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Usually my family come with me to the Norwich gigs on the tour, because Catie has friends in the area and I normally do two nights. Three years ago my 40 day old daughter joined me on stage, but my son (who is maybe three times as old as that already) is going to miss the chance for an early stage debut. In East Anglia at least.
Because this tour it’s just the one gig and there’s too much going on, so I travelled up with only my tour manager for company and came straight home again afterwards. It felt a bit strange not having Phoebe asleep in the dressing room or in her pram in the auditorium. But Norwich has always been a fine city to play (we usually did our Lee and Herring tour preview shows in the Arts Centre) and the gig tonight was sold out and the audience very much up for it. I have to say (and I don’t usually say this kind of thing) but so far the tour has been fucking excellent. I’ve done well. The audiences have been great and I’ve sold 6 of the first 10 gigs out (though a lot of the smaller rooms have been in the first part of the tour).
As I walked up the hill to get a sandwich before the gig a young man said, “Hey Rich†and started talking to me. I don’t think I have met him before, but he talked with a familiarity that suggested I might have, but he told me that he’d done his first gig the other day. It had gone well he told me and he said that two girls had come up afterwards and talked to him about something he’d done. “And that’s why we do this job,†I told him, three-quarters joking. But he seemed genuinely delighted that some women he didn’t know had wanted to speak to him because of what he’d done on stage and I had to concede (if only to myself) that as much as I have always loved comedy for the sake of comedy, the fact that it makes (no offence intended to the young man I met or me as a young man), relatively unattractive prospects much more attractive. I don’t think that I had just met the ghost of my younger self, but maybe all young people are the ghosts of our younger selves. Or at least we are all more or less the same. It gets even better when the women also want to kiss you. And if you do it for long enough then you might eventually find one that wants to marry you too. But that takes bloody ages.
It was nice to see someone thrilled by their first gig, as I prepared to do my… I wonder how many I’ve done now. At least nine. Maybe I’d bumped into the next Peter Kay or maybe I’d bumped into the next Richard Herring (poor sod, as if there could be another) or maybe this man would never gig again, but always remember the day that two women had spoken to him and not just to say, get out of our dormitory.
I haven’t always been thrilled to be gigging, but as heady as those early days were for me too, I’m sure (I don’t really remember too much) I don’t think I have enjoyed doing this job as much as I am enjoying it now, with the caveat that I was sad to miss more time with my family and my daughter going to swimming class and bravely insisting on conquering her fears and swimming under water and smiling at her own defeated timidity.
For the second year in a row a man in a wheelchair got stuck on the Playhouse stair lift. I am not sure if it was the same man, though I feel it might have been. He seemed to take it well and suggested that it might have helped with the charity collection. I wondered if he’d like to come with me everywhere and get trapped in the theatre entrance somehow so people were more inclined to donate
It was a longish journey home. I didn’t get to sleep for a couple of hours once I was back. Ooooh I’d regret that in the morning. Don’t get into this business. You come in for the girls or boys or both talking to you and then 30 years fly by and it’s almost like a job. But a brilliant one. Where you have the best of times.
