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Tonight's gig in Milton Keynes became the show that went wrong, partly due to technical mishap and partly down to mid-tour complacency. But even though being on stage often feels like a dream, I can't remember a gig which was more like the performance anxiety nightmares that I occasionally have (about four times a night). I remained strangely calm as everything around me descended into mild chaos, but afterwards did feel a bit shaken up. One or two interruptions due to cock ups are enjoyable for an audience, but when it gets to three or four (and some of them are just down to carelessness) it can become closer to embarrassment. I think the audience stayed with me, however.
It was all swinging along nicely until the second half. As I got to the bit with the “Grand Children Spoilt Here†door mat, I clicked my computer's space bar and the slide appeared on the screen, but it was not appearing on the screen. As the whole routine is about the tiny issues with the font, grammar and spacing this was a bit of a problem. I called for technical assistance, but the crew were in a box high at the back of the theatre and Giles, my tour manager doing whatever he does backstage during the show and no help was forthcoming. I tried to tread water, but when the cavalry didn't arrive I had no option but to push on.
Luckily I had bought my own version of the door mat for use in small venues where the audience were close enough to read it, but where there was no projector and screen. We've never used it on tour, but Giles has always left it curled up under the prop table just in case. I think I had told him there was no need to bother with that, but luckily he hadn't listened (or maybe heard). Even so to try and use this small prop in a large 350 seat theatre seemed redundant. It also took two hands to hold it up which made it tricky to speak into the mic and left me holding it like a football scarf above my head or more usually in front of my face.
The mat is also quite prickly and unpleasant to hold and I could feel it lightly cutting the outer layer of my skin.
But I pushed on and the routine worked fine, though I was worrying about the surprise ending (spoiler alert) which also requires the video screen. Short of inviting the whole of the audience on to the stage to watch the short video in a little box on my computer, there was no way of showing that if the projector wasn't working.
A tech guy had now arrived and was waiting for a break in the action to come on to stage. I called him up and chatted to him, unfairly lightly mocked him and quizzed him on what had gone wrong, as he flailed around a bit, checking the connection and just twisting the screws that connected the projector to the computer. “Well I could have done that,†I told him, as this solution failed to bear fruit. I had no option but to keep up the repartee and take the mickey as I had a show to attempt to keep on the tracks and it was already leaning at 45 degrees.
With his failure to solve the issue I carried on with the next bit of the show and could see Giles, roused from his sleep caused by masturbating whilst wearing my street clothes in the dressing room, waiting in the shadows. I called him up, mocking him for not being super roadie Malcolm Kingsnorth (which is our tour in-joke), but allowing him to bask in the applause as he got the projector working. I hadn't chastised him for the relatively minor errors of having failed to put out the show programme that I briefly read from in the second half or for having not put all the RHLSTP badges out tonight. He had done a good job here. The end of the show was saved.
Except that there was shortly a groan from the audience who had spotted that the link had gone down again. But I was confident that we'd get it back again, so carried on. I thought we might as well wait until the last possible moment so that it wouldn't go wrong again.
But then in my penultimate routine I realised that the book I read from was not on the table. Maybe it had got moved in all the confusion so I searched for it, feeling a bit sick that something else was going wrong. I thought I might be able to remember the longish passage that I read, but still, the prop is necessary to bring home the jokes and the message and to prove it's all true. It wasn't there, so again I had to call for Giles, who again seemed to take ages to turn up (how many times does he need to sate himself?) and then entered again, thinking he was on heroic rescue duty, only to be told that he'd not placed out the book. He went scurrying away to find it. This one was in our control and shouldn't have happened, but I continued to fill by explaining my mortification and wondering if this was happening. It was, of course, partly Giles' fault. But it was mine too. Usually I check my props before a show, but weariness and complacency had caused us both into sloppiness and we both had to suffer the embarrassment of our lack of preparation biting us in the bum.
On the plus side I can be pretty certain that we won't make these mistakes again, but I am annoyed we allowed them to happen once. I am lucky that I just work with slides and scatological jokes and not trapezes and fire arms. But I bet even they occasionally get lackadaisical about their set up procedures and then he results are a bit worse than a slightly red face.
I was impressed with myself for not losing my shit, either on stage or off. Some acts would have blown up over the errors, but we're all human and I was culpable in this anyway and I knew Giles would be beating himself up too. Obviously I was going to fire him, but I needed him to get me home first.
