There was a time when I felt like this tour would never by end, but finally my cock has spunked its last and tonight in Leicester I performed the show for the last time - at least in its second coming. Might I try and slap my cock back to life in another ten years? Or will it be useless and limp by then? Never say never, but I think twice might be enough. I enjoyed performing it, much more, if I am honest than I enjoyed it the first time, when I became bored of doing the same script for two years. But now it's been filmed so I can move on to new ideas. Maybe if I got significantly more popular then it would seem apt to perform the old shows again for a new audience, but I think having them all on DVD may suffice.
The Edinburgh Fringe is now less than two months away and I have a lot of work to do. But I am looking forward to the hard work, even as I leave behind a script that I know back to front and a performance where I know how to hit every word to wring out the laughs. Though even tonight I found better ways to do it, a softening of my voice here, a pause there. I had thought that the 70 or so people who had come to see the swansong might be a tough crowd and laughs were sparse to begin with, but I didn't drop my head and they relaxed (after I'd asked a 12 year old boy to consider his father's spunking cock) and it went well.
It's been an uneventful tour: apart from being propositioned by swingers and Giles nearly killing my dad there are few off-stage stories to be told. But that is just as well. I remarked to Giles on the way home that nowadays all I want to happen is to get to the theatre, do the show and then get home again. The less that can happen outside of those parameters, the better. Not for the blog, or the Metro column, but for me. Tonight I had two beers on the drive home (I was, of course, a passenger in the car), which is one of the craziest things that has happened. It meant that Giles had to stop at the final service station before London so I could do a wee.
It's the most interesting thing to happen today. I don't think this tour will feature heavily in my memoirs.
I tried to make the end into a climax, after all these nights of playing with my Cock that seemed only fitting. But there was no massive sense of relief or even realisation that it was over.
I am re-reading Stephen Fry's "Moab is my Washpot" in preparation for Monday's interview with the great man himself (all the tickets are gone and there's a long waiting list, but you will be able to download the video from
Go Faster Stripe or listen for free in the usual places- lots of positive feedback on the Chris Addison one). Obviously I usually just read wikipedia and ask people about asparagus, but with such a fantastic guest I think I need to up my game a little. At least for the first twenty minutes. What a fabulous book it is. I managed to get a third of the way through it by show time and even though his upbringing is fairly different and alien to my own (though in one of the photos in the middle he looks almost identical to one of my own school photos - the eyes and nose are exactly mine) I still empathised with this awkward child, even if he was a lot naughtier, mendacious and cleverer than me. The book has little of the self-consciousness that can occasionally affect Fry's writing (or at least has the correct amount and I say this as a painfully self-conscious writer and person) and is nostalgic in all the right ways. It's properly evocative and made a few random childhood memories of my own flash up. I found myself remembering a girl who sat next to me in my first year of middle school impressively pissing herself. The noise that her prodigious pee made on those familiar school plastic chairs is still in my brain. I can't remember much more about that girl than this incident, but I will probably never forget that. It was a torrent of wee.
Fry's stories are more complex and slightly sad, but it brought to the surface the exact feelings of shame and confusion that I experienced at a similar age. The bold Fry volunteers to take a note to another teacher in another class (before he even knows what he is volunteering for) and then is overcome with the panic of older kids laughing at him and throws the note into a wellington boot and then lies his way out of what happened. I can't remember any exact stories of something similar happening to me, but it resonates so thoroughly that I am sure it did. Fuck all the "do you remember Spangles?" bullshit, this is proper nostalgia comedy. Do you remember the dread, confusion and loneliness of being a child? The awkwardness and the fear? This book gets to the heart of it better than anything I've read.
And maybe the reason that the terror resonates so much is that I am starting to feel it again in anticipation of the interview. I have not met Stephen Fry before and he is one of my absolute childhood heroes. I remember the first time I saw him in the televised version of the Cambridge Footlights back in about 1982, when comedy was all my life was about (now it's about comedy and my wife). And then he was at the heart of the group of comedians who blew my brain apart. And now I've got to chat with him in front of an audience for an hour or so. I am shitting myself. My dreams tonight were full of me interviewing him, asking the very questions that I've been thinking of asking him, but with everything going wrong - having to conduct half the interview back-stage, there being no chairs in the auditorium, being forced out into the street. I hope I can do a better job in the waking world. I think this should be a really good one. As long as I don't fuck it all up.
