It was a good enough gig in Nottingham, though nobody offered to fellate me whilst their husband watched so I have to consider the night a failure. I wonder what I did wrong. I tried my hardest.
The show was a little beset with technical problems. The slides were jumping a bit early on which rather ruined the big reveal joke when the wrong slide came up. Spoiler alert - the joke is about Bill Wilson the man with biggest cock in the world. I say that I've been banned from showing a photo, but then say I'll show it anyway and (this is the funny joke), it's a picture of a man standing next to an oversized cock, but the bird type! Then I say he coincidentally has an enormous penis and then show a fairly graphic picture of an impressive erection. But tonight the bird pic got skipped and we went straight to the massive penis. Which might be seen as a post-modern subversion of expectations, but it really removes any (admittedly deliberately slightly rubbish) humour. The show has become sentient and is starting to edit out the bits it doesn't like.
I managed to joke around it and amazingly didn't lose my cool even when when it happened again on the next press of my remote control I decided that I'd better restart the slide show (I always have another version ready to go in case of problems). But then the clicker stopped communicating with the computer and I couldn't move the slides on at all. I waited for them to pair for what seemed like a long time. The Nottingham Playhouse had a set for a play in with a curved wooden floor, arcing up at the edges. I said I wished I'd bought my BMX bike and the mimed doing stunts. Surely that would give me enough time. But no. Just as I was about to give up it all started working again.
Audiences usually enjoy these kind of fucks ups and starting the slide-show again meant I was able to recap the show thus far and do the cock/cock joke again properly (even if the surprise was lost) whilst deconstructing the lie about the city council having censored my show.
The theatre was just over half full, but that still meant there were almost four hundred people in, which means that 1300 people have seen this show in the last four days. Of course it's not the superstar level of the TV comedians, but it's impressive for me. If I could be consistent with that kind of ticket sales then the tour would be very successful. It would be lovely to get 325 people at every gig I did and it would also mean I would make a very healthy living (which makes you realise just how much money acts that regularly sell a thousand tickets a night are making - not to mention the ones who sell 10,000 at three times the ticket price I am charging). But I fear that that might be more people than come to the remaining 12 gigs on the tour. Next week is looking particularly quiet so if you can recommend the show to anyone in Great Torrington, Hereford, Swindon, Tewkesbury and (to a lesser extent) Exeter then please do! But thanks to the people of Bristol and Nottingham who have funded the next week of gigs, paying for me to bring my comedy to towns that are more reluctant to embrace/pay for it. It's going to be a slightly anti-climactic end for my Cock (unless the gig in Regent's Park sells loads of tickets, which I fear is unlikely in the time available), but overall I am very happy with the way things have gone. As always my memories of touring to audiences of 30 puts what I am getting now into sharp focus. I am lucky to get to do these lovely big theatres occasionally, just as I am accidentally lucky to still be playing the fun, tiny venues which would be lost to me if I was more successful.
The impending end of the tour does remind me that I have a new show to write and I am quietly terrified about that, as I really have nothing for it at the moment. And as always performing a show that is honed and crisp and which I know back to front makes it feel impossible that I could write anything as good. There's no guarantee that I will do it, but at least my years of experience tell me that I have usually managed before and I am looking forward to getting my teeth into something new.
And I'd like to thank the naughty, drunken couple in Bristol last night for providing me with a subject for next week's Metro column.
