Warming Up #3996
I was compering a gig at the Greenwich Theatre tonight as part of the Greenwich Comedy Festival. The audience didn't really warm to me. Even though I do most of my gigs in theatres these days, this was a theatry crowd who seemed a bit shocked when anything got even a little bit rude. As I am very rude that was goign to be a problem. I tried some banter with the front row, which launched me off into two stories about smashing an audience member's phone and the rude names in the West London ex-directory computer in 1989. I had also found out all about a woman in the front row who had earlier tweeted that she hoped she wouldn't be picked on. I had followed the link to her blog and was able to surprise her by knowing her name, that she'd just changed jobs and went to Dubrovnik last year. I thought this was all quite inventive and interesting stuff, but the audience had not warmed to me. It wasn't a disaster, but it wasn't great and it's always a bit of a problem if there's coldness to you in a room when you have to come back on four more times. I tried material out on them in the hope of winning them back, but made the mistake of doing the ruder stuff, which pushed them further away. They were also noticably irked if I picked on someone, feeling too much empathy perhaps. Usually this freewheeling, audience insulting stuff would be lapped up, but Greenwich were made of more refined stuff. They didn't even really engage when I told them that their town gets pretty badly banged up in the new Thor film. Luckily they enjoyed the acts.
One of the curses of being a compere is that you have to stay for the whole gig, even though all you do at the end is come on and thank everyone who's been on and then tell everyone to go home. This is especially depressing if the audience don't really like you - "Oh, not that prick again!" At the end of the first half people had started leaving their seats before I'd even finished my short wrap up. That's something that often happens at festivals when the compere is often seen as an opportunity for a loo break, but is rare in the theatre. At least a proportion of the audience held me in disdain.
But as I waited backstage in the second half for the brilliant David O Doherty to come to the end of his storming set, I sat in a chair in the darkness and noticed something leaning on a table in front of me. My eyes tried to make out what it was in the darkness. It looked like... it couldn't be... it was a moon on a stick. What a strange coincidence. I presumed it was there from some recent production, but maybe there was a big "This is your life" style finale, where my lifetime of work was going to celebrated with a big parade. One of the idiot dancing children had left their prop somewhere where I would see it and given the game away. Of course, the whole audience had been in on it and had been pretending to be indifferent to me and to love all the other acts, so that the surprise would be even greater. You thought we hated you, but we love you. Look at the parade we've set up for you. All your catchphrases represented by a dancing child. Congratulations on 24 years in the business.
Even if it wasn't going to be that (and I was pretty sure it was) then it was still oddly reassuring to see this item. Of course it wasn't the actual moon on a stick, just a cardboard representation of the moon... on a stick. But it was probably too much to expect the real one and Greenwich is just getting over the devestation caused by that elf bloke in Thor and the fire on the Cutty Sark so having a lunar satellite smashing into its theatre was going to be too much devestation to cope with. Also it was Stew who wanted the actual moon on a stick, not me. So a representation was fine for me.
Something must have gone wrong backstage or I got off too quickly or something, because the big finale never happened. Though at least everyone stayed in their seats until I was done, so that was a small victory.
After a mediocre gig the long tube ride home through a drunken city, with the dangerous addition of fireworks into the mix was the last thing I needed. But I got away unscathed. I had thought about nicking the moon on a stick, but professionalism forbade it, just in case the production that used it was still in full swing. And I'd definitely have been beaten in if I had a moon on a stick on the tube. Drunks hate that kind of arrogance.
