In these early days of my reborn career as a stand-up comedian I am really enjoying all aspects of the job. Particularly the driving funnily enough.
I was playing Birmingham tonight (and yet return to the South coast tomorrow to play Brighton), and although it was a bit of a long trip it was a lot of fun zooming up the motorway, listening to my iPod (which when I've been on my own in the car has played only cool music - apart from the theme to the film Arthur, which I had no idea I possessed). I appreciate that this novelty may well wear off soon enough, but for the moment it is an exciting adventure for me - perhaps not all that different from touring theatres and arts clubs on paper, but somehow it has a bigger significance for me.
Some people have expressed surprise that doing stand-up is such a big deal for me. After all I've performed fairly regularly in the last 13 years since I gave up doing the clubs, but I have had to overcome an enormous psychological barrier and it is very gratifying to find out that I am actually doing OK. There's certainly room for improvement and I still have many things to learn (tonight's gig was not a disaster, but did not catch fire in the same way as the last two), but even as recently as last year I steadfastly believed that stand-up was something that I was not cut out for.
Certainly much of this is down to not having been very consistent when I did it the first time. The cherry on the cake was when I was at some student union somewhere, going badly. Somehow I got one of the students on stage (probably by doing the rubbish line along the lines of "well if you think this is so easy then you come up and have a go") and through some chain of events created by my own stupidity was forced to take my trousers down in front of the assembled throng of drunk idiots (I think I'd bet him he wouldn't do it, but then he did, so I had to... or something). It was humiliating, not because I mind people seeing my pants (let's face it if you've come to all my shows you've seen a lot worse than that) but because I had lost control to such a ridiculous degree. Things were going well with the radio writing at the time, so I decided to cut my losses, concluding I just wasn't the kind of person who could make a go of it in that particular branch of comedy.
On top of this there had been the incident a couple of years before when the Oxford Revue had been booked to play Late n Live at the Gilded Balloon in Edinburgh and been heckled off stage by what felt like every working comic in the UK. They hated us for being posh-o privileged students: ironically we were only doing the gig cos we all really needed the ten pounds each we were going to be paid.
So it's good to be putting these ghosts of failure to bed and to be trying all this out again. It's also significantly easier to get booked now as well, which helps quite a bit.
As Martin Cross (from off of the Boat Race) would say I am now operating outside of my safety zone and it's mainly feeling great. But I am feeling quite fired up and I can only see that doing all this is going to be very helpful with my productivity. I have mainly been doing old stuff at these gigs so I can start to feel comfortable, but am going to start putting in new routines (though if you've read this regularly you'll recognise some of it) quite imminently.
