I was due for one

Published by Rick on Tagged Uncategorized

What was originally booked as my only gig for this entire week turned out to be one of three, and I can only thank god the other two gigs came up. Had this remained my only gig, I’d be laughing a lot less at this evening than I am now. It was booked by a comedian I had worked with a month ago, and the way it was presented to him, (thus the way he presented it to the three performers on the bill) was a periodic get-together for the locals, and that there’d be raffles and presentations after a banquet, then have comedians to round the night out. The first part was true; it was locals, but beyond that, it was just a drunken evening of piss-takes, as the community of Barwell (Leicestershire), population Steve, all came out to seemingly celebrate nothing much more than “Wow, It’s Saturday!”

Let’s start with the promised food. Oh yeah, there WAS food, but cheese and crackers do not a banquet make! The unlucky Mr. Matt Price, the evening’s compere, was saddled with that unenviable task of trying to garner enough focus to present a comedy show while there was nothing lighting the stage to indicate that the person standing before the microphone was in fact a professional, not some local loudmouth dickhead. Poor Matt had to follow just such a person, who ended his 20-minute in joke with a song about various people in the room. That guy was actually one of the more courteous of the audience members, at least looking toward the stage every now and then and laughing and applauding at the moments he was supposed to. Matt didn’t have as booming a voice as the man he followed, so it was a struggle, but finally he got enough focus after five minutes or so to bring up the first act, Cole Parker.

Parker has been a fixture on the UK comedy scene for better than a decade, yet all he could apply from his extensive on-stage training was to determine which knob joke would work best where. It was clear that anything resembling cerebral was not the order of the day.  I was reminded of the most laughably horrible UK gig I’d done about 6 years ago with three very gifted (and now very successful) comics, Jim Jeffries, Glenn Wool, and Jason John Whitehead. We all died that night, as it was a totally stupid setting for a comedy show, but Wool went up first, and as his brilliant observations were interrupted only by the tumbleweeds blowing by, he reached for the ultimate lifeline, “Well, now I think it’s time to talk about my great big cock!” That was the biggest laugh anyone got that night, but it was only from me, Jim and Jason. At this Barwell gig, Parker had to dig into the same well, which was all this crowd wanted anyway. He lasted fairly close to 15 minutes, pretty good allowing for the fact that an endearing stand-up routine often allows for a story to develop before zinging with the punch line. There was no time for set-up here; if 15 seconds elapsed without a fuck or a dick, the attention was gone.

None of this was helped by a very drunken show manager, whom we had to kowtow to since he was the one paying us. I’ve been working in UK for almost this whole decade, lived in Essex for over five years, and haven’t heard quite so many dropped consonants as this man and his mates could rattle off. Maybe the heavy amount of booze makes you lazier, I don’t know, but the only word that translated after a while was “foock,” which was used as every part of speech except pronoun.

There was a break after Parker was done, then an interval which allowed me to set up my gear and sound check my guitar. More importantly for the audience, it was a chance to get more booze, not that comics performing on stage was any real deterrent to that anyway. Poor Matt had to return to more accelerated chaos, trying desperately for just enough crowd control to bring me up. This was a goal sadly unreachable, and he finally had to shout at them to please shut the fuck up. (He did say please!) So I’m finally brought up, and I thought I’d covered enough bases during the interval to ensure that from my end things would run smoothly. I still hadn’t counted on one guy who was blocking my way to the stage to return to his seat near the front, and once I was on, he proceeded to talk loudly through almost my entire set, even after his own table mates told him to shut up.

I accepted my fate with the “Oh well, it’s only 20 minutes out of my life” attitude, except that most of it was 20 minutes of death. I abandoned my thoughts of doing my set material after the first two gags were met with indifference. From there it was every possible dirty song parody I knew, followed by opening it up immediately for requests. I started singing every shit UK hit I knew just to stir things up, and the response to that was some big guy waddling toward the stage, and the only thing that kept me from running was a smile on his face. From that I could surmise that I wasn’t in danger, but there was nothing here resembling a bouncer, so if he’d swung and connected, too bad for me. He merely wanted to come up and sing/talk a verse to Benny Hill’s “Ernie(The Fastest Milkman In The West),” which got more response than pretty much everything I’d done up to that point.

I ended my set to courtesy applause, packed up, got paid by Drunken Man, and got the hell out. Two things loom as frustrating after this whole ordeal. I can handle two-hour drives to gigs, no problem. Since I couldn’t avail myself of enough cheese and crackers to call that a meal, I had to plan on stopping somewhere along the way back. Obviously there was nothing in Barwell, so I had to depend on roadside services. At the first two I came to on the M1, both of them had shut the hot food services, and i said screw that and moved on. When I stopped for petrol (or gas, as we call it across the pond), my only food choices were from the menu of epicurean delights offered by Ginster and Co., meaning a sandwich labelled as “fresh” is a total misnomer, though it may have been fresh when it was delivered to the shop at 6:00 that morning, but by 10:00 PM, it’s now allowed moisture to seep through, so you can’t really tell tuna from bread anymore. So now I’m driving back to London, still about 90 minutes away from home, but that’s only if the weather is clear. The weather became problem number two, for I had to deal with rain that fluctuated between misting and pissing down. Thank god BBC Radio2 was doing an interesting documentary on songs the Beatles gave away.

So the evening was a downer after the two unexpected gigs had turned out to be really fun. The ultimate thing that makes me want to kick myself multiple times is that at noon today, my agent called with a gig offer. I had told him this was an early gig, so I could do a late spot somewhere if something came up. The gig he had was one of my favourite clubs in all of UK, The Bearcat Club in Twickenham, SW London. The spot they offered was too early, but it paid equal to what I was making in Barwell. I could have told Barwell to go fuck itself, but I have this conscience that says to honor your commitments. Well, since I booked this gig myself, maybe I got what I deserved. My agent’s not a perfect human being (Wow! I just used agent and human in the same phrase!), and I paid for my mistake of not trusting that he was looking out for my best interests. At least it gave me something to vent about…

November 16th, 2009

About Rick Right

• Stand up comedian
• Musician
• Vinyl DJ
• Voice over artist
• Musicologist
• Writer