Archive: 26th October 2012

Show Report: Friday 26th October

The Hat Factory Luton

Before Gig

The venue is next to the train station – about 2 minutes' walk - but

‘they’ are renewing the pavement at the station and ‘they’ have

erected temporary metal fences to block off the area under

construction. This forces me into a 5-minute detour to get to the

venue, which is in plain sight the whole time. This phenomenon of

closed off bits of pavement undergoing perpetual refurbishment, when

they are perfectly adequate already, is a growing problem across the

UK and throughout Europe. I am sure to be the first person to raise

this issue and bring it to public attention. So my anger is a compound

anger borne of numerous incidents of fenced off pavement, all my

previous experiences piling up in my head one on top of the other.

The venue is an arts centre and it has double doors that appear to be

the standard manual doors, but are in fact automatic and open outwards

when operated by a push button at waist height. I fail to see this and

try and yank the doors open. At first they don’t give so I just pull

harder and eventually they spring free. Something mechanical seems to

give. The receptionist looks at me with concern. Only then do I

appreciate I wasn’t supposed to force them open. There is a young

woman standing by reception who has seen all of this. I hope she is

not the promoter. She is the promoter. Perhaps she will interpret my

clumsiness as endearing clownish behaviour and not the actions of a

rampaging Scotsman unable to adjust to modern doors in the 21st

century?

In the dressing room I meet the fellow acts. One of them is an

archeologist by day. He is talking about digging up corpses in the

Ipswich area. This partially cheers me up.

I ask for a tea before I go on but the venue doesn’t sell any. The

performance space itself smells of hospital. I don’t feel particularly

Friday night. I intend to rant about the pavement situation as soon as

I go on stage. The immediacy and the genuine anger should convincingly

sell it. The pavement works are adjacent to the venue so surely the

audience will have observed this too?

 During Gig

I remember relatively little of this show with hindsight.

My plan to rant about the pavement is dead in the water almost from

the word go. Almost as soon as I launch into my opening remarks a

heckler from the very back of the room shouts out “yeah”. He is the

most annoying kind of heckler:  a tagger heckler. Basically after

every punch line he tags on another comment thus ruining the moment

and undermining the punch line. He will also go on to ruin other punch

lines by making a pre-emptive comment just before I deliver the killer

line. Sometimes when this happens it is impossible to go back and

repeat the punchline as the moment has evaporated. Jokes shouldn’t

seem labored, they should look like you are just throwing them out

there. If you have to have another run at the punchline it makes it

look too much like work. There is a forensic intelligence about this

kind of heckler and their ability to torpedo a joke. Paradoxically

they are very often unintelligent and guided by a stupid animalistic

instinct – I believe it’s called “The Force” in Star Wars films. He

may even believe he is helping. The upshot of all this is that my

planned rant on the pavement situation is aborted. I now finally

understand what Burns meant about “The best laid schemes of mice and

men…”

The heckler's interjections are too numerous for me to recount. When

he did shut up the gig built nicely and the audience appreciated the

material. The trouble was that he was right at the back and very

difficult to see and identify. He sounded of no particular age or no

fixed type. There seemed little to pin on him at this point. How can I

operate without stereotypes?

There were a couple of people constantly coming in and out at the back

and at first I though this was the heckler because the heckling didn’t

occur when they were out the room. Only later did I realize they were

separate entities.

I find an opportunity to slot in the pavement rant at some point – I

forget which - and it works a treat. See, I knew it! It would have

been a barnstorming start but it wasn’t to be.

I end on a joke about being offered a sweet by a child. As I deliver

the punch line somebody knocks over a bottle on the concrete floor and

the echo reverberates around the room. Now battle hardened by this

gig, I decide to fight it rather than go with the flow. So I add

another final routine and do something older about phoning adult chat

lines. But this makes the set go on a little too long and it would

have been better to end with the bottle falling over. There is a

strong audience response on the way off stage.

 After Gig

The show was a fun but disjointed one and of all the show reports I

have ever written (approx. 30) this is the gig I have most difficulty

trying to recall after the event. There was a lot of fire fighting in

the gig. And I know I did about 15 minutes of material in 25 minutes.

That gives you some idea of the amount of interruptions.

As I leave the stage, I am plagued by a feeling that I have forgotten

something and only much later do I realize that yes I missed a whole

routine about “being dumped for nobody”.

I later find out the heckler is fifteen. This retrospectively seems to

open up a field of possibilities in dealing with him –some of them

rather tasteless.

The people who were persistently coming in and out turned out to be a

couple having a row about the man having to momentarily carry his

girlfriend’s handbag. They had the good grace to leave the room every

time they wanted to bicker – well done them.

I overhear a woman in the corridor saying, “he talked about drinking too much.”

In fairness this section probably took double the usual time due to

the interruptions.

I enjoyed the gig a lot. The audience were overall very nice and I had

to work hard to try and gel a show together from a sometimes

disjointed set, but paradoxically these can be more enjoyable gigs

than the ones where everything falls at your feet.