HOW DID I DO IT?

Published by Rick on Tagged Uncategorized

I have saved my diaries from 2004 up until the present day, and I sort of wish I had been saving them from further back. I would love to see how I notated a specific day in the 1990s where I did seven gigs in one day. It was 20 years ago this month, February 2004, that I had one of the all-time busiest months in my entire career. Who knows how much busier it would have been had I not been in America until the 5th of the month, but from the 12th to March 1st, I had a total of one day off, plus one day that was spent totally in transit.

This was a time in UK that paralleled the comedy boom that happened in the late 1980s to early 90s in America. The chain of UK clubs called Jongleurs was at its peak, with three rooms in London, plus at least 14 scattered through the rest of UK, as well as some one-nighters in theatres in various resort towns. They paid for hotels on most of the road venues, but since most of the comics lived in Greater London, they would pay an extra travel expense for venues that were within 50 miles of London. With a minimum pay of £200 for a 20-minute set, which at that time was equivalent to about 300 US dollars, it didn’t take me long to pay off the $20000 debt I had accumulated before I started working in UK.

Sadly, as busy as I was, the gigs were in such rapid succession that they all become a blur. I don’t think I had any bad gigs in that February run, because those tend to stay in memory. (There was a gig in May of 2004 in Birmingham that ranks as one of my all-time worst, and sometime in May, I’ll give the gory details of that one.) The most taxing day for me was the one I was devoting to travel. My route was from Newcastle-Upon-Tyne to Dagenham, Essex, where I lived at the time, a road distance of just under 300 miles. What was really difficult about it was driving on the motorways when there was snow on the ground. The windows kept fogging up inside and icing up outside, as the temperature was near freezing. The only way I could see where I was going, as the window washer had frozen up, was to stick my head out the window. It was that way for nearly fifty miles. Somehow I managed to not get pneumonia.

My February Odyssey started on the 12th in Spalding (Lincolnshire), then on to Manchester, Harlow (Essex), Nottingham, Bournemouth, Leeds, Hull (E. Yorkshire), and Newcastle before that travel day, then three nights in Birmingham. That’s a lot of running around for a 53-year-old to be doing over the space of less than three weeks! I can’t imagine doing a tenth of that workload now. I was all set for a nice night of relaxation on Sunday the 29th, but dream on! My agent called that afternoon and said there was a gig in Guildford, about an hour’s drive from Dagenham. I was not too enthusiastic about it, tried to convince him to find someone else, but I knew he would call and say he couldn’t find anyone, which he did about an hour later. At this particular time I was living with a woman who would become my fiancé, along with her 9-year-old son. The two of them were set for a peaceful evening with me finally home for a day, though the next day I would be working at Brighton University, a gig I do remember as a lot of fun. When the phone rang, my soon-to-be stepson started to cry, as he knew what was coming. I said to my agent, “This better be a fun gig, because you’ve made a young boy cry!”

It actually was a pleasant gig, one I had done before, in a library, of all places. It was an early gig, so although I missed a lovely dinner, my future (ex) wife was preparing, I got home before 11:00. She waited up for me because she had decided that because it was February 29th, Leap Year, she proposed marriage and wanted it to happen before the year was out. I said yes because I was pretty sure I wanted to move to England anyway. This was what I thought would be the final piece of the puzzle. We got married in November that year, but, as I’ve written about many times over the years, it didn’t last.

As it turned out, marriage didn’t have as much of an effect on people of my status as much as working for eight years on work permits did. Still, I got permission for indefinite stay in October of 2008, not knowing that the marriage was only four months from disintegrating, but at the same time knowing its days were clearly numbered.

March of 2004 would not be quite as hectic as February, with me only working 18 of the 31 days in that month, and the bulk of those gigs being three night runs at the Jongleurs rooms in Cardiff, Bristol, Reading, and Southampton. 2004 turned out to be one of my all time best years financially, and I would have a nice run until 2009, just when the marriage was ending. Despite the drying up of work and the marriage going bust, obviously things worked out, because I’m still here 15 years after!

February 23rd, 2024



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