Can't Stand Up for Sitting Down (3 page)

Who is
right? Well, it’s completely dependent on where you live. And let’s face it, no
one outside London gives a toss. As someone who was born in South London and
returned there aged twenty to work in Camberwell, I am shot through with
loyalty to the Sarf. It’s less crowded, there are more green open spaces and a
more mixed, chilled-out and generally more attractive community.

North
London never has anywhere to park and North Londoners think they’re great.
Well, someone has to.

But it
has to be said that the vast majority of comedy clubs were and are in North
London, with a smattering of slightly grubby ones down South. I didn’t mind
that, as I like grubby And having lived North of the river for a bit and never
being able to park less than half a mile away from my flat, I felt the pull of
the South in my heart almost from the kick-off and returned relieved and
ecstatic a year or so later.

The ‘C’ word

‘Cunt’ was a forbidden
word in the early days of the circuit. When alternative comedy developed away
from the traditional circuit, the unspoken (but known by everyone) rules
discouraged racist or anti-women jokes; the ‘C’ word was considered to be
offensive towards women.

My
friend Alan Davies remembers it as being a real taboo in the early days, and
Mark Kelly recalls a comic called Tony Morewood being one of the first to bring
it back into the fold — in reference to a member of the audience. From this
point it seems the ‘C’ word was reclaimed by various comics, most of them men,
ironically, until it began to enter the arena of words that were once
offensive, but now have lost their bite.

It
seems though that it has not quite been rehabilitated, and perhaps still needs
to be said by Holly Willoughby on
This Morning
or someone on
Springwatch,
maybe, before it completely loses its bite. I have mixed feelings towards
the dear old ‘C’ word. I know it can be offensive to women, but there’s nothing
quite like the primitive ejection of it into the universe when one is at the
height of anger or frustration; nothing else quite replaces it. So, what I’m
really saying is I’m a hypocrite. I don’t think people should use it, but I do.

As the
comedy circuit developed and grew, the commercial possibilities on offer
caused the more fringey acts to drop off the edges. Clubs started to open that
could be real money-making business opportunities for hard-nosed promoters,
rather than the idiosyncratic comedy wannabes who had hitherto run clubs. So
the Comedy Store and Jongleurs were born and the small, odd clubs started to
disappear along with the small, odd acts.

And,
with the new clubs came new and different types of audiences. From your
stereotypical beard-strokers (‘and that was just the women,’ many comics I know
would have remarked) suddenly there were audiences from outside Town who didn’t
have an allotment or a solar panel to their name. They wanted a GOOD NIGHT OUT
and they weren’t prepared to put up with any polemical nonsense, comedy mime or
poems about the political sitch in Peru. They wanted clever, slick stand-ups
with a joke rate to equal Mr B. Connolly’s, and they were ruthless in their
disdain of the gentle drama-school wordsmith.

There
was an influx of Irish blokes onto the London circuit when they realised they
could actually earn a living. London said hello to Sean Hughes, Michael
Redmond, Dylan Moran, Patrick Kielty and many others. The comedy circuit in
America seemed to be faltering slightly too, and that meant that Bill Hicks,
Emo Philips, Steven Wright, Will Durst and Dennis Leary all ventured across the
Atlantic to have a crack at the English.

The
comedy circuit in America sounds far more hierarchical than it is over here.
(I’ve never been.) Comics have definitive places on a bill and have to work
their way up the ladder to be ‘the closing act’ who earns more than the rest.
In London it was different in the early days. There was no such thing as ‘Top
of the Bill’. Most bills at London clubs in the mid-eighties were
interchangeable. However, things started to change as audiences began turning
up to see particular acts. My friend Mark tells me that at ‘new material’
nights, audience members would ask if certain comics like myself were on. God
bless him, he had to say that or I would have chinned him.

For a
long time, everything was centred in London, and although there were one or two
far-flung outposts of comedy like a tiny club in Bungay in Suffolk run by
Malcolm Hardee, all comedy was Londoncentric. Of course this has changed
enormously since I started; now every town and city has its comedy club, while
Jongleurs has spread like a virus round the entire country.

The Tunnel Club

The Tunnel Club was run by
the inimitable and chaotic Malcolm Hardee whose catchphrase ‘Oi oi!’ would
preface any interaction he would have with the audience. He would shamble onto
the stage looking like a cross between a tramp, Frank Carson and a little boy
with Eric Morecambe-type glasses. The audience absolutely loved him and didn’t
care that he did the same material week in and week out, to the point that they
could repeat it along with him.

Whenever
an act was on who was struggling, the cry would go up from the scary heckly bit
at the back on the right-hand side… ‘Malcolm!’… and if it started to build
and everyone started shouting Malcolm’s name, he would have to come back on and
shoo off whichever poor sod was doing his best against a tide of derision and
no laughs.

Malcolm’s
other catchphrase was ‘Fuck it’, which he would liberally sprinkle throughout
his compering. Malcolm would often resort to getting his genitalia out for a
laugh and occasionally would place a pair of glasses on the top of his bollocks
— his impersonation of General De Gaulle, and an unsettlingly accurate one at
that. People always said he had the longest bollocks on the circuit (it’s not
like there were loads of other pairs of bollocks on display), and although
there was never actually a competition to find out the truth of this statement,
I think they were probably right.

The
Tunnel Club was the modern equivalent for comedians of the Roman Coliseum. If
you got the thumbs-down from the audience, you were dead — no empathy no
support, you just had to get off. As you made your way to the stage, you could
often hear members of the audience shouting, ‘Crucify her!’ or similarly
reassuring supportive comments, and it did really feel like you were being fed
to a baying mob.

On the
whole, it was a non-violent place and you were reasonably safe apart from a
bruised ego, but one incident there heralded the beginning of the end. The
female half of a double act called Clarence and Joy Pickles was hit in the face
by a heavy plastic beer glass and cut quite badly Following this, comics were
urged by Arthur Smith to boycott the Tunnel. Quite a few did, and it was a
while before things got back to normal. All this only increased the Tunnel’s
reputation as a scary gig.

One
night, an American comic juggler — you’re in a coma already, I know — attempted
to involve the audience in his act by throwing his skittles (or whatever
they’re called) into the crowd, to be returned when he asked. He soon
discovered to his cost that the Tunnel audience didn’t play that game, and one
was aimed back at him with the ferocity of an Olympic javelin-thrower,
whistling at great speed past his head and causing the audience to send up a
massive, bloodthirsty cheer. However, as the next one sailed towards him with breathtaking
acceleration, he actually managed a body swerve and caught it. Suddenly the
audience loved him and he could do no wrong and went on to storm it.

It was
because of the completely arbitrary nature of the punters at the Tunnel that
most comics feared its power. Add to that a clever audience whose ability to
place a well-honed heckle was second to none, and you did face true
humiliation. However, if you got through it, the rewards to your self-esteem
were tremendous and you felt like a hero.

My
approach was to step on stage and just stand staring at the audience while they
roared, railed and abused me at the top of their voices. Eventually they would
get bored, and as the noise died down I would launch into my set at a hundred
miles an hour and pray I must have done the Tunnel four or five times and am
proud to report I have an unblemished record and was never booed off.

However,
to wheel out a cliché, all good things must come to an end, and the Tunnel did
not last. Details are sketchy in my head, but there was a police raid following
a stabbing in the car park, and the Tunnel was forced to close. My friend Mark
remembers looking back over his shoulder as he left during the chaos of the
raid, to see Malcolm stark naked on stage holding a dog on a lead which was
trying to bite him on the bollocks. A fitting image, I feel.

The Comedy Café

The Comedy Café was our
refuge after shows. It was a place where we could drink, hide and chew over the
night’s stand-up, as all the comics who met there had come from every end of
London to relax and get a bit pissed. Initially the room above the club itself,
in Rivington Street just on the edge of the City, was slightly bare, but Noel
Faulkner, the endlessly generous and sweet overseer of the club, allowed us to
do pretty much what we wanted to the place to make it more homely We got hold
of a few grotty old settees and Alan Davies tells me I forked out for a pool
table, although I don’t remember this, and it became a little private club for
us to meet at the end of a Friday and Saturday night.

The
core group was myself, Alan Davies, Mark Lamarr, Andy Linden, Keith Dover, Jim
Miller (aka James Macabre), Hattie Hayridge (Holly from
Red Dwarf
to
you), Simon Clayton, John Gordillo and Andre Vincent, plus an ever-changing
cast-list of comics and performers — Ross Noble and Jools Holland among them. I
wasn’t particularly young and sprightly then as I hadn’t started stand-up until
I was thirty but Alan Davies, looking back, can’t believe how young the core
group were, mainly in their early twenties. Alan remembers going on at the
Comedy Café gig one night just after Mark Lamarr, and a bloke in his forties
with a couple of similarly aged mates saying very loudly to them, ‘How old’s
this one?’

We also
used the Comedy Café room during the World Cup in 1990. Noel got a massive
telly in for us and we watched the Germany game there. Alan recalls being
slightly miffed that a load of extra comics turned up and all the decent seats
were taken when he arrived. It was, of course, the semi-final in which Gazza
was booked and cried, and Waddle and Pearce missed their penalties. Huge
depression and England’s inability to deliver the killer blow has been repeated
endlessly throughout many World and European Cups.

We were
young, we were attractive (ish) and we had enormously good fun — and I think
about those days as a time of mega-laughs, a few fights and making really good
friendships.

It was strange not being a
nurse any more and having virtually no responsibility apart from writing jokes
and managing to drag myself out of the house in time for a gig in the evening.
At the time there was a thriving comedy circuit in London. Each club had its
own, very personal characteristics — to do with the nature of the venue, the
type of audience that came there and whether there was a regular compere or
not. Here, in no particular order, are a few of my favourites:

Best
Comedy Clubs

The Chuckle Club

The Chuckle Club was and
is run by someone called Eugene Cheese. (I don’t think that is his real name!) When
I performed there, it was in a pub just off Carnaby Street, which was quite
unusual as lots of comedy clubs, apart from big ‘uns like the Comedy Store,
didn’t tend to be in the West End but flung out towards the fringes of mainly
North London with a sprinkling East, a few West and hardly any South.

I liked
the Chuckle Club because despite the fact that it was quite a small club,
Eugene always paid top dollar and was very fair with the door split. The crowd
were mainly regulars who had developed an audience personality of welcoming
bonhomie so it was always a joy to do.