The lorry driver didn’t want to be typecast as just another lorry driver:
‘I have a weekend job too!’
‘What is it?’
‘I play Robin Hood in the Robin Hood Experience in Nottingham.’
Now, I mentioned the Robin Hood Experience in passing when talking about Nottingham. I alluded to the 1970s animatronics, but may have neglected to mention the very real members of staff wandering around in doublet and sackcloth and administering the safe-play archery range at the end of the tour. If you’re accurate, they present you with a certificate! I know this because I have one of those certificates.
As we were having this chat, a thunderbolt suddenly struck me. I looked at the lorry driver, and then down the row, then back at the lorry driver again, and saw a beautiful synchronicity:
‘Oh my God, has anyone noticed…? In the front row we have Robin Hood,’ I said, and pointing to the performance analyst two seats away from him, ‘and the Sheriff of Nottingham at the same gig!’
We got most of the first half out of this.
When I came out for the second half, I decided it was time to change the subject. So I started telling a story. I was only a couple of sentences in when I was interrupted by the policeman raising his hand.
‘What’s up?’
He pointed to a man sitting directly between him and the lorry driver/Robin Hood; a man I hadn’t spoken to at all.
‘Ask him his name,’ he said, with a grin.
I peered down at this stranger.
‘What’s your name?’
‘You’re not going to believe this,’ he said. ‘It’s Matthew Merriman.’
I promise this is true.
York Grand Opera House
1 accountant from Lincoln
1 man who teaches staff at a mobile-phone company
1 man who repairs technology
Nothing that happened the following night could quite compare with that, although the Opera House is a proper, plush Victorian theatre. It sits well in the city.
York is pretty, medieval and strangely obsessed with trains. It has both the National Railway Museum and the Model Railway Museum. I got a whole routine out of the Model Railway Museum many years ago when the man behind the counter refused to let me leave my bag in reception, saying, ‘Not with what your boys have been up to.’
I didn’t get a routine out of the National Railway Museum, although I did get a free ride on the Yorkshire Wheel, sited at the museum. I felt quite the celeb until I realized, on the slow ascent, that I was the only person on the entire Ferris wheel, because the heavy rain had decimated the view. I think I saw a cathedral at one point.
I was wrong. It was a minster, which is like a cathedral, only more camp. And also more expensive to get into – although you can walk into the ticket-selling area, get to the turnstile and announce, ‘I’m just looking, thanks,’ as if you’re shopping around for a cathedral to visit.
York also has a famous street which is called The Shambles. And they sell a lot of fudge here.
The English obsession with fudge is a puzzle to me. Fudge is fine, don’t get me wrong; but so many towns around here seem desperately proud of their local variety. There are the seaside towns, obviously, along with most of Devon and Cornwall. Bath is all about the fudge. And to that august and immortal list of Places That Melt Milk, Sugar and Butter Together (Vanilla/Chocolate optional), we can now add the Viking town of York. You can’t get away from fudge here. You’d think the streets were built from it, especially given the subsidence in The Shambles. Come to think of it, Fudge and the Shambles would be a great name for a band.
And, despite all this local pride, all the fudge tastes like, well, fudge. Everywhere it’s sold as ‘Bla-di-bla’s Famous Fudge’, and it’s not even English, it was invented in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1886.
York has invented enough confectionery, though. Rowntree and Mackintosh were based here, as was Terry’s. York City FC play at KitKat Crescent, and the Yorkie bar was named in the city’s honour.
You’d think, with all this, as well as Mars in Slough and Cadbury’s in the Midlands, that England would be the biggest sweet-eating country in the world. Certainly, as an Irish child, taking a trip over the Irish sea was like winning Wonka’s golden ticket. You had sweets here we never dreamed of. Crazy, unnatural sweets that were being stopped at Irish Customs as an affront to God or something. Mint Aeros and giant, giant bars of Dairy Milk and, strangest of all, Caramac. Washed down with Vimto and Tizer and other foreign drinks, we burped our appreciation of the English love of confectionery. We were wrong, though. The Swiss are the real pigs, getting through more than 22lb of chocolate per person each year. Then come the Austrians, then, feasting on the work of other nations, the Irish. As usual, you only made the quarter-finals. You come in seventh.
Grassington Festival Marquee
1 solicitor
1 park ranger
1 landlord
750 people in a tent
After York, we made a quick stop off at the Grassington Arts Festival, one of the many local arts festivals that dot the English countryside throughout the warmer months. The product of an enthusiastic committee and, usually, one crazy visionary, these festivals aren’t built to compete with Glastonbury or Hay but to bring some entertainment to the locals and add some heft to their tourism push. There isn’t any particular theme to them other than deciding who they’re in the mood to invite, which leads to an informal and eccentric mix.
Grassington is a tiny village in the Yorkshire Dales, described on its own website as ‘one of the best loved of the honeypot villages’ in the area, the honeypot comparison apparently based on their allure to tourists. Y’know, like the phrase ‘like flies to shit!’ but more Up! Their festival has been running for almost thirty years now, is spread over more than a fortnight and allows me to claim that I shared a bill with Aled Jones, Barry Cryer and General Sir Mike Jackson. I’m not sure if I shared a dressing room with them, but if I did I’m sure that they were just as impressed as I was by the small tent, next to the marquee, with the gas fire. This was no place to be a prima donna. I hung up my two shirts (fifty-eight shows and counting now) and went to work.
The Dales themselves are famously beautiful, although I have only their reputation to go on, since, the night we were there, the entire area was enclosed in cloud. The Yorkshire Dales might be the world’s largest wind-farm and oil refinery for all that I could make out in the drizzle. I spent a large part of the gig pointing in random directions and imagining out loud what hideous industrial eyesore was hidden by the fog. I find that the best way to address people who are deeply proud of their beautiful landscape. ‘That’s the docklands over to the left. And over there is the smelting plant…’
Ironically, since the gig was in a big white tent, the one thing I could see was the audience. In a theatre, the stage lights have to be tweaked and lowered even to let me see the first couple of rows; seeing the entire room, eyeball to eyeball, is like running naked into a school assembly. I spent the first twenty minutes talking to my shoes, rather than face the people.
Luckily, the audience didn’t care about either the strange lighting, or the nonstop pitter-patter of rain on the tent roof. They were far more interested in the solicitor whose big court case was getting a dog off the crime of worrying sheep.
The informality of the festival is such that I ended up after the show in a local pub with the festival committee and, coincidentally, the local rugby club. I pressed the committee for gossip, and they revealed to me that one of the other headliners, a famous and famously anodyne television presenter, had arrived in the village with his own security detail to fend off stalkers. ‘Look at him and his bodyguard, who does he think he is?’ was the general reaction, until just before the show started when one of the festival staff found a mysterious man trying to break in at the fence. ‘I’m a close personal friend of —’ he insisted, until the police were called.
They did tell me who the
celeb was, by the way, although I can’t be 100 per cent sure because the rugby team had started making me drink yards of ale. It’s a very informal festival is Grassington.
Carlisle Sands Centre
1 manager of a fireworks company
1 air-traffic-controller controller:
‘What do you do? Stop them bumping into each other round the office?’
1 student
Very hung over from drinking those yards of ale. Clouds lifted and I saw the Dales look beautiful at last. We crossed the Pennines, bought a football and kicked it around in the summer sunshine outside the venue until I got dragged in to perform in a room that doubles as a basketball arena.
We learned that, when designing a fireworks show, some of them make you go ooh! And different ones make you go ahh!
Getting demob happy now. Only one to go.
Perth Concert Hall
1 man who runs 2,000 vans for Tesco
1 cancer researcher
1 jewellery designer
1 tool line supervisor
This is the last gig of the UK tour until October. We’ve reached the end of May, done sixty shows and, to finish, driven to the most northerly point of the entire schlep. The landscape opened out more and more around us after we left Carlisle, until we sit now at the edge of the Highlands. The weather is spectacular, we’ve arrived too early, we’ve got time to kill, so me and Damon go for a pint.
In the middle of Perth, there is a row of pubs and restaurants with terraces and outdoor seating, filled with tables. We plonk ourselves down at one, I get some drinks and we settle down to enjoy the last of the afternoon sun.
Then a waiter runs out after me and takes our drinks off the table.
‘You can’t drink them here,’ he says.
‘What’s the problem?’ we protest.
‘It’s the law. You’re not allowed drink on the street. Not without food. You’ll have to sit indoors I’m afraid.’
‘But we’re in your beer garden!’
‘No, it’s still technically the street.’
‘Can we order food then?’
‘The kitchen is closed.’
‘But why do you have this beer garden?’
‘It’s the council. You can sit out here, they’ll let us have the terrace, but you can’t drink, because they don’t want any public drinking.’
So we swapped our beers for soft drinks, and sat there at the pub terrace, amidst a row of pub terraces all filled with people who weren’t allowed to drink. Every few minutes, new people would arrive, buy drinks and then the waiter would run out, take the drinks off them and explain the bye-laws. And each time, the punters would wriggle for a loophole.
‘What if I stood and my wife sat and then we…’
And each time, the waiter would patiently shake his head and just go, ‘The council…’
If Perth Council built a giant Ferris wheel, people would admire it, queue up along the river Tay, and as they approached to board, a council member would cry, ‘Halt!’
‘What’s wrong?’ the people would say.
‘You can look at it,’ the alderman would explain, ‘but it’s not for travelling on.’
It wasn’t the only lost opportunity in Perth that day. Truth be told, I wasn’t very good that night. Perth has a gleaming new concert hall, modern and geodesic amidst the smart grey stone from which all Scottish cities are built. Modern halls are a wonder of multifunctionality, but you pine for the intimacy of the Victorians. This is not an insurmountable handicap, though, or a justifiable excuse. That night, I just never got any momentum going. I never owned the room, never felt I really had them. After the show, the festival committee came backstage to say hello, and I mumbled something and desperately hoped that I was just spoiled by the truly great nights in Derby and York, that I was being a neurotic performer and that it was better than I imagined. I don’t think it was, though. And it was a disappointing way to wrap up.
When we got back to our hotel, we immediately asked for the bar and hit our second wall of bureaucracy of the day.
‘The bar is closed, I’m afraid.’
‘Can we not get a drink at all?’
‘Of course. You can sit in the bar and the night porter can serve you minibar drinks.’
And that’s what we did: we sat in the bar, staring at two hundred bottles of top-quality scotch we weren’t allowed to touch, while the Eastern European night staff brought us miniature bottles of Bell’s and single-serving bottles of wine.
It was time for a break.
The following morning Damon and I parted company for a few months. It was bitter-sweet, with Damon supplying most of the bitter, seeing as he was leaving me off at Edinburgh airport so I could fly home while he then drove the car all the way back down to London on his own.
‘Aren’t you going to wish me a happy flight?’ I said to him as we parted.
‘Fuck you.’
A couple of weeks later, I tuned into The F-word. It was all as I remembered, apart from the bit where Gordon, in voiceover, went, ‘Hopefully this dish will help Dara eat more healthily on tour.’
Well, thanks, Gordo, that’s all my problems solved. Now all I have to do is talk Damon into travelling everywhere six hours early in order to arrive in time for the local market and making sure we only play theatres that have industrial kitchens on site.
And chervil? You can’t get chervil anywhere, for love nor money. Trust me, I’ve tried. I’ve spent the last year trying to find it. Greengrocers. Fancy supermarkets, chervil.com. It simply doesn’t exist. I think Ramsay just made it up.
Television, eh? It’s all lies, y’know.
Chapter 14:
I Remember That Summer in Dublin
We take a couple of months off the tour here, because people don’t really go to comedy shows during the warm summer months. Except in Dublin. What Ireland may lack in the number of theatres, the audiences make up for in enthusiastic attendances. Ireland boasts one of the largest comedy festivals in the world, a DVD chart filled with home-grown acts and, most importantly, night after night of full houses. A good-sized comedy tour in England will maybe do fifty shows. A big Irish act, Tommy Tiernan, say, or Des Bishop, will do that many nights in Dublin alone.
All through the summer, I kept returning to the city, weekend after weekend, to one of the greatest rooms in stand-up, Vicar Street Theatre. It didn’t start as a comedy room. It was originally built as a music venue for legendary Irish singer-songwriter Christy Moore, but over time the focus changed as more and more Irish comedy acts began to develop their own enthusiastic following.
If a band gets big, they move to bigger and bigger venues, all the way up to stadia. Comedy loses something the bigger the room gets, so if a comedian gets big he just plays the same rooms more often. Some comics have started to try ‘arena’ shows, and good luck to them, but it wouldn’t work for me. In a giant room, I’d have to lose the very closeness that allows me to keep the show spontaneous. I’d also be trading in a number of nights in the perfectly sized room for one of hassle and compromise in a vast one. I love actually doing my job; I love performing the show. I’m not searching for the most efficient way to deliver these jokes to the greatest number of people as quickly as possible.
So every weekend I head over to Ireland to enjoy myself. And, in the process, see how it all compares to England.
Dublin Vicar Street
1 woman who gave me a belt
1 woman who gave me a camera and told me to take a photo of her friends
1 man who gave me a set of lurid protective gloves for handling asphalt
1 man who makes artificial limbs
1 woman who gave me some crisps
Well, for a start, it’s even more interactive. This might be because the room is much more informal, perhaps because it’s a music venue, not a Victorian theatre. The show starts later than normal, there’s a proper bar, people sit on stools downstairs with a table covered in drink in front of them. This informality sui
ts me; if I walk onstage lamenting the fact that I came out without a belt, I am immediately supplied with one. A lady’s belt, unfortunately, with a diamante edging, but all it had to do was keep my trousers up for a couple of hours, and it did the job fine. When I returned the belt at the end, the nice lady had the decency to accept her own belt back as if it was a lovely souvenir of the night.
Having a photo taken is a more usual souvenir, but it’s always better if you can get an unusual angle on it, such as from the stage, in the middle of a show. I took one of this group smiling, and one of them looking bored and miserable while tearing up their tickets in disgust. I know which one ended up on Facebook.
The lurid gloves were from a safety-equipment salesman:
‘Do you have any of your stuff on you?’ I asked.
‘What do you mean, on me?’
‘I mean, in the back of the car, in the car park, nearby. If you can find any of your stuff during the interval, I’ll do the show wearing whatever you’ve got and that’ll be free publicity for you. Anything. If you have a full-length body suit to protect against radiation sickness, I’ll wear it.’
He looked at his wife dubiously, and she shrugged. I let it go.
When I came out for the second half, there was a pair of Day-glo heat-resistant gauntlets on the stage.
You can imagine how long I spent pleading with the artificial limb-maker.
Tickling the English Page 17