Tickling the English

by Dara O Briain

  It’s at this point that things begin to blur. The gigs are beginning to meld into each other and the mileage is steadily increasing. Sometimes it’s easy to spot a theme from the week’s travel and, at other times, like this batch, it’s just a random collection of towns, from East Anglia to the Midlands, and out to Wales and Northern Ireland. And then back to East Anglia again.

  Moreover, the clutter is mounting in the car, unnoticed by myself and Damon, but worthy of a sharp upbraid any time we have to give anyone else a lift.

  ‘What the fuck is this on the floor? This car is a tip.’

  Discarded Lucozade bottles and sweet wrappers, sports supplements from the newspapers, half-eaten shanks of meat, all of them steadily encroaching on my leg room. The atmosphere isn’t helped by the two shirts I wore in the previous night’s show drying out in the back. It’s always the same two shirts as well, on heavy rotation, so the stench builds up across the week. Sitting in that car is like living in a mobile bachelor pad, but for a lonely, mean old bachelor, given that all I do in the car is sleep, eat and argue with the radio. We’re permanently set to BBC Radio Five Live, partly for sport, partly for the excellent Simon Mayo show on the drive to the venues, and partly so that I can wear off my adrenaline after the show tutting and complaining at the lunatics on their late-night phone-in show – the kind of people whose fault it is I am writing this book in the first place.

  Actually, I have no idea how we started listening to Five Live all the time. I always presumed it was Damon’s choice but, one day near the end of the tour, I noticed him switch over to Five Live when I got into the car and began to wonder if he had always thought it was my choice. At that stage, it would have been weird to ask, so it stayed.

  I used to drink on the way home. I remember on a previous tour the moment at which our hire car hit 10,000 miles. ‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘I can’t believe we’ve driven 10,000 miles.’ To which Damon sharply responded, ‘We didn’t drive 10,000 miles. I drove, and you just sat in the passenger seat drinking.’ It wasn’t that curt rebuke that stopped the boozing; it was the waning thrill of arriving home smashed at 3 a.m. to a sleeping house.

  A few years back, when the tours were smaller and didn’t merit a tour manager driving me, I used to travel by train, stay in tiny hotels and, after the gig, drink my rider. My rider at the time was eight cans of cider, and there were a few nights where I would sit in the hotel room at 1 a.m., wide awake still from the gig, glugging at a can and watching the African Nations football highlights. Great days.

  There is a tendency to overplay the loneliness of life on the road. It’s certainly a shock to go from the comedy clubs, where twenty minutes of jokes allows you to hang out with your comedian mates at the disco afterwards, mingling with the audience and feeling like the king of the room, to your first theatre tour, where at the end of a two-hour show, you take the applause, go to your dressing room to towel off and, when you walk out, the building is deserted. It can be strange to reconcile that the latter is reward for success at the former. (It’s not just the punters who scarper either. There was one time in Middlesbrough when I took a little too long to gather up my cans and I was locked in.)

  The tours now aren’t lonely though. Not with me and Damon sitting quietly together on the long journeys, listening to a radio station neither of us chose.

  King’s Lynn Corn Exchange

  Of course, if we wanted to spice things up, we could stop off and buy some pornography on the A1 on the way to King’s Lynn. At the Adult Pit Stop, just past Sandy, before you get to Biggleswade. Sandy is a town, by the way, rather than the girl from Grease fallen on hard times and now used as a landmark for truck-stop red-light joints. The Adult Pit Stop has only been there a couple of years. Apparently, it used to be a Bar-b-cue place before. But if there’s one thing a trucker wants more than fried chicken…

  Similarly, on the M62, there are ads for escort services. And calling prostitutes ‘escorts’ might fool you if it’s a spot of dinner followed by ‘executive stress relief’, but a woman who will visit your truck? That’s a prostitute.

  We don’t stop, of course – that would genuinely be as weird as any old couple suddenly stopping off at a sex-shop while they were on the A1. It’s embarrassing enough that Damon is always up and about before me in the morning and, by the time I surface, he’s ready to leave.

  ‘Have you, err, settled the bill?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And did that include… the movies?’

  ‘Yes. What did you watch?’

  ‘Casino Royale.’

  ‘Again?’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  King’s Lynn was shut when we arrived, so we watched a junior boxing club training in the car park while we sat on the banks of the river Ouse and enjoyed the mild evening.

  During the show, the most popular audience member (getting a huge unsolicited cheer from the crowd) was the operations manager from a sugar factory. Clearly the people of King’s Lynn appreciate the everyday miracle of beet to grain. Me, I liked the guy who did marketing to pigs. That wasn’t really his job, but his description was so long and technical that I just decided to take the words ‘marketing’ and ‘pigs’ out of it and run with that idea instead. Luckily, we had met another man who installed ATMs for a living (who got no cheer from the crowd – more of a sugar place, King’s Lynn) – and so the issue of how to get disposable cash to pigs was quickly solved.

  All in all, a pleasant gig, even if it was in another bloody Corn Exchange. One tiny frisson: the night after me, Jim Davidson was on. When there are a number of comics touring at the same time, you tend to criss-cross the country, seeing each other’s posters in the lobby and occasionally having the odd near-miss. In the past, I have left notes in the dressing room for Ross Noble and received ones from Al Murray. Stage-hands speak in awe of the latest Ken Dodd marathon. This, however, was the closest I had come to ever meeting Jim Davidson.

  Frankly, I got the chills. This is because, unbeknownst to him, Jim used to feature in the show.

  A couple of years ago, I had done a joke on Have I Got News for You? which was condemned by gay rights group OutRage! Previous targets of OutRage!, by the way, include Robert Mugabe, and then, me.

  To be fair to them, it wasn’t a joke I’d have gone to the wire to defend (it was something about Elton John and Billy Elliott) and the routine I did was about how, if I did try to defend it, I’d suddenly find myself on the wrong side of the comedy divide. Hence a bit with me and Jim Davidson playing golf (my generation of comics don’t really do golf ) which includes the lines:

  Dara (readying to tee-off): Jesus, Jim, I’m getting awful trouble off the queers.

  Jim (standing with club): What seems to be the problem, Dara?

  Dara (still readying to tee-off): Ah, they can’t take a joke. (Pause, turn to Jim) They can take a cock up their arse, but they can’t take a joke, what! Eh?!

  (Jim and Dara roll around laughing before Dara strikes the golf ball 275 yards down the fairway.)

  Obviously, I’m quoting out of context, so you don’t get the full satirical point but, still, you can see why Jim might not like it…

  Cardiff St David’s Hall

  In Cardiff, we were on the night after Ken Dodd. This is the closest I have ever come to the legend. While I was onstage, Damon found the sheet backstage with his show timings:

  Ken Dodd

  First Half: on 19.03 – off 21.53

  Second Half: on 22:17 – off 00:13

  The man is a monster.

  Leigh Delamare Services on the M4, on the way back from Cardiff

  When people ask, I always name this as my favourite services, although I think it’s just because I find the name memorable. There is a mystery services somewhere out there, neither I nor Damon can remember where, which had a twenty-four-hour McDonald’s, which would make it my favourite services if we could ever find it again. It may have been only a dream.

  My actual favourite is probably Leicester
Forest East on the M1. This is really two service stations, one on either side, joined by a covered bridge filled with restaurants over the motorway. This makes it one of the few places in the world where you can enjoy fish and chips, a lamb shank, or maybe a lasagne, while through the windows, three lanes of traffic appear to be hurtling towards you at 80 miles an hour.

  I’m also fond of the Sandbach services on the M6, because I once convinced a woman there that I owned the place. She looked really surprised to see me here, as if, since I host Mock the Week, I should be using some sort of celebrity services, just behind a velvet rope:

  ‘Actually, I’m just checking up on the place.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. Me and Frankie Boyle have invested our money from Mock the Week in a number of service stations. We’re thinking of adding this one to our portfolio. Tell me… how have you found the facilities on your visit here?’

  ‘Emm, fine, clean, I suppose.’

  ‘Excellent. Thanks for the input.’

  Life on the motorway is filled with longing. For home, of course. For a cleaner car. But also for the many unexplored delights that go zooming past your window at 70 mph.

  Take, as an example, Billing Aquadrome, off the M1, junction 16. Haven’t been there, desperately want to go. I don’t even have a clue what goes on at Billing Aquadrome – it just sounds incredible. Water is involved in some way, but in an incredibly futuristic way. If it was just an aquadome, I’d know what to expect. It’s just slides and a wave-pool. It’s not though. It’s an aquadrome!

  This is like a dome, but in many more dimensions, like a hyper-cube, which, as we all know, is a four-dimensional cube. In my dreams, Billing Aquadrome is like an Escher painting. Water flows in all directions at once, and up, and down. And out. And into the past and future at the same time.

  I cannot fully explain how exciting Billing Aquadrome is in my imagination.

  I also want to go to Gulliver’s Land (M1, junction 14), the National Space Centre (M1, junction 21), the Heights of Abraham (M1, junction 28) and, most of all, Birdworld (M3, junction 4).

  These are the most compelling of the road signs I see over and over again from the passenger seat as I traverse the country. Each of them appears twice on big brown signs before the exit, which we go whizzing past. On the way out, we’re in too much of a hurry to stop. On the way home, these places must surely be closed. I always make the same promise to myself as we zoom by: ‘Some day, I’ll take the time to really see these places.’

  Please let these not be my final words: ‘I never went to Birdworld.’

  Northampton Derngate Theatre

  1 council worker

  1 MD of a company that makes medical supplies

  1 man who runs a bingo hall

  1 sweet old lady (retired)

  I can say without fear of correction that Northampton was the worst theatre in the country. Not this one, the Derngate is fine. But the one that was there before, the Deco, was the shittiest room in the land. It’s a design thing. Try to imagine the worst possible configuration of a theatre. Firstly, make the stalls as small as possible – even though the stalls are the most expensive, prime seats and, also, being the seats below the stage, the easiest ones to talk to and make laugh, and thus the heart of the room.

  Put all your effort into the balcony, which starts at eye-level to the act and stretches narrowly into the distance. Then put all the stage lights at the front of the balcony, again at eye-level, so that the comic is left blinded if he has the temerity to do anything as brash as look towards the crowd. This way, the comic is unable to see any audience members but aware that, even if he could see them, they wouldn’t be able to see each other.

  And this is the best bit. This is the bit that, even if you thought everything else was just whining, luvvie, get-a-real-job-or-stop-complaining stuff, you’ll get how this bit is just evil. This is just dastardly. At the back of the room, on the far wall, way past the unseeable stalls and the blinding lights and infinitely long balcony, way to the back and high on the wall so that it is the only thing you can see, do you know what they had? A clock. A fucking bright yellow, illuminated clock.

  They built a room so difficult to get laughs in that it already makes time grind to a halt. And then they put a clock in front of you, so that you know just how much longer you have to stay there.

  They’ve torn down the Deco, and I requested the chance to piss on its rubble.

  The Derngate was fine, although there was a strange moment when, during the crime stories, a nice old woman at the front made the point of clarifying that the burglars whom she had caught in her bedroom were Irish.

  ‘I don’t think that’s important,’ I said.

  ‘But they were Irish.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said I. ‘Am I in Middle England?’

  ‘Yes!’ said the crowd.

  Buxton Opera House

  1 casualty doctor

  1 manager of a market

  1 builder (injured; he fell off the second rung of a ladder. Now available for very low building jobs)

  1 man who organized danger holidays for schools

  The location of the mythical ‘Middle England’ is not something I’m going to get into here. Frankly, I think it’s an internal matter and you should sort it out amongst yourselves.

  If I had to make a literal recommendation, it would be Buxton in Derbyshire. This is both for its position and tenor; it’s slap bang in the middle of the country and terribly middle class. It also seems to have the largest catchment area of any gig in the country. People come from all over England to see the show in Buxton. The people I spoke to had come from Yorkshire, Cheshire and Nottinghamshire. I had appeared in closer venues to all of them, but none of them seemed to mind the trip.

  It helps that the Opera House is a beautiful, beautiful theatre. It’s easily one of the prettiest in the country. It’s also one of the best-run, with a busy and varied schedule of festivals and touring shows. Buxton hosts, amongst other events, an opera festival, a light-opera festival, a Gilbert and Sullivan festival, a puppet festival and the Buxton Festival, which features rare opera and spoken word.

  The programme is also notable for its policy not to book any clairvoyants.

  There is hardly a theatre in the country that doesn’t include a couple of psychics every term. For good reason too. Talking to the ‘other side’ shifts tickets. I remember once being terribly proud of myself the first time I sold out the Swansea Grand. Then the man on the stage door pointed out (unnecessarily, I feel) that, two days earlier, Scouse Ghost-bluffer Derek Acorah had been in, performing his second sell-out show of the week. I even have a name for how disappointing that news was. I call this ‘the Swansea Bring-Down’.

  Nowadays, as we tour around, we keep note of the upand-coming post-mortem bullshit merchants as we come across them. And they always sell out.

  This makes them a strange anomaly in the history of showbiz. They are the only field of the entertainment biz to remain successful despite never having delivered.

  Their continued success is despite the fact that they aren’t actually talking to the dead, because, not to be too obvious about this, talking to the dead is impossible. If talking to the dead was possible, then why would we never have received any useful information from the dead? Where are all the Wall Street clairvoyants, then? Why aren’t the CIA using them for military intelligence? Why aren’t all the historians beating a path to the doorway of Sally Morgan, telly psychic, to settle long-standing academic disputes?

  Because it’s all horse-shit. And I’ll happily see them in court. I call as my first witness, my dead grandfather. Your challenge, psychic, is to tell me which grandfather.

  I could be more gracious about this vile industry – after all, they are just for entertainment purposes and legally obliged to say so, except that they prey on the weak and the bereaved and the misguided and present them with new memories of their dead loved ones, memories that they just make up onstage.
<
br />   I would play Buxton ten times a year if they’d have me. Mainly for the beautiful room, but also because they don’t go for this hideous charade.

  They book psychics in the Belfast Waterfront, but, in the credit column, they don’t take them seriously. A well-known telly corpse-chatter was on the week I visited Belfast and, according to sources (the gossipy stage crew), she had a terrible show. The industry term is ‘to die onstage’ but that just seems like a clumsy pun here. How about ‘She stank up the room’? ‘She went down in flames’? ‘She bombed’?

  The lady in question walked the stage for an hour, getting nothing right. Apparently, the spell was broken quite quickly and, once the suspension of disbelief (this woman can talk to the dead! Oh wait…) was over, it just became an awkward stand-off. Seventeen hundred people watched a woman demonstrate no extra-sensory perception at all and, before long, they began to circle.

  ‘Stacey,’ one voice said (her name isn’t Stacey; if you ever meet me in a bar, ask me and I’ll tell you her name, but for the time being, let’s leave it at Stacey). ‘Stacey, what about my mother?’

  ‘When did she die?’ asked Stacey.

  ‘Oh, she’s not dead.’ Laughter from the crowd.

  ‘Stacey, what about my sister?’ shouted a different voice.

  ‘Is she dead?’ Stacey checked.

  ‘No.’ More laughter.

  ‘Is there anyone who would like me to do an actual reading?’ Stacey said, getting noticeably irritated.

  ‘Stacey,’ said a third voice. ‘What about my father?’

  ‘Is he dead?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Stacey adopts the pose. She summons voices from another realm, feels a presence coming through, begins to make contact with the dear departed…