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I was gigging at the Royal Albert Hall tonight (named after Roy Al Al Bert Hall - it’s full name should be the Roy Al Al Bert Hall Hall), not in the main venue, but in the slightly smaller Elgar Room. I am doing quite a few of these late night comedy shows over the next few weeks. It’s always fun to see who is playing the big room and to meet their fans in the corridor (I generally seem to arrive during the interval). Two weeks ago it was Dave Gilmour whose fans were steaming drunk and tonight it was Cliff Richard, whose audience, I think it’s fair to say, have largely grown old with him. Nothing wrong with that beyond it making my journey between the venue and the dressing room like a slightly more placid version of the Walking Dead. Don’t get me wrong, I am getting older and I hope I will still be going out to see stuff in my seventies or indeed still being on stage when I am in my seventies. And never forget Cliff has done one thing that I will can promise you I will never do….. sold out the Roy Al Al Bert Hall Hall on numerous occasions. So who is the best Richard, Cliff fans? It kind of depends what scale you’re working on, but I don’t think anyone will be so devoted to me to come and see my shows when they can only walk at a snail’s pace, if at all (maybe Andy McH, but apart from that)...
It’s a strange experience to be doing stand up whilst the distant strains of a notorious pop star are quietly heckling you. “You’re just devil woman” Cliff claimed and I didn’t really have a comeback to that. “It’s so funny how we don’t talk any more,” he continued, but I wasn’t going to fall into that trap and start up a conversation. “I’m just a bachelor boy and that’s the way I’ll stay…” He was heckling himself now. None of that happened.
Of course I made some jokes about him during my set, which I will leave to your imagination, but what right do I have to take the piss? He has more talent in his little finger, allegedly, as he sometimes calls it.
On the way into the gig I had passed one of the buses that had brought fans into London and was waiting to take them home. It said “Newmarket” on the dashboard. The luggage compartment was wide open, waiting, I am supposing for wheelchairs. For one mad second I wondered about crawling into the space and hiding there and hitching a lift to Newmarket as a stowaway. It would be an enormously uncomfortable journey and I’d end up in Newmarket at one in clock in the morning with nowhere to sleep. But apart from that it would be amazing prank. I decided against it. But if the universe is infinite then an infinite number of me made the decision to do that, even if a much larger infinite number of me made the correct decision not to and an even larger infinite number of me were doing something else entirely and an even larger infinite number of not me didn’t have the chance to do anything because they never got to exist.
Which is about as close as I have got to writing any of my sitcom.
The infinite number of universes theory is bullshit. If any of the infinite versions of me got into that luggage compartment, despite being exactly the same as me in every way, I will give you all a million pounds (in the universe where I have all the money in existence).
