Days without alcohol - 64. Being on tour is actually making this a whole lot easier as I am driving home from most of the gigs, but for the moment I am still very tired and quite ill and certainly not in the mood for consuming something that will make me feel worse.
Life has become a little boring since I fell ill a week ago and there isn't too much to write about. I am either asleep or wandering around in a bit of a daze or driving to gigs or doing gigs or driving home from gigs and not much else is going on. I was in Farnham tonight and it was another tough show, partly as it was a big cavernous room, with very weird seating. When I arrived the front part of the seating was a good twenty feet away from the stage and then the main block of chairs was even further back. It is very hard to play comedy if the front part of the audience at least is not close to you, but by moving the seats nearer I was going to create a massive gap between the people at the front and the people at the back. This however was preferable to me playing to emptiness and invisible punters in the dark, so I got them to move the seats closer.
Evenso I was going to require a lot of energy to keep this big cold room buzzing with comedy and I was still feeling very run down and some of the early banker jokes seemed to fall flat. Still I battled away and think I did pretty well in the first half, though some sour faced patrons in the second row did not return after the interval.
My energy was right down in the second half and I don't think I did a terrific job, though I got through it. I am just feeling sluggish now, rather than out and out incapacitated, but trying to make people laugh when you just want to be at home in bed can be difficult. If the crowd get behind you you can be lifted by their response, but in a strange venue like tonight it was always going to be hard to get an atmosphere going.
Backstage, unusually, there was some kind of meeting going on in a room next to my dressing room. At one point some young men just barged in as I was lying on my sofa watching Seinfeld, and rather than apologising for the intrusion, just asked me if I was working for the theatre. Usually when a performer is backstage one feels cut off from the outside world and safe and you get quite territorial, so it was strange to have people just wandering around and I wondered what might have happened if I had been out in the loo when they had opened the door.
It seemed as if they were there for some kind of religious meeting as eventually I heard someone giving a gentle speech and then everyone started humming and chanting. It was a bit spooky and certainly unusual.
I got home by 11pm though, which made a nice change, but couldn't sleep immediately depsite being exhausted, so watched "Music and Lyrics" instead. Which could have been a genius film if only they had had the courage to cast Robin Williams instead of Hugh Grant. Then it would have taken on a whole new level of awfulness, which must surely have made it great.
