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I have possibly played Warwick Arts Centre on every tour I've ever done. We certainly came to the University in the 90s with Lee and Herring and I don't think I've missed one here since I started touring alone in 2001. So although I think this will just be my last stand up tour for a while (rather than forever), it was perhaps an apt place to be making the break.
It didn't really hit me that the tour was really over until I got home and was drinking a glass of nice red wine (on my own as the family slept, aptly enough). 2019 will be the first year I haven't done a tour since 2000. It feels like the right time to have a fallow year (and I've managed to insert three less difficult tours into those 18 years by repeating an old show or doing a best of - and my original tour of Talking Cock took place over two years). But the relief at not finishing a tour and then immediately having to start work on another one and get straight into previews is huge.
And I know it's the right time to have this break as there isn't even a pang of regret. Having to do those last six shows without a tour manager brought home just how knackering the whole thing is on my old body and I will appreciate the respite.
Aptly too the last gig felt like a little bit of an anti-climax. I was in a temporary venue as my usual room is being done up and perhaps the high ceiling swallowed the laughs, but it felt like harder work than usual and some banker jokes seemed to get very little. The theme of the tour is anti-climax.
I'd been out for Sunday lunch with my family and another friend and then set off for Coventry early, in the hope I could get some work done. The drive through the sunny countryside was glorious and it didn't take long before I had arrived.
We set up the show and then I went to a nearby cafe to see if I could polish off the last 20 or so emergency questions. I was surrounded by students enjoying the Sunday sunshine and realised that it was 29 years since I had left University. Even back in 93 or 94 when I'd first played at this campus I would have (wrongly) felt old and out of place. Now of course, I am old and out of place, but inside I feel no different than I did back in the 80s. I didn't want to go back. I was so awkward and useless and I saw a few young men walking around who I knew were as clueless and confused and sad as I had been back then.
I am still all of those things, of course, but I am now old as well.
I made some progress on the book and listened to some of the delightfully funny Bob Mortimer RHLSTP (I think this is my all time favourite).
Then on to the show and that weird feeling as you say jokes for possibly the last time ever.
Then the drive home and waiting for the adrenaline to subside. Feeling teary with happiness and sadness that this was genuinely all over. Perhaps a year or two away from full on stand up will give me a chance to regroup and try something new. I am very proud of the latest show and particularly my ever-increasing competence as a performer.
And yet stepping away, if not entirely, does just feel like a weight off my shoulders.
The book should be, if not done, at least sent off tomorrow and then I just have to put together the last episode of the sitcom…. still quite a lot of work…
I also got a tweet from someone who'd bought a carbon monoxide alarm on my advice and it had gone off, saving them and their child from potentially serious side effects. In some ways that was almost as good as having finished a tour! I am still occasionally chilled by the fact that we only had an alarm pretty much by accident and how close my newborn son was to a boiler leaking fumes. But we were lucky and it's great to think that our frightening experience has also saved at least one other family from something horrible.
I'll be back looking for an open spot next week I am sure. Thanks to everyone who came to the tour. It's been a blast. But I am very glad it's done.
