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Into the plague pit of London today (though impressed to see 90%+ of tube customers masking up - an earnest looking bearded man in his thirties or forties making notes about a Sylvia Plath was one of the only non-maskers, but it’s possible he was hoping to kill himself. Not as clever as he thinks he is, anyway.
I was going down to Elephant and Castle to pretend to be a serial killer for a new web series by the brilliant Bilal Zafar. It wasn’t quite the first time we’d ever met - I’d given him a free ticket to one of my gigs when he was a poor student and he had come third in a new comedian competition that I’d hosted - but it was the first time we’d worked together in the same room. I’d come up with quite a nice conceit for my character, but the whole interview was improvised and it went to some very unexpected areas. Bilal and Stevie Martin were really the inspiration for me doing long form improvised comedy (I know I was doing snooker and stone clearing before I worked with them, but they’re more anti-comedy than comedy or at least experimenting with the comedy of tedium - since working on these guys shows I’ve wanted to make stuff that is at least attempting to be funny, even if the funniness is sometimes about failure to be funny). They showed me that it was possible just to launch into something and hope for the best and trust that you were funny enough to make it work. We certainly made each other laugh today which is both good and bad. Good because we were being funny, bad because we were ruining all the takes.
I felt like I’d done a good job. It was more of a comedy job than an acting job, but I am glad that I am regaining confidence with stuff like this. I had a lot of this destroyed by the Fringe of 88 and some of the people I subsequently worked with, so it feels good to be believing in myself enough to give stuff like this a go.
I’d tried to do some Christmas shopping first, but had largely failed to get any of the stuff I’d planned. There was a 20 minute wait at the Apple Store just to buy stuff and my plan to go online instead didn’t work as there seemed to be no way to order and collect later. Must be nice for Apple that they can afford to let sales go like this - but maybe they don’t have enough stock (or maybe it was specifically the thing I wanted that wasn’t available).
In Soho I was spotted by a passing cyclist, even though I was still wearing my mask, who turned out to be comedian (though now actor) Michael Smiley, who I’d got to know at the Adelaide Festival in 97 when he was a bit more a tearaway or at least an unpredictable force of anarchy. I haven’t seen him for a good few years, though was present on the night that he met his wife and I think helped them get together again by jokingly trying to dissuade her from hanging around with this idiot. They seemed an unlikely pairing, but that was over 20 years ago and they’re still going strong.
As always, comedians seem to have this sympathetic ability to just pick up from where they left off and in spite of not having seen each other for over a decade we slipped back into easy conversation and chatted about our kids (though his eldest is 38 years old) and what the Northern Irish voice could be used to advertise.
Anyway, he then cycled off to his voice over and we probably won’t meet again for twenty years if ever. But it was great to see him and to feel this huge city shrink to the kind of village where you can bump into people you know.
