Bromley 16th January 2014

16^th January 2014

 

Bromley

 

Before Gig.

This room is like a giant banqueting hall. It is designed to hold around 400 people but tonight there are nearer 60 people in attendance. They have sat themselves around the edges - - an entire periphery with no centre. Except, the two sides of the audience do not connect across the front.  The way they've assembled themselves resembles male pattern baldness. There is no compere per se rather the bar manager has a clip-board and he confesses to me before he goes on stage that he has never before introduced a show. I am guessing this is going to be hard work. 

 

During Gig

I guess correctly. This gig is an uphill struggle from the off. The applause dissipates before I get to the microphone. I find it difficult to generate any momentum.

There are only two tables that I can actually see from the stage. They are stage right and stage left with an empty table between them – the bite out the donught. I cannot see any other tables. This is partly a result of the stage lights and partly a result of the curvature of the earth that is clearly visible in this giant banqueting hall. This will come in handy later on when I will be unable to see their ambivalence and merely sense it intuitively.

This is fairly up market audience but they seem to turn their noses up at the thought of heroin making me think they are not proper posh just noveau riche.

“Beer isn’t alcohol” I state later.

“Yes it is!” corrects a lady (table right). 

Sigh.

She is of course factually accurate but, alas, her search for the truth is misplaced in a comedy show. Her literalism will be her undoing as an audience member. If there is state of mind half way between pedantry and confusion then this woman resides there and will stay there for the remainder of the gig.

Nevertheless the ill judged intervention affords me the opportunity to do this routine as more of a conversation piece as though I am persuading a sceptical friend. Initially, I like the turn this routine has taken tonight. For a moment, I am hopeful, but I am never destined to get to the end of it as a bigger heckler is on the horizon. Just as I am about to recommend drunk driving to the audience (that would probably have invited another outburst from my obtuse friend at the front) I am heckled by a woman mid way up the audience (and thus invisible) “Looking at porn on the internet?”  This feels more of an 'in' with the audience and I take it. I am desperate to build a rapport. There is banter back and forth along the lines that I may get together with this woman after the show. She is clearly well into middle age (and possibly beyond) so the joke should be that I am hitting on one of the less eligible women in the audience and, I don’t how I know this - - but I can tell that she's overweight. Indeed this is confirmed shortly afterwards when a man at the back heckles her regarding her size. From then on I feel hamstrung. I keep thinking to myself “don’t say she’s fat”. I now feel I am fencing with one hand tied behind my back.

I feel I have exhausted the banter with this woman and I return to material but I am still finding it hard to get moving on the routines. As the gig goes on this hall is getting bigger. The walls are moving outward. The gap between the front table expanding. This woman will heckle again but it will never reach the giddy height of me claiming to fancy her. There will be more banter. Occasionally her table will break out in a sort of separate gig but they will always return to the polite ambivalence of  audience. There will even be a point later on where I accidentally say she is fat and she won't mind and the audience won't mind but neither will they like it either and I will feel a bit dirty.

 

There comes a point where I realize things aren’t going to get better and I totally relax and the gigs just bumps along. There is not a scintilla of malevolence from the audience but there now seems to be a mutual understanding from both performer and audience that this is as good as it gets. The room stops getting bigger.

 

I am keen to encourage any audience participation. There is a man right at the back who previously was heckling the woman heckler who has decided to start heckling proper and aim it at me. However he is so far away that it is a bit like trying to hold a conversation with an elderly relative in a wind tunnel. Since I cannot hear what he is saying, his heckles have to be passed on by a relay system, intermediate tables have to hand the message on. It feels a bit old fashioned, maybe like the way heckles may have been done in Victorian times. Actually, I wish I’d made that observation about it.