of fartivity came upon me and, as I had been prone to do, I exercised my fine powers of coordination with focus and determination.
Reader, I am proud to inform you that fart and cough were fused quite exquisitely. Certainly there was not even the slightest turn of head or wrinkle of nose from any of the assembled personages.
I am less pleased to tell you that, because I had ejected perhaps too enthusiastically, a voluminous quantity of merde shot out of my anus and into my underpants. Indeed, I fear a pellet or two may even have made its way down the trouser leg and onto the floor.
A butt-clenched stagger to the door followed, as I excused myself, leaving a helpless Vince stranded on the shop floor with several eager customers, confusion and betrayal in his eyes. Where was I going? How could I forsake him? Had I forgotten he didn’t know how to properly operate the till yet?
With Tony occupying our shop’s only lavatory (he was later to return in fury at my absence), I somehow managed to totter to the travel agents next door: another Chelsea franchise, where you could book a trip to watch the team play abroad, though it was many more years before they would actually qualify for a European tournament.
I smiled weakly and asked for the key.
Catching it nimbly, I headed inside. There was nothing I could do but commence the industrial-sized clean-up job. Of course, had there been any toilet paper in there it might have been a little easier. Suffice to say I had a relatively decent reception at the Comedy Store that night, and if you looked closely enough you would have been able to see that I wasn’t wearing any socks.
D – Doing the Circuit
It had been a few months and I hadn’t heard anything from Bob Mortimer, so I thought I’d be proactive. Taking my trusty dictaphone into my bedroom, I shut the door, shouted downstairs to my mum not to come in, recorded my stand-up set on an audio tape, stuck it in an envelope and posted it off to him, with an accompanying letter explaining that I was enjoying gigging on the comedy circuit but that at the end of my year off I was going to go to university.
Not long afterwards, in a questionnaire in Smash Hits magazine, Bob named Sir Bernard as his favourite new act of the year. I was chuffed to bits and also delighted because I could use this as a quote on my publicity material.
Meanwhile I was ever-present on the circuit, going to clubs most nights, even when I wasn’t performing. I made as many contacts, took down as many phone numbers as I could, and learned the names of every promoter at every club.
Back home I’d ring them up. Some warmed to me and welcomed me, others sighed wearily at the sound of my voice. My act was polarising, extreme, strange – but I made sure to tell everyone that Bob Mortimer had seen it and taken my number. I had also done a gig with Harry Hill, who – alongside Mark Thomas – was at that time the king of the circuit. Harry very kindly gave me the numbers of a few key promoters and said I could use his name as a reference.
It was a truth universally acknowledged that the most terrifying club to play was Up the Creek in Greenwich. Veterans told stories about its predecessor – The Tunnel Club – which had been closed down after bottles and glasses had been hurled at the acts.
Up the Creek had a similarly fearsome reputation. Both clubs were run by Malcolm Hardee, a deadpan comic – one of the older acts on the circuit – who wore thick bottle-rim glasses that made him look a bit like Eric Morecambe.
Hardee had an unusual way of introducing acts – particularly new ones that he hadn’t seen before. ‘Might be good, might be shit.’
And lots of very good people were shit at his club, as it happened, because it was often such a nightmare to play. The audience at Up the Creek didn’t like observational comedians very much, even if they were headliners everywhere else. The weirder, quirkier acts had a better reception, but even then the crowd might bray and boo and hound the turns without mercy.
I had heard the horror stories and resolved to avoid the place, but one Friday evening I found myself on the bill elsewhere with Malcolm. He took a shine to my onstage antics and invited me to play his club that Sunday.
I turned up and realised this was no ordinary club. It was far grander in scale. The acts waited stoically like condemned men in a room upstairs where the wall was covered in a huge mural depicting the Last Supper, but with various comics taking the place of the Apostles and Malcolm himself in the middle as Jesus.
I received Malcolm’s trademark non-committal introduction and went onto the stage. The audience could immediately sense my fear and it wasn’t long before I was heckled. I gave as good as I got and won the audience over. From that moment on they laughed at everything and I finished my set on such a triumphant note that Malcolm slipped me a £20 note, even though I was an open spot. He also said he wanted to book me for two full sets.
‘I haven’t got twenty minutes yet,’ I told him.
‘Just do fifteen, then.’
The first set took place the day after my nineteenth birthday. I gathered a few friends and we headed across London on the train (from north-west to south-east) for the show. I had none of the luck of my previous visit, and lasted seven terrifying minutes before I was drowned out by the boos.
We were all shell-shocked, but my friends tried to cheer me up on the long journey home. ‘You just made eighty quid in seven minutes. That’s probably more than Paul McCartney,’ said Jeremy. A couple of days later I rang up Malcolm and, before I could say anything, he said, ‘I know why you’re calling. You want to cancel the other gig. Well, you can’t.’
I did the other gig and this time I didn’t even manage five minutes before I was relieved of my duties. One crazed audience member was so incensed by my attempts to entertain that he grabbed me by the collar as I came offstage, screaming, ‘You come back here again and I’ll fucking finish you!’ into my ear.
I played Up the Creek a few more times after that, but always had an absolute stinker, even though I was headlining regularly elsewhere. Malcolm wanted to carry on booking me regardless, but it was too disheartening. Despite the decent money, getting booed off isn’t good for your confidence or your reputation. Everyone knew that Up the Creek was a law unto itself and that even the best of them could get destroyed there, but even so, every time you got booed off anywhere, other comics would witness it and talk about it amongst themselves.
Somehow I got away with it, though. I guess I was a bit of an anomaly on the circuit. There weren’t many people who would ‘die’ as often as I did and yet still get booked, but promoters seemed to like what I was doing, and would accept that I was a risk worth taking.
If it went well, it tended to go really well. If it didn’t, it was a disaster. There was no in between. People truly loved it or hated me. The act had developed – out went the dodgy impressions and in came some actual gags. It was no longer an echo of anything anyone else was doing. As I became more experienced, I grew bolder and braver onstage, interacting with the audience and improvising more.
I still had some disastrous shows, though. At St George’s Medical School in Tooting the students had destroyed everyone on the bill before I came on. I went onstage already angry on behalf of my colleagues and it wasn’t long before I too was the recipient of abuse. In my case someone threw a bottle and – in a rare and uncharacteristic moment of skill – I returned it on the volley, punting it over the heads of the front few rows.
