rock journalists write about people losing their ‘edge’, but I think that’s a deliberately self-congratulatory term. I think that success makes people lose their curiosity. They find a comfort zone; they build a wall around themselves and they raise their children there. If all goes to plan the kids hit their teens, find it all claustrophobically dull and leave to make their mark.
The suburbs exist in order to make young people tetchy and eager to move to London. That’s the circle of life, I suppose. It’s like The Lion King, but set in Basingstoke.
High Wycombe Swan
1 former army-truck driver
1 man from N (or Penge; or Enne; or something)
1 man from a data storage company
1 teenage boy
High Wycombe is a good example of the ‘burbs’. Situated about thirty miles north-west of London, it was once a thriving market town with a successful furniture industry. Now it is commuterville. It has also sold itself under the slogan ‘High Wycombe – A Place to Get Excited About!’
I myself have not had the chance to get excited. In all the years I’ve been travelling to the Wyc, I’ve never seen it open.
This is
not a problem unique to High Wycombe. We often arrive into towns in time for a six-thirty soundcheck. In other words, after all the shops are shut and the streets are deserted. The only signs of life are the members of my audience smiling out at me from pizza restaurants as I walk past the windows trying to get a feel for the place. For all I know, the shops never open in King’s Lynn, Woking or Carlisle.
Tonight then, as usual, I wandered through the empty streets to the Wycombe Swan Theatre and therein tried to convince a nice, well-to-do crowd that there’s something inherently amusing about working in data storage. They weren’t convinced.
The man from Enne, or Penge, or wherever (it was difficult to hear and, after asking three times, I was in danger of boring the arse off the room; when in doubt just go with whatever you think the person said), told us that the village he lived in had four pubs and that his favourite was the Horse and Jockey.
‘What’s so great about the Horse and Jockey then?’ I enquired.
‘The guys are really great in there,’ he said, clearly not intending it to sound quite as gay as it did.
Nevertheless, I was looking for any comedy angle at this stage. I took the low road.
‘How would you describe yourself then, as a horse, or a jockey?’
No answer.
During the crime story, as if to underline the refined tone of the area, somebody claimed to have stopped some underage drinking. This got booing from the youth of Wycombe, but stood as a helpful reminder that this is a part of the world that takes law and order seriously.
Tickling the English Page 10