paintings and the wonder of science onstage, swore loudly and pathologically in tea rooms, and appeared to make most of her own clothes. Josie was one of the actsI’d been impressed by when I started back on the circuit. She hadn’t toured before, and being away with someone who was interested in what Aldershot town centre would be like, for example, leavened the deadening effect of the driving. And there was an element of the miner’s canary about her role in the proceedings. On the rare occasions when the crowd didn’t go for Josie’s open-hearted surreal spiel, I knew that despite Charlie’s and my best efforts to book a tour that connected only with the hot freaks of alterno-Britain, we were in a venue full of sports fans and squares, and I was going to have to work hard.
It was a cold, harsh winter, and I was still shaky and weak. I sat at the wheel, gurgling back the prescribed bottles of water, necking painkillers, looking for baked potato stands in windswept city centres and stopping every thirty minutes to empty my distended bladder into any available space. In Glasgow, after I’d jumped out of the car in a traffic jam to piss up some wheelie bins by a multi-storey, a now soggy junkie crawled out from behind them, in the midst of injecting heroin into his forearm, and said, ‘For fuck’s sake, man!’, but with an air of resigned and philosophical acceptance, as if we were both in this together.
The tour had a frosty, somnambulant quality. Before a lovely gig above a pub in the little Derbyshire town of Wirksworth, we walked to the Nine Ladies stone circle on a snowy Stanton Moor, through the tree houses and smouldering fires of frozen eco-protesters who were trying to prevent an American-owned quarry edging any closer to the stone circle. The locals left them food in boxes at the bottom of the hill. The Actor Kevin Eldon joined us for a non-cost-effective trek to the Isle of Skye, where we drew thirty people, still more than I’d played to in Dundee five years earlier. And in Lincoln, there was a heavy snowfallduring the gig. I went back to my room, a monastic cell you could rent cheaply from the bishop in the actual cathedral cloisters, and Josie stayed and played snowballs in the grounds of the university with the audience. She was having enough fun for both of us, which was good, as I was perpetually shattered. *
* In February, while Josie and I were making a tourist stop at Worcester Cathedral, I received a text from Daniel Kitson saying that Malcolm Hardee, one of the progenitors of Alternative Comedy as we know it, had drowned. I was disproportionately upset, as I didn’t know him well, but he had been one of the first people to book me, and represented the anarchic spirit that was slowly disappearing from the circuit. Malcolm’s funeral, a euphoric variety show and rolling eulogy jointly presided over by Arthur Smith and a tolerant priest at St Alfege Church, Greenwich, was one of the greatest pieces of theatre I have ever seen, but I wonder if the sense of hysteria at the subsequent wake reflected, in some way, the fact that Malcolm’s death symbolised the end of an era. Malcolm’s signature act – the naked balloon dance he performed as The Greatest Show on Legs – was recently appropriated move for move by some scumbags on a Simon Cowell TV talent show.
The gigs, though, were great, and worked much better than they would have done in the partially filled municipal hangars I’d become used to. At the end of the tour, after I deducted all my costs, I think Josie’s support fees of £100 a night added up to only a little less than I’d made myself. But I had made something. For the first time in fifteen years this was a wedge of live work that had been absolutely and incontrovertibly worth doing. ‘Come back next time,’ said the promoters of these real places with their hand-reared audiences who actually liked comedy. There was a whole world out there of enthusiastic comedy
It was a cold, harsh winter, and I was still shaky and weak. I sat at the wheel, gurgling back the prescribed bottles of water, necking painkillers, looking for baked potato stands in windswept city centres and stopping every thirty minutes to empty my distended bladder into any available space. In Glasgow, after I’d jumped out of the car in a traffic jam to piss up some wheelie bins by a multi-storey, a now soggy junkie crawled out from behind them, in the midst of injecting heroin into his forearm, and said, ‘For fuck’s sake, man!’, but with an air of resigned and philosophical acceptance, as if we were both in this together.
The tour had a frosty, somnambulant quality. Before a lovely gig above a pub in the little Derbyshire town of Wirksworth, we walked to the Nine Ladies stone circle on a snowy Stanton Moor, through the tree houses and smouldering fires of frozen eco-protesters who were trying to prevent an American-owned quarry edging any closer to the stone circle. The locals left them food in boxes at the bottom of the hill. The Actor Kevin Eldon joined us for a non-cost-effective trek to the Isle of Skye, where we drew thirty people, still more than I’d played to in Dundee five years earlier. And in Lincoln, there was a heavy snowfallduring the gig. I went back to my room, a monastic cell you could rent cheaply from the bishop in the actual cathedral cloisters, and Josie stayed and played snowballs in the grounds of the university with the audience. She was having enough fun for both of us, which was good, as I was perpetually shattered. *
* In February, while Josie and I were making a tourist stop at Worcester Cathedral, I received a text from Daniel Kitson saying that Malcolm Hardee, one of the progenitors of Alternative Comedy as we know it, had drowned. I was disproportionately upset, as I didn’t know him well, but he had been one of the first people to book me, and represented the anarchic spirit that was slowly disappearing from the circuit. Malcolm’s funeral, a euphoric variety show and rolling eulogy jointly presided over by Arthur Smith and a tolerant priest at St Alfege Church, Greenwich, was one of the greatest pieces of theatre I have ever seen, but I wonder if the sense of hysteria at the subsequent wake reflected, in some way, the fact that Malcolm’s death symbolised the end of an era. Malcolm’s signature act – the naked balloon dance he performed as The Greatest Show on Legs – was recently appropriated move for move by some scumbags on a Simon Cowell TV talent show.
The gigs, though, were great, and worked much better than they would have done in the partially filled municipal hangars I’d become used to. At the end of the tour, after I deducted all my costs, I think Josie’s support fees of £100 a night added up to only a little less than I’d made myself. But I had made something. For the first time in fifteen years this was a wedge of live work that had been absolutely and incontrovertibly worth doing. ‘Come back next time,’ said the promoters of these real places with their hand-reared audiences who actually liked comedy. There was a whole world out there of enthusiastic comedy
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