St Patrick’s Day falls in the middle of Lent, the Christian festival of penance and self-sacrifice. For forty days and for forty nights, blah blah Jesus in the desert, for our sins, blah blah, the devil tried to tempt him, blah blah, everyone has to give up sweets. And Everyone Had to Give Up Sweets. Or cigarettes. Or pints. It’s almost the only thing I regret about Ireland’s move towards secularism, that future generations won’t have that shared experience of ditching the Mars bars for six weeks.
Obviously, it was a problem that, in the middle of this season of self-sacrifice, lay our largest national fiesta. So, an Irish solution to an Irish problem. On 17 March, you got the day off Lent. Don’t ask me how that worked theologically. Presumably, Jesus walked out of the desert, just for the day, watched the parade, wore a big Guinness hat and ate as much chocolate as he wanted. And then the following day, back into the desert. Either way, for decades and decades and decades, St Patrick’s Day was the oasis of fun in a generally grim month and a half.
Now, tell me how St George’s Day is supposed to compete with that? No amount of photo opportunities with Boris Johnson and some Morris dancers can compete with the power of an autocratic Church with a 95 per cent monopoly, combined with the sugar rush of the sudden infusion of six bars of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk.
St George’s Day can’t get close. For a start, it isn’t even a national holiday. Even if you wanted people to celebrate it, they have to go to work.
It has no context, no history and no purpose. It smacks of wishful thinking by a right-minded committee that thinks you can just parachute these things into place, as long as you get the logo right and, probably, they’ve got a team of consultants working on that right now. £400k later and they’ll show you a letterhead of George and a grinning dragon doing a thumbs-up.
There was already an attempt to do this with a ‘British Day’ in 2007. Communities Secretary Ruth Kelly MP and Immigration Minister Liam Byrne MP, publicly launched the idea and came up with ways of celebrating Britain Day after a year of canvassing public opinion. A twenty-seven-point list of recommendations was circulated which should just have been photocopied directly from the back of the envelope it was written on. The ideas were vague and random:
3. By using TV to inform about British history; a speech by the Queen; TV link-ups around country.
5. By encouraging young people to visit or help older people; celebrate voluntary work.
Until, inevitably, and with a certain blunt honesty:
13. Through drinking…
And before the list was even finished you could feel the straws being clutched at. It just became a collection of random, positive words:
20. By appreciating the country; weather; enjoyment.
The British Day plan was quietly dropped.
The fact is, you can’t reverse-engineer something like Paddy’s Day. And you probably don’t want to. Are you ready to put aside your ambivalent attitude to religion in general, and instead force the entire country to convert to Catholicism and then give the Church hierarchy unfettered access to the reins of power? We know you don’t want it and, frankly, I didn’t move to England to sit through that again.
Face it, England is the victim of its own success. You can’t gobble up other nations, absorb them into your flag, and then whine that your original flag doesn’t get the attention it deserves. All this crying over the St George’s flag is like a fat girl who ate everyone’s cake wailing that she can’t fit into her party dress any more. This is what you wanted with the empire; suck it up.
Moreover, it might be worth asking if there isn’t a bigger price to pay for the kind of cultural success Paddy’s Day has achieved.
There isn’t an Irish person alive who hasn’t cringed at the sight of Guinness hats and leprechauns being bandied about like That’s Who We Are.
Every year, we see the footage of drunken American kids wearing ‘Kiss Me, I’m Irish’ T-shirts and getting hammered in our honour. Even at home, the day has always been a bit of an underage drinking festival. I appreciate the craic as much as anyone; I just dislike the entire nation being reduced to a caricature.
All those campaigning furiously for a St George’s festival might be wise to ask themselves if they want to see England narrowed down to a man in a cartoon dragon costume running down Fifth Avenue. ‘Tally Ho!’ they’ll shout, in a Dick Van Dyke English accent. ‘Tally Ho!’
The show in Basingstoke passed without any mention of George at all. In fact, we had forgotten what day it was until, on the drive home, we had to swerve to miss a solitary, stumbling drunk wrapped in a St George’s cross.
As he wandered home late and emotional, this celebrant seemed to have sufficiently enjoyed himself without any committee help. He didn’t look like he was pining for a parade. He didn’t seem like he needed someone to step in and organize a party for him. A pedestrian crossing, maybe, but as for the rest of the day, he seemed to have navigated that perfectly well on his own.
Chapter 10:
From London to London (in a week)
After the blur of motorways, we have a few days of commuting like a normal person. We land in London, at the Hammersmith Apollo, not ten minutes from my home and probably the most crucial week of the tour.
For one thing, it’s the biggest room of the tour. Three nights here in front of over ten thousand punters would be a big deal anyway, even without the extra weight: this is where we record the tour DVD.
The night you record the DVD is always among the most important and, sadly, least enjoyable of the whole escapade.
For a start, it’s burdened with pressure. This is the snapshot of a year’s work; the one iteration of an ever-changing show that gets trapped in amber and presented to the world as an item of record. ‘This was my show,’ it says. ‘This is what I talked about every night up and down the country. If you didn’t come along to see it live, this is what you missed.’
And it’s not, of course. The show changes every night, depending on who’s in and what happens. And the best you can hope for is that on the single night that you’ve hired six cameras and sound and light and an outside broadcast van and put on a nice suit, well, the best you can hope for is that that isn’t the night where all the seats at the front have been block-booked by an electronic-engineering company. This is not the night for the crowd to break all three of Dara’s Rules.
The exam dream you have before the tour is replaced by the more vivid panic of standing in front of a crowd going what do you do? – what do you do? – what do you do? And every smiling face replies, ‘I work in IT.’ ‘I, too, work in IT.’ ‘Well, actually, I also work in IT, but in an even more obscure niche than the previous two.’
And at the end, when the filming stops, you find out that row two is filled with astronauts, firemen and undersea welders, all sitting there shrugging and going, ‘Why didn’t he talk to us?’
God, the times I pine for an underwater welder onstage.
But this neurosis is for the end of the week. First, Monday night in the Apollo with no cameras, then a quick spin around the country, then back home to Hammersmith for Friday and the big day on Saturday.
London Hammersmith Apollo
1 service locator
1 business adviser
1 proctologist
Monday is a romp.
I was not expecting this. For the last couple of years, comedians have been colonizing this legendary rock venue through the BBC Live at the Apollo series, which has become an increasingly important landmark gig for a rising comic, plus a rare chance to do more with that Edinburgh show you’d written than carve it into tiny portions to hand out to panel shows.
It’s a great show to do but, Jesus, a cold crowd sometimes. The punters get the tickets for free because it’s a TV show, they have no clue who’s going to be on, the room is really brightly lit, so that everyone is 15 per cent more self-conscious than they should be and, if they don’t know you, it can feel vast out there.
I remember the fir
st time I appeared on Live at the Apollo. Before you come on, you have to stand behind a giant sign at the back of the stage that spells ‘Apollo’ in light bulbs which, like all set dressing, looks great from a distance but, up close, is just a load of light bulbs. At least when it moves, though, it’s genuinely done mechanically. Most of the time, walls that slide and doors that open on telly shows are done by hand so, as you wait to go on, nervously running through the lines, muttering, ‘Don’t fuck up the first joke, don’t fuck up the first joke,’ there’s a bloke standing next to you with Allen keys and gaffer tape hanging off his belt muttering, ‘Don’t fuck up opening the door, don’t fuck up opening the door.’
On Have I Got News for You?, for example, the backdrops spin into position as the show starts. What you don’t hear at home is the footsteps of the props guys racing from backdrop to backdrop, trying to get them turned in time.
The second time I appeared on Live at the Apollo, I was hosting the show, rather than appearing as a guest. This meant that I would warm up the crowd, welcome on the guest comic and then, when they had finished, wrap up the show. This went to plan perfectly almost all of the way to the end. The idea was that I would say ‘Goodnight!’ in my showbiz way, and then turn and walk slowly back towards the giant sign, as it rose and a plume of dry ice rolled out to greet me. The credits would roll under this long walk, with the audience’s cheers bringing me home. I would then turn and smile my final goodbye to the crowd, the sign would descend and the show end.
Sadly, no one told the crowd.
I said, ‘That’s all from us. Thank you! And goodnight!’ and turned.
At which point the entire room got up out of their seats and started leaving. Which is fair enough – they thought it was the end of the show. As I walked back into the set, I could hear the thud-thud-thud of thousands of velvety theatre seats flipping upright.
The cameras were still rolling though, so I had to keep my steady and majestic pace.
Behind me, conversations were starting, people were rustling with coats and turning their phones back on.
The Apollo stage is vast. Still I am walking, the loneliest man in the room, still keeping this show going while three and a half thousand people are filing out. The sign begins to rise, smoke billows out, I reach the back of the stage and turn. And I salute a half-empty room, fake smile on my face, acknowledging an applause which ended about thirty seconds earlier.
A few stragglers notice me and just stare, some quizzically, but most in a sad way, thinking, ‘Poor guy, just can’t let it go. It’s over, Dara, it’s over…’
So, with those as my most recent memories of the Apollo, I walked out dreading a big cold room, and it was a romp. We met a ‘service locator’, which, behind the fancy title, was a man who sources cables underground for construction companies. It’s a surprisingly straightforward task given the right meters and detectors apparently; but still a job that has the potential to look a bit magical. Obviously, you find the cable first, then you hide the meters and detectors in the giant sleeves of your wizard’s robe. Then you take out a coat hanger and divine.
You do some incanting first, of course. You can’t do divining without a bit of incantation. It just doesn’t work without the incanting. Anything that sounds, you know, sort of… Sumerian. Repeated over and over until you collapse, drained, pointing down at the tarmac and with your last breath, ‘Your… cable… is… here.’
This is exactly how stage psychics work, by the way.
Our service locator didn’t seem that interested in adding a touch of occult mystery to his day job but was thrilled when, later, during the inevitable Fritzl family mention by the crowd – we were in that fortnight when the story was everywhere – I mentioned that a man with his ability to sniff out things underground might have been quite the help to the Austrians.
As for the proctologist, I don’t have to tell you that having someone in the audience who examines arses would probably get a laugh or two. Any comedian can make something of that. But finding a proctologist with a broken wrist? I thank you. And, before you ask, a light bulb.
London should be fun, being my home town.
This is a minor embarrassment, by the way. I released a DVD in 2008 that contained a show in London and a show in Dublin, and I opened both with the words, ‘It’s great to be home.’ This made me look like Richard Nixon.
It is more than possible, though, to be both Not British, and a Londoner.
This is my claim on Londoner status. Not long after I’d emigrated, I was doing a comedy-circuit gig in a room above a pub in Tufnell Park in North London. I was looking round the room, preparing my rag-bag of international put-downs, noting how many New Zealanders, how many Dutch, how many Americans were in the room, and it was suddenly obvious that I was missing an entire ethnic group, possibly the largest in the city.
This group, to which I also belonged, consisted of the massive group of people who came to London because this was London, one of the great cities of the world. We had come between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five; we had come from all over the world (and all over the UK); and we had come because this was the world centre of our industry, because this was where opportunity existed and this was where the exciting stuff was happening. This was our common nationality, and where we used to come from was just backstory. We were Londoners now. That was our ethnic group.
Great cities have a gravitational pull. For me, there are basically four of them, New York, Paris, Tokyo and London, and they exist to distort the space around them. They draw the population in, usually young and ambitious and willing to endure shitty houseshares in the city’s endless warren of sub-divided three-storey Georgian houses.
England plays host to London, much like it plays host to the Premier League. It used to be yours, and now it belongs to the world. And you can whine about the day-to-day hassles and the foreign faces or you can relax and enjoy the fact that you have something genuinely world-class and iconic on your doorstep.
You want proof of London’s international iconic status? In any Hollywood science-fiction movie, when they show that montage of all the alien attacks from around the world, London always gets flattened first. I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve seen Big Ben flooded, zapped or struck by a meteor. That’s how you measure global brand-reach.
How well the capital fits into England is another matter.
The great English trait of Romantic nostalgia is curiously absent in London. It’s possibly because of the transient nature of the population. Maybe if there is nostalgia in the hearts of the people of London, it is for somewhere other than London. That might explain the rush away from the city for some at a certain age. Maybe nostalgia is too simplistic an emotion to attach to anything as massive and messy as a city of eight million people, although that hasn’t stopped New Yorkers or Parisians.
If the English were to be glibly summed up as pragmatic but a bit moany, though, then this is the perfect capital city for them. The city is massive, and Londoners negotiate daily a ludicrously complicated transport system, by underground, overground, bus and boat. This gives them endless opportunities to complain, but it also forces them to perform route calculations of astonishing complexity, usually without even looking up, for fear they might make eye-contact, or show weakness or share a human moment with a fellow commuter, which is not the way things are done in London.
My favourite-ever joke (of my own) is about Londoners and their gift for re-routing. It was about the response to the bomb attacks on 7 July 2005. This is the joke:
The media reacted as if the attacks would, or should, be greeted like 9/11 had been in New York. Of course, the attack was nothing like 9/11, and besides… this is London. They’ve had the Blitz and then there was the IRA… In fact, the response in London to the attacks was much more:
‘There’s been a bomb on the Piccadilly Line!’
(Long thoughtful pause and then, like a problem being solved…)
‘Well, I can get th
e Victoria Line…’
(You might need to see me deliver that one, actually. It’s all in the way you say ‘Victoooria Line…’)
The joke always worked fairly well outside the city, but phenomenally well in the London clubs, even the weekend after the attacks. I remember reading pieces in the national press about ‘How long before Londoners can laugh again?’ As it turned out, the following weekend.
You want a really, really dark sense of humour? Time Out, the London listings magazine, printed a letter during the Jean Charles de Menezes investigation from an anonymous man who asked if it was wrong, when reading about the wrongful death of the Brazilian shot in Stockwell tube station, to have realized that the route de Menezes was taking would shave ten minutes off his, the reader’s, commute.
Londoners: Not sentimental.
Portsmouth Kings Theatre
1 managing director of an architectural IT company
1 IT infrastructure manager
1 repairman for catering equipment
1 voiceover artist
1 An old man named Stanley
The fickle wishes of the tour give us a few nights away from London before returning for the big shows at the weekend. Portsmouth first, although, strictly, it’s Southsea, on the outskirts of the city, which is all nightclubs and chip shops and bars and this beautiful, proper theatre.
The street also has both a Kwiki Mini Mart and a New Kwiki Mart, which hints at a long-running and wonderfully low-stakes feud.
Whenever I’ve gigged in Portsmouth it has been along this drag, and it took Three Men in a Boat to get me into the centre of the city proper and to one of the most striking architectural sights of the British coast, the Spinnaker Tower.
Tickling the English Page 12