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A one off tour date in Bridgwater? What was I thinking? Probably that I might use it as an excuse to visit my folks, but as we’re all heading there in a week or so this ended up being a round trip, with no Cheddar stop off. Luckily I was well rested and for the most part enjoyed the drive.
I don’t think I’ve been to Bridgwater Arts before - as a child I used to avoid the town as it smelled really badly. At the time everyone assumed this was down to the plastics factory in the area, but they shut that down and the town still smells, so it’s all down to the inhabitants. I basically opened with that one. But I knew they’d like it. The stinky and disgusting Bridgwaterians.
I thought I might have done a gig in Bridgwater before, remembering a rowdy night in a massive hall, with some rugby loving twats, shouting their way through Isy Suttie’s subtle and funny set, but it turns out that that was in Taunton (and the day before the infamous encounter with the bus driver that became a Youtube hit.
Playing a small town that I’ve never played before is always likely to lead to disappointing numbers, but in the end about 100 people showed up, which is pretty good. My 2016 “The Best†gigs haven’t really given me much indication of whether doing a Best of tour is a good or bad idea. The delicate balance of giving out all this free content depends on the tours selling well. But 100 in Bridgwater is positive enough.
The show went fine. I had mic problems early on and wondered if it was down to my negative comments about the town. I was given a second mic and joked with the tech guy that it would be fine if he just gave me a new mic every 90 seconds. That joke turned out to be prophetic as the second mic also gave up the ghost after less than two minutes. But this sort of thing can no longer phase me. It was incorporated and the audience enjoyed getting something unique.
I am still working out what my best 90 minutes of stand up should be. And there are quite a few of my favourite routines that can’t really be extracted from the show that they were in because they’re either too long or have too many call-backs in them. But weirdly the show is shaping up to have a mini-theme of what being “the best†actually means. Clearly it’s hard to pull off the idea of being the Best when you’re playing a 60% full Bridgwater Arts Centre, but then are success and excellence necessarily linked? And in any case the arrogance of the title was deliberately self-defeating. I have been working as a comedian for 30 years now, if you include my University days (in fact it’s now almost exactly three decades since I performed “My Penis Can Sing†at the Oxford Comedy Cellar, which is probably has a reasonable claim to be the night that kicked this whole thing off. To still be tootling along and making a living is in one way a triumph, but still after all this time, I have not become the kind of act that can ever guarantee a sell out. Things still feel precarious, like a badly selling tour or a duff show could derail everything. But as I said at the end of the show tonight, that’s the best that I’ve got from the first 49 years of my life, let’s meet up in another 49 to see what else I’ve come up with. "The best is yet to come,†I half hoped, half lied.
A hundred people in Bridgwater. It’s not up there with your Peter Kays in terms of financial glory, but it’s still a nice living and still puts me in the top 5% (if not top 1%) of touring comedians. It should act as some kind of benchmark for my profession. And it’s a 100 people in Bridgwater in December. That’s a tough month to sell tickets. As the next AIOTM is threatening to prove.
My appeal remains limited, but I am popular enough to keep doing this. And I will keep doing it as long as I am still enjoying it. And though it’s sometimes a struggle to accept or believe. What I am experiencing is a victory. I know. It’s hard to fathom. To be fair though, it would only take a tiny shift in ticket sales to push me back into the ranks of those for whom it is not viable to tour. I am aware that every year out on the road could be my last. The last ten years have seen me make small leaps forward, followed by plateaus and then more small leaps. I may be the first comedian to become an over-life success. Sadly that means dying just as you finally get to the top.
The drive home was tough. It should have been about two and a half hours and I had calculated that I had enough in me to last that long. Booking a hotel not only costs money, but means that two writing days are lost to driving (and it takes longer to get home in the day). The clear night time roads should mean that it’s more practical and economical to get home after the gig. But I had forgotten how regular night-time road works had become and the M4 was shut for one junction near Reading, which meant a 35 minute diversion, with a bit of a traffic jam and tricky non-motorway driving, just as I was reaching the limits of my range. I was hardly going to stop off and get a hotel so close to home, but it turned a more or less enjoyable drive into a mini-nightmare. At one point I thought I was being beeped by a clown car. There was a really strange horn being beeped somewhere behind me. Was I doing something wrong? It turned out it was a car of lads with their window open and one of them beeping an air horn out into the night. Perhaps some Reading team had just won a game of something. They seemed happy.
I can just about manage the driving on a one night stand, even with the delays, but luckily will have a tour manager for most of the Spring dates. Working 2pm-1am (if you include driving) - what a way to make a living.
