It is feeling like an awful long way to go to the end of the tour. I have now done 40 tour gigs (not including the previews and Edinburgh run which must be well over 60 shows) but there are still 24 to go. It feels like it should be way less than that. Even with a tour manager I am finding the regime tough. I don't seem able to shift this six week long cough/chest thing (although it's much better than it was a fortnight ago) and I've managed to strain my shoulder. There are plenty of great comedians over 40, I think they're just less inclined to put themselves through this. Again, not saying it's very hard compared to a lot of jobs, just that my profession has lots of cushier options and I can see why people would tend to take them.
The actual gigs are nearly always enjoyable (for me at least) but someone needs to invent a teleport system for middle-aged comedians (I think we'd be the primary utilisers of such technology) and also robot bodies that never age or ache or get ill. Am I asking too much?
I want my next show, "We're All Going To Die!" to come from the perspective of someone who has not been told they have six months to live and who hasn't experienced any recent bereavement, but the way I am feeling at the moment I might have to rethink. Obviously my imminent death will be a great PR angle and it might be worth dying in order to get those ticket sales, but artistically I think the show will be better if it's not precipitated by death looming on the horizon (any more than it does already). Of course I have no control over who lives and dies (not yet), and if I actually die that is going to have some impact on the show (I am still happy to have my frozen cadaver put on stage for people to look and laugh at - it might be my funniest show to date). I have already decided to do a much more selective and shorter tour next year (so if you're in one of the towns that I do well in then your reward will be to see me again!), but this is partly so I can concentrate on writing and a new internet project.
It was a slightly gruelling drive to Colchester today (I was at the wheel as I was meeting the Cannibal there) which perhaps exacerbated my middle-age complaints of aches and pains and tiredness, but I still had plenty of energy on stage. The performance was notable for the fact that the fly on my trousers kept coming down. My posh wedding suit is very nice, but this has been a recurring problem with it, though one that has been kept in check. I am quite paranoid about it and thus regularly have to try to surreptitiously check that the cage isn't open, even though the beast is asleep. This is quite easy to do in a show about this subject as I often point at or indicate my own crotch as an illustration of a point. But if you then have to pull your fly up when 250 people are looking at you, it's pretty likely that they're going to see you. I caught it half-down a couple of times, but towards the end of the first half (of the show, not my penis) it was all the way down. The people of Colchester said nothing. Until the interval when some of them mentioned it on Twitter. Of course the ultimate fear of the performer is that one day they might actually go on stage with some body part hanging out of their clothing without realising (I have of course deliberately got my cock out on stage during the play "Excavating Rita"). I guess if it happened in this show then I could pretend it was deliberate or that I had put a joke massive cock in my trousers (or joke tiny cock delete as applicable). It might be a fitting finale if I got it out and made it talk. Perhaps I should just do the whole show nude so that I am not self-conscious about the possibility of my fly coming down, my underpants undoing themselves and my penis thrusting itself out into the open air. If I was totally nude I could relax. Maybe the audience should be nude too. Perhaps I'll add a couple of specialist dates at the end of the run. Because if there's one thing I want this tour to be it is longer.
When did I grow old?
