What would the 7 year old me make of this? Here I was on stage, standing in front of more than 3000 people, reading out the stories he had written: The Man Who Could Fly, The Man Who Was Never Born, The Plant That Never Ghrow and of course The Four Men Have A Fight With The Men of Phise.
Would he be excited, amazed, delighted or just embarrassed that the adult him would still be peddling this crap over three decades later.
He might also be annoyed that I was essentially taking the piss out of him, but only lightly. I was proud to be spreading his stories to the world. I was even being filmed for the BBC (BBC4 but let's not let that get in the way of a good story). This would all make my infant brain explode. But I think I'd be quite excited that the BBC would have four channels in the future. If only I had known about CBeebies!
It was a long, long night and I was on near to the end, but the audience seemed to stay with the show. And it had been another stonker. It ended with Barry Cryer and Ronnie Golden singing their infectious and hilarious one-joke song "Peace and Quiet", with a reprise involving the theatre organ rising up through the stage and the rest of the acts from the night joining the veteran comics. How cool to be Barry Cryer and to be closing the show at the Hammersmith Apollo at the age of 74. You never know what's coming round the corner.
I have said it before, but will say it again, I love Barry Cryer. He is full of love for comedy and also of stories (you might have to hear one or two of them more than once, but they're good enough stories to bear repetition). I was talking to him and Ben Moor, saying that the great thing about being on stage with Cryer is that it means that we are now immediately two degrees of separation away from pretty much every comedy great from the last fifty years. He has worked with them all.
Barry corrected me and said that although he was friendly with him, he had never worked with Benny Hill, who I was surprised to learn wrote pretty much all of his own material. He had a couple of interesting stories about Hill, the first being that he had managed to provide a comment about the death of Frankie Howard even though he was himself dead at the time. Benny's agent had been rung up for a quote from Hill, and rather than bother the great man had just made up a comment on his behalf, unaware that Hill was also sitting dead in his armchair in front of his television.
Barry had also met Benny in the street one day after he'd been dumped by Thames TV. Benny, one of the most famous men in the world was walking along in his hat and coat, carrying a plastic carrier bag, going unnoticed by all. The pair then got the bus up the road towards Benny's house, again without turning any heads, the frugal Hill insisting there was no need to take more expensive transport. Benny was philosophical about his fall. He had made millions of pounds both for himself and for Thames TV, but now (perhaps thanks to Ben Elton's dismissal of his supposed sexism) was unfashionable and had no place in the modern world of TV. He told Barry how he had been called to Thames for a cup of tea and told there and then that it was over. "They could at least have bought me lunch," he observed.
But that's showbusiness I guess. It's a shame that they couldn't have sent him off in a more respectful and grateful way. And it's sad to think of how it all turned out for him. Dead in his armchair for a couple of days without anyone knowing.
But at least he seemed grateful for what he had had and recognised that he had been lucky to make millions from what he had done. Even if he was reluctant to spend that money.
And another example of the weirdness of fame came as we headed to nearby Belushi's Bar for some after show drinks. Load music was filling the pub, but the TVs were all tuned into Dara O' Briain performing a show at the Hammersmith Apollo. There was no sound, but there he was doing his stuff.
Dara had just been on the same stage tonight and I knew that he was imminently about to arrive to be surrounded with images of himself mutely performing.
It must have been surreal for him when he turned up, and I suggested that as we couldn't hear what the TV version of him was saying that he might do a kind of karaoke version of the set, providing the pub with the routines he was doing on the TV.
But Dara managed to cope with the awkwardness of the situation and presumably everyone he met pointing out the strange coincidence. And maybe it is best just to laugh along and enjoy it while it's all going your way, because in thirty years time him and I might be meeting in the street, discussing the old days and taking the bus (if such a thing still exists) home.
But if one of us ends up dying in their dressing gown watching the telly, I think it's more likely to be the author of "The Four Men Had A Fight With the Men of Phise".
I guess we never know what the future has in store for us. The best we can do is enjoy the present. I may never perform in front of that many people again, or perhaps like Cryer I will still be doing so in my seventies.
It's a die, the roll of which even I cannot predict (and incidentally so far from the results I have had, one person got a six and the other got a two, so that is a 100% failure rate for my predictive/psychic abilities).
