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I managed to sleep in past 9am for the first time in ages. I used to love a lie-in, but now I nearly always wake up by 7, regardless of when I go to bed, so it was cool to catch up on a couple of hours of sleep. Lots of people on Twitter told me to make the most of it as I wouldn’t be able to do that when I have a baby. But they are wrong. I absolutely be able to sleep in until 9 when I am on tour. My baby is going to have to scream very loud if I am going to hear it in Crewe. Over the next couple of years I am sure that I will spend most of my time on tour asleep. I may do my first 730 date tour.
When I am at home, given my recent sleep patterns it might be me waking the baby up at 6.30 every morning so that we can play. I can not envisage that having a child will be at all difficult. It’s easy peasy. I will never eat these words.
Tonight I was in another town I haven’t played before (as far as I recall), Wakefield, one of the first acts to play the newly refurbished Unity Theatre. I had easily sold out the smaller of its two venues, with 150 people coming to see me, which is not bad for a place I’ve not been to in the past. It was quite a mixed crowd with some older couples who looked a bit demure and respectable and who I suspected were there to support the venue, with little idea of what I was going to do.
I started off with some proper jokes to ease them in, but on the second one a man interrupted the feed line by shouting “Bollocks” from the back. I asked him what in particular he was objecting to and as I suspected he revealed he was referencing the heckler clip from youtube. I told him that it was unlikely that many other people would have got that reference and wondered what kind of person could watch a clip like that and decide they wanted to emulate the heckler. It was a weird interjection as he was almost certainly a fan of mine (unless like me and my teenage friends in 1983 at the Ted Rogers gig, he didn’t like me and had resolved to come along and wreck the night. I quickly put him in his place and got the audience on side. There was no point in attempting to finish the joke that he had interrupted, so I advised everyone to get a partial refund from the man in question. I feared that it was going to be tricky to get through a story based show if this guy was going to chip in like this throughout, but luckily and unusually he shut up from there on in.
And though I saw a few confused faces in the crowd, this mixed crowd seemed to like what I was giving them, even if it wasn’t typical Saturday night comedy fayre. I had really expected at least two or three of this five gig run to be slightly tricky, but so far they have been pretty joyful. The only real slip up tonight was that I went to the interval as usual, only to be told that there wasn’t meant to be an interval as the bar wasn’t going to be open. But it gave everyone a chance to have a wee (or leave if they didn’t like the show - they nearly all stayed!) Looking forward to getting home, but coping with the solitude much better than I used to. And whilst sales are not exceptional, it looks like so far so good in terms of holding my own against the 109 other comedians on tour at the moment. My new responsibilities make all this stuff much more important of course, but delighted to have had two decent sized crowds in two new towns in the last two days. If people keep coming to the live shows then I can keep doing the free stuff. So spread the word to anyone that you think might be interested - all the dates are listed here.
Seven down, sixty-one (at least, suspect a few more will be added) to go.
Still some tickets left for Warwick Arts Centre on Sunday
And for RHLSTP with Sarah Millican and Rebecca Front on Monday.
