Tickling the English

by Dara O Briain

  More than twice the height of Nelson’s Column and built in the shape of a giant sail stretching towards the English Channel, the Spinnaker Tower appeals because it combines the majesty of its design with the humanity of having a broken external glass lift, ever since the opening day, when it malfunctioned halfway up and a load of dignitaries were trapped. Engineers had to take the internal lift all the way up to the viewing platform, and then abseil down.

  This is the perfect blend for the English. Now the locals can admire the stunning views across the Solent and the dominating shape on the skyline; at the same time they can tut and roll their eyes at how inept it all is. ‘Oh, it might be pretty, but does it work?’

  It’s like Terminal 5 and the O2 centre in Greenwich (formerly the Millennium Dome, of course). Both of them are fine, fine buildings. It’s hard to think of a sleeker airport in Europe, and the O2 is a model of how to feed, water and entertain twenty thousand people without the need for burger vans and rain-gear. Sadly, both will never recover from start-up problems which will forever leave them as easy punchlines for bad newspaper columnists.

  It’s one of the more unusual English national traits I’ve discovered. You’re not scared of the grands projets; you seem to regard it as unnecessary, however, to test them before the big opening. Maybe you think it’s hubristic to do things well, that the odd broken luggage carousel shows that you haven’t lost the run of yourselves amidst the vastness of this construction. You need something to complain about. You want that imperfection. It’s the dropped stitch that separates you from the divine.

  ‘I am Ozymandias, king of kings! I would like to apologize for the late running of these trains!’

  Nottingham Royal Concert Hall

  1 trainee lawyer

  1 IT trainer

  1 man who makes fireplaces:

  ‘Out of what?’

  ‘Wood.’

  ‘That’s tempting fate, isn’t it?’

  1 wildlife photographer

  Nottingham is an attractive market town, built around the largest town square in the country. Boots the Chemist started here, as a chemist, before some genius realized that if they just sold sandwiches as well, they could probably open at least three branches on every street in the country.

  Nottingham makes much of Robin Hood, including the magnificent Robin Hood Experience, a good-hearted1970s tourist attraction which showcases the best of 1970s animatronic archers and recorded medieval-crowd noise. They’ll polish it up some day, and it’ll lose all its low-tech magic.

  They don’t make as much of the founder of the city, the Saxon chieftain Snot. In fact, the city’s original name was ‘Snotingaham’ – literally, ‘the homestead of Snot’s people’. If anyone wants to campaign to restore the name, I’m on board.

  Nottingham is also very popular for stag weekends, serviced not just by the pubs and clubs but also by the vast number of quad-biking/clay-pigeon-shooting type activities in the area. Stags are lured here by the oft-quoted stat that Snotsville (the proper name, thank you) has the country’s most favourable male–female ratio. Sadly, this statistic dates back to the city’s textile industry during the war. Right now, that would give it the nation’s most favourable eighty-five-year-old male–female ratio, but still the stags keep coming, little realizing the ‘grab-a-granny’ weekend they have in store.

  Strangest fact I learned: the world premiere of Reservoir Dogs was held in Nottingham.

  Oh, and other strangest fact: the world record for ‘number of people dressed as a zombie’ was broken here, at the videogame festival Gamecity.

  So Nottingham is, quietly, pretty cool.

  A fun gig, too, during which we learned one exciting wildlife fact: ducks don’t do sultry.

  Iain Smollett was the wildlife photographer. And while the UK is certainly better than Ireland for wildlife, it’s no Kenya. (Ireland has no wildlife worth speaking of. If there was a wildlife-tour company in Ireland, it’d be called ‘Chance of a Fox’ or ‘The Odd Hedgehog’.)

  ‘So, Iain, what do you shoot?’

  ‘It’s mainly ducks.’

  ‘Is it possible to get much out of a duck?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Do they have much emotional range?’

  ‘Oh yes. They’re quite varied. Territorial, or nurturing, or…’

  ‘Could you make them sexy? Can you make a duck glance over his shoulder in that coy, slightly saucy way? I mean, if you call yourself a photographer…’

  So Iain showed me a photograph of a duck glancing over its shoulder, he claimed, in a sultry way. Do you want me to describe it to you? It doesn’t merit a thousand words. It’s a duck. It’s a duck, looking slightly to the left. If this is as sultry as it gets for the duck world, it’s a wonder they breed at all.

  Sheffield City Hall

  George – who rolls steel

  1 T-shirt designer

  1 plumber

  1 accountant

  1 IT contractor

  And so the gigs roll along happily, keeping my confidence high for the big DVD show at the weekend. Next up is a trip back to Yorkshire, usually home to the most talkative people in the country. Gigs in the past in Leeds, Selby, Bridlington, Halifax and Huddersfield have all been uniformly wonderful. Similarly, Sheffield is the home to one of the best comedy clubs in the country, The Last Laugh, a famously sweaty gig in the back room of the Lescar pub. You’d do a forty-minute set, and come off drenched and have to change in the kitchen as the punters wandered past the door. For some reason, I can still see the giant tubs of margarine, as I tried to look casual while conducting a post-mortem, shirtless and glistening, with show host Toby Foster.

  This trip, I am doing my show at the City Hall, which is by no stretch of the imagination a sweaty room in the back of a pub. However, ten minutes into the show, and I am drenched again. But now it is with a cold, cold sweat. The kind you get when you realize that there are 1,950 people in the room and it just isn’t working.

  Let’s see how this happened. I ran out to applause, mentioned a few of the other nights on the tour, hit them with the schtick about how much I was looking forward to chatting to them tonight and then said, ‘Right, who’s here?’ and leaned in towards the front row. And, instinctively, 1,950 people seemed to back away.

  Have you ever made a room clench? That’s what it felt like.

  They puckered up. They curled into a ball. They went foetal. It was like doing a show to an alarmed hedgehog.

  I managed to frighten a room full of people so badly, their natural defence mechanisms kicked in and they made a smaller target of themselves.

  From the very start it was all one-word answers and nods. They were giving me absolutely nothing to work with, and all the fluid that would normally be lubricating my mouth began to drench my shirt instead.

  Dying onstage is a bizarre piece of evolutionary biology. Why exactly would we have developed a response to fear that dries the mouth and thickens the tongue just when we need them most? What caveman antics required this most specific of fight-or-flight responses?

  If you’ve never gone through it, these are the stages:

  Firstly, panic. An internal panic when Plan A gets nothing, and a quick root around to find a Plan B. Secondly, a viscosity of the brain. When Plan B fails, it takes markedly longer to find Plan C. Sometimes you end up doing Plan A again. This is not good. It never works better the second time. The mouth begins to dry now, and you suddenly become very aware of how bad this looks. Normally, on stage, you’re not self-conscious at all. You’re too busy doing the job even to consider how ridiculous it looks. When the laughs stop, there is a very sudden realization that you might look very foolish indeed in front of these people. This is the fight-or-flight moment. Do you politely exit, with some good grace and dignity, or do you plough on and hope that something, anything, in your sorry script will gain some purchase with the crowd and turn this around?

  The answer, hard-earned, is of course C: you stop what you’re doi
ng, tell the audience how shit it’s going and blame them. You’ve done this before, it always works. The only difference is them and, frankly, you’re a little disappointed. You’ve made the effort to come here and they haven’t brought their A-game. You’ll go through with this, but you expect better, starting with the next joke.

  Then you go back and do Plan A again. Fuck ’em.

  This night in Sheffield wasn’t quite death though. I had still a show I could do, I still had at least ninety minutes of tested material that I had no difficulty getting out, and that the crowd were enjoying. I just couldn’t get them to engage in any one-to-ones. All the bonus, all the gravy of the offthe-cuff, all the ad-libbing to sprinkle on top of the show, all gone.

  I walked off at half-time, and Damon was already there, going, ‘I know, I know… Remember, though, you’ve not played the City Hall before. Maybe they just weren’t expecting it to be so… interactive.’

  After the show, I was sitting, still a little shell-shocked, at the stage door, when a cheery punter passed by. ‘That was great!’ he said, and was genuinely surprised when I almost grabbed him by the collar.

  ‘How the fuck was that great? You all said nothing to me! I couldn’t get a word out of you!’

  ‘Well, we didn’t come to hear us. We came to hear you. That’s what we’re like in Sheffield. Bands get really thrown as well when we don’t sing along. We come to hear them sing the songs though.’

  That’s what they’re like in Sheffield. They won’t make cream with you, but they love the cake.

  London Hammersmith Apollo

  1 security guard:

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Putney.’

  ‘You’re a security guard for Putney? Do you stand on the bridge forcing traffic back?’

  ‘No, for the police in Putney.’

  ‘The police in Putney need security? How dangerous has it got in Putney?’

  1 financial manager for Boots

  1 Navy signalling guy

  1 photographer (mainly interiors)

  1 oil refiner

  1 schoolboy

  2 cobblers

  10 special guests

  In London the next night we were back to a world of chat. Did you know that the Signalling Corps does not use Morse code any more? I certainly didn’t but was set straight by the Navy signaller who arrived ten minutes late and caught my attention. Flags they do use, but really just for the hell of it, it’s all digital encryption now.

  He also said that, no, he does not sing ‘YMCA’ when doing semaphore. He had to agree that there was something inherently camp about it, as there would be about any military activity that could be done equally well with pompoms. Pom-poms might even be easier to see in a storm than flags. And they’re more fun to make. For a professional communicator, the Navy signaller seemed as if he would have been happier left alone at this stage but, after Sheffield, I felt starved of attention and, besides, he arrived late and had a cool job.

  For the DVD recording, I had been forced to do some fact-checking for legal purposes. Little things like advertising slogans and product names. You can still mention them, but have to make sure you don’t spend the entire tour slagging off Tefal for selling a ‘Stealth’ kettle and then the night before the record find out that it was actually Kenwood. Y’know, schoolboy errors like that.

  I mentioned a long time ago that the only real stand-alone joke the show contained was about Dettol and Yakult. Neither brand could be said to come out of the joke badly, but we were still put on alert when my agent received a call midway through the tour from Yakult head office.

  ‘We hear Dara is doing a joke on his current tour about our product,’ they said.

  ‘Yes. Yes he is.’

  And there was a long pause, during which my agent pondered how to tell me that the Yakult gag had been nixed, and tried to come up with another probiotic yogurt brand that would work just as well. Then the reply:

  ‘We’ve never been in a show before. Could we come and see it?’

  Ten tickets were happily despatched to Yakult and, when I delivered the gag, the usual laugh was followed by a distinct and very specific cheer from Row H.

  After the show, the Yakult team came round to the stage door and presented me with four trays of Yakult. Oh yeah, that’s pretty sweet. 192 tubs of probiotic yogurt. I can’t offer any great testimonial, however: none of them got drunk. Life on the road just doesn’t suit a rigorous digestive regime and, when we got home in June, they were all still in the boot of the car.

  The other, more crushing, legal requirement for a DVD recording is that a verbatim transcript is taken to be analysed for any possible slander issues and to help the edit. Then, for some cruel and perverse reason, a copy is sent to me. This is the grimmest reading. You know the way you don’t recognize your own voice on tape? Try having it written out word for word.

  Offstage Announcement

  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Hammersmith Apollo, please put your hands together and welcome on stage DARA O BRIAIN.

  Dara O Briain (Onstage)

  Lovely! How are you? You in good form? Good evening, good evening, good evening, good evening, good evening! Hello, how are you? Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the Hammersmith Apollo! Are you in good form? Very, very good. My name is DARA O BRIAIN.

  And rapidly descends from there. This is some banter with the crowd to put them at their ease:

  Listen, you’re a really good crowd like whatever, there’s some crowds where you kind of have to work and melve them together like but you’re there, you’re there already, right. No, hey hey please, please I don’t want you to take that as; that’s not meant to be some shitty showbizzy hey you’re a great crowd kind of a way right. I’ll just indicate that I judge you as much as you judge me so we’re equal there right.

  It may help at this stage if you read these in one of those Marge Gunderson from Fargo accents; or like the Swedish chef from The Muppet Show. Or whatever accent you enjoy doing to indicate that somebody is mentally deficient.

  Some stuff may have been lost in translation, but that still doesn’t explain ‘melve’. I presume I got caught between ‘meld’ and ‘merge’. Is melving an audience vital to the success of the show? Probably not.

  And how about this gem, where I react to the news that one of the audience members works in the oil industry but, hilariously, in Reading, and how difficult it must be to strike oil in Berkshire:

  You know you’re right it is just magic and maybe there is oil in Reading. Why can’t we just dream? Anyway that be great if you went home afterward the gig it be great if you went home like and you’re in the bath and suddenly just saw up out of the toilet and you Mary, Mary this couldn’t be that would be too lucky wouldn’t it. Just started shooting up out of the thing. Anyway where was I, oh yeah, yeah, yeah I was talking about the whole oh psychics at that was it right.

  There’s sixty pages of this stuff. It’s just heartbreaking.

  *

  We recorded the DVD on the Saturday night, and it’s been out for a while, so I can be honest now and say that there was a moment during the night when I thought that the nightmare I mentioned earlier was going to come true. With all the cameras in and the audience brightly lit, we were doing the one take we’d get of the whole show. And I thought it was going to be a bad one. Not rubbish bad. But mediocre bad.

  It was during a routine I loved, about how much of a crock homeopathy is, and, just that one time, I felt I was losing them. I’ve looked back over it since, and even though it’s a routine dear to my heart, I do think I began to look a little nerdy and preachy, which is always a winning combination.

  And then, just when the energy was dipping, some woman shouted out ‘Energy’ from the stalls. I still have no idea why. You can tell on the DVD that I had no idea at the time and, with nothing else to do, decided to take it as the invitation to mime ‘Energy’ back at her. Then somebody shouted ‘Stealth’ and I mimed that, and the whole show changed direction.
There was a huge whoosh! of energy back into the room from this off-the-cuff nonsense, and that got us all the way to the end.

  And if you pause the DVD at just the right second, you can see the relief on my face.

  I’ll end my visit to London with a nice moment. Not from the DVD night, but the night before. In my encore, I recap the show and say a final goodbye to all the people in the front row. On the Friday night, the last of those was the Navy signalman. I had been intrigued by his revelation at the start of the show that Morse code was no longer in use by the Navy. Sufficiently intrigued, in fact, that, during the interval, I had gone online in the dressing room and found the Morse code alphabet. I spent the break slowly writing out a private message for him. At the very end of the show, while getting him a huge round of applause, I presented him with the note.

  It’s always tickled me that, at the end of such a huge show, two hours long, in front of 3,300 people, the final punchline actually took place hours later, when he’d got home, fished the note out and sat down and dusted off an old textbook to find a Morse code alphabet. And, letter by letter, he would have spelled out:

  B.E.T.Y.O.U.D.O.N.T.A.R.R.I.V.E.L.A.T.E.T.O.M.Y.S.H.O.W.A.G.A.I.N.

  Chapter 11:

  No Wood, Just Trees