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D – Doing the Circuit

It had been a few months and I hadn’t heard anything from Bob Mortimer, so I thought I’d be proactive. Taking my trusty dictaphone into my bedroom, I shut the door, shouted downstairs to my mum not to come in, recorded my stand-up set on an audio tape, stuck it in an envelope and posted it off to him, with an accompanying letter explaining that I was enjoying gigging on the comedy circuit but that at the end of my year off I was going to go to university.

Not long afterwards, in a questionnaire in Smash Hits magazine, Bob named Sir Bernard as his favourite new act of the year. I was chuffed to bits and also delighted because I could use this as a quote on my publicity material.

Meanwhile I was ever-present on the circuit, going to clubs most nights, even when I wasn’t performing. I made as many contacts, took down as many phone numbers as I could, and learned the names of every promoter at every club.

Back home I’d ring them up. Some warmed to me and welcomed me, others sighed wearily at the sound of my voice. My act was polarising, extreme, strange – but I made sure to tell everyone that Bob Mortimer had seen it and taken my number. I had also done a gig with Harry Hill, who – alongside Mark Thomas – was at that time the king of the circuit. Harry very kindly gave me the numbers of a few key promoters and said I could use his name as a reference.

It was a truth universally acknowledged that the most terrifying club to play was Up the Creek in Greenwich. Veterans told stories about its predecessor – The Tunnel Club – which had been closed down after bottles and glasses had been hurled at the acts.

Up the Creek had a similarly fearsome reputation. Both clubs were run by Malcolm Hardee, a deadpan comic – one of the older acts on the circuit – who wore thick bottle-rim glasses that made him look a bit like Eric Morecambe.

Hardee had an unusual way of introducing acts – particularly new ones that he hadn’t seen before. ‘Might be good, might be shit.’

And lots of very good people were shit at his club, as it happened, because it was often such a nightmare to play. The audience at Up the Creek didn’t like observational comedians very much, even if they were headliners everywhere else. The weirder, quirkier acts had a better reception, but even then the crowd might bray and boo and hound the turns without mercy.

I had heard the horror stories and resolved to avoid the place, but one Friday evening I found myself on the bill elsewhere with Malcolm. He took a shine to my onstage antics and invited me to play his club that Sunday.

I turned up and realised this was no ordinary club. It was far grander in scale. The acts waited stoically like condemned men in a room upstairs where the wall was covered in a huge mural depicting the Last Supper, but with various comics taking the place of the Apostles and Malcolm himself in the middle as Jesus.

I received Malcolm’s trademark non-committal introduction and went onto the stage. The audience could immediately sense my fear and it wasn’t long before I was heckled. I gave as good as I got and won the audience over. From that moment on they laughed at everything and I finished my set on such a triumphant note that Malcolm slipped me a £20 note, even though I was an open spot. He also said he wanted to book me for two full sets.

‘I haven’t got twenty minutes yet,’ I told him.

‘Just do fifteen, then.’

The first set took place the day after my nineteenth birthday. I gathered a few friends and we headed across London on the train (from north-west to south-east) for the show. I had none of the luck of my previous visit, and lasted seven terrifying minutes before I was drowned out by the boos.

We were all shell-shocked, but my friends tried to cheer me up on the long journey home. ‘You just made eighty quid in seven minutes. That’s probably more than Paul McCartney,’ said Jeremy. A couple of days later I rang up Malcolm and, before I could say anything, he said, ‘I know why you’re calling. You want to cancel the other gig. Well, you can’t.’

I did the other gig and this time I didn’t even manage five minutes before I was relieved of my duties. One crazed audience member was so incensed by my attempts to entertain that he grabbed me by the collar as I came offstage, screaming, ‘You come back here again and I’ll fucking finish you!’ into my ear.

I played Up the Creek a few more times after that, but always had an absolute stinker, even though I was headlining regularly elsewhere. Malcolm wanted to carry on booking me regardless, but it was too disheartening. Despite the decent money, getting booed off isn’t good for your confidence or your reputation. Everyone knew that Up the Creek was a law unto itself and that even the best of them could get destroyed there, but even so, every time you got booed off anywhere, other comics would witness it and talk about it amongst themselves.

Somehow I got away with it, though. I guess I was a bit of an anomaly on the circuit. There weren’t many people who would ‘die’ as often as I did and yet still get booked, but promoters seemed to like what I was doing, and would accept that I was a risk worth taking.

If it went well, it tended to go really well. If it didn’t, it was a disaster. There was no in between. People truly loved it or hated me. The act had developed – out went the dodgy impressions and in came some actual gags. It was no longer an echo of anything anyone else was doing. As I became more experienced, I grew bolder and braver onstage, interacting with the audience and improvising more.

I still had some disastrous shows, though. At St George’s Medical School in Tooting the students had destroyed everyone on the bill before I came on. I went onstage already angry on behalf of my colleagues and it wasn’t long before I too was the recipient of abuse. In my case someone threw a bottle and – in a rare and uncharacteristic moment of skill – I returned it on the volley, punting it over the heads of the front few rows. ‘Come on then!’ I screamed. Not wise. More bottles followed and I scarpered to the dressing room, where I had to be locked in for an hour for my own safety.

Some months later, I was performing at the intimate Aztec Club in Crystal Palace. I was more confident by then, but again alarmed as every act was falling prey to a huge, very drunk Irish guy, who was bellowing insults across the small room and ruining the evening. Even the compère was helpless.

I knew I was doomed to the same treatment, but I decided to meet the challenge head-on. I went onstage, dispensed with my material and instead focused my act solely on the man, hurling insults at him, belittling him, even impersonating him. The atmosphere changed. The tyrant was humiliated! The relief in the room was palpable. Now surely this bully had been silenced once and for all. Maybe he would even leave.

I came offstage to wild applause and the next act went on. I packed my wig and jacket into my bag, paused for a moment and leaned against the wall near the bar, smugly basking in a jubilant glow.

The floored giant came over and calmly spoke to me . . . ‘Very funny, that. Good stuff. I like what you did.’

‘Um, thank you,’ I said, a little surprised.

‘And now I’m gonna take you outside and beat the bollocks off of ya.’

I looked up to him and gulped. His eyes burned into mine. The moment seemed to last forever.

‘Nah, I’m only playin’ wit’ ya.’

I exhaled loudly. The relief probably would have been visible from the moon.

He paused, studied me and then spoke again. ‘Nah, you’re gonna get a bruising. Pick up your bag. I’ll meet you outside.’

A low whine from yours truly, then . . .

‘I’m just mucking about. You’re fine.’ He patted me on the head.

Pause.

‘Nah, screw it. Do you think you can talk to me like that in front of these people? In front of my lady? Fetch your coat.’

Imagine a nineteen-year-old arse quivering and then times it by ten.

‘I’m messing. I’d never do that.’

‘Ha. G-g-good.’

‘Nah, this is my local. No one comes here and talks to me like that. Funny man, yeah? I’m gonna teach you a lesson. Come with me. Now!’

This went on and on, back and forth. He was going to beat me to a pulp. Of course he wasn’t. He was going to smash my head into a lamp-post – no, he was just joking. He was going to punch my lights out. Only kidding.

One of the bar staff witnessed this exchange from a few feet away. He came and stood between us, and then whispered in my ear that it might be a good time to leave, and that he and a couple of others would walk me to the station. I didn’t hesitate to accept his offer. I assume Goliath watched as I picked up my bag and coat and we slunk out of the bar, but I didn’t look back so I’ll never know.

Remember in the first chapter when I was name-dropping? Well, here is one of my proudest ever clangs. In 2008 David Walliams and I had the honour and pleasure of spending a little time with Robin Williams in LA. I told him this tale one night when a group of us were at dinner, swapping war stories, and he fell in love with it. Later I heard that he’d started doing an impression of my impression of the Irish guy in his act.

Does it get any clangier than that? Unlikely.

Except it just did, because Billy Crystal was at that dinner too.

Clang!

Clang!

Clang!

Clang!

Clang!

Sometimes when I played outside London, accommodation was provided as part of the deal. This sounded good on the face of it, but it usually meant a dodgy B&B, a flea-ridden bed in a cupboard in a university hall of residence, or a room in someone’s mate’s house, rather than a hotel.

I had a tough gig at a student union in Newton Abbot, where I was supporting the magnificent Jenny Eclair. Afterwards we were dispatched to the austere home of Mrs Dalton, a thin-lipped old lady who had been widowed just a couple of months before.

I couldn’t get to sleep because it was freezing cold in my room – and also she had cats which set off my allergies and gave me a pretty severe asthma attack. Stupidly I had forgotten to bring my medicine with me and in the early hours, sleepless, wheezing and shivering as the window frames rattled in the wind, I quietly took myself downstairs to the kitchen.

An irritated Mrs Dalton, woken by the noise, followed, and kindly made me a cup of tea. We chatted for a little while and then I went back up to bed. A couple of hours later, still sleepless and now genuinely struggling to breathe, I returned downstairs. Mrs Dalton reappeared too. Close to tears, I told her that I might need to call an ambulance. Mrs Dalton had had enough of this strange man wandering around her house. She calmly told me that if I called an ambulance, she would call the police. I went back to my room, sat on the bed gasping for air, and waited for the sun to rise. Eventually Jenny surfaced, fresh from a lovely night’s sleep, and we shared a taxi to the station. I told her about my night.

‘Oh, you should have woken me,’ she said. ‘I get asthma sometimes. You could have used my inhaler.’

There were happier experiences. My favourite batch of out-of-town gigs was a mini-tour of the south-west – Exeter, Yeovil, Falmouth, Bridport and Torquay – booked and compèred by a lovely guy called Bentley, who worked away on the oil rigs for several months of the year and then returned to spend time with his family and run comedy shows. Everyone on the circuit was happy to do Bentley’s gigs, even though they didn’t pay a king’s ransom, because he was such a generous host, cooking for us and driving us around.

When one of the other comics offered me a joint before the show one night, I declined because I didn’t know how it would affect my act. Some comics could knock it back but I never had more than half a pint before I went on, and certainly didn’t smoke pot ahead of a gig, though I often indulged afterwards. Bentley told me I should have a toke – it might inspire me. I warned him that I had no idea what would happen and he said he didn’t mind and I should just enjoy the experience.

I had a few puffs, but to my surprise it was really strong stuff. I went onstage, started my set and the audience was laughing. I then got completely paranoid that they were doing so for the wrong reasons. I became convinced that I hadn’t done my flies up properly, and kept stopping to adjust them, which the crowd thought was part of the act. I went down so well they gave me an encore. I promptly went back onstage and was so disorientated I repeated my entire set word-for-word, prompting more hysteria from the audience and more confusion from me as to what they were finding funny.

In the early nineties London had a burgeoning Jewish comedy circuit, where some established acts – Ivor Dembina, Mark Maier, Peter Moss, Dave Schneider, Ian Stone – would perform modified sets or even create new ones.

It was at one of these that I met the late Leelo Ross. A large, friendly Northerner, Leelo’s quickfire set was jammed full of great gags. It was a pleasure to watch her and a pain to follow her.

Some years later I found myself by chance sitting opposite Leelo on a bus to Muswell Hill. She told me she had given up comedy and become a clairvoyant. We got off at the next stop and popped into a nearby café, where she read my tea leaves. She told me that I had Italian ancestry, came from a family of sailors and that she could see my late grandmother standing in front of us, hairs coming out of her chin, holding a tray of cheap cakes. I thought it was high time she returned to making people laugh and shortly afterwards David and I cast her as Tanya in the ‘Fat Fighters’ sketches in Little Britain. She did a great job, giving a very natural, sensitive performance and bearing Marjorie’s ceaseless barbs with grace.

The audiences at the Jewish comedy nights were older than at most comedy clubs. They drank a lot less alcohol and didn’t particularly want to see sweary comedy. And it was at one such event in Palmers Green that my poor mother saw my act for the first time.

I was on the bill with my school friend Ashley Blaker. Ashley had been in the year below me at Haberdashers’ and we’d shared an interest in comedy and football. He used to do stand-up shows for charity at lunch break and hundreds would attend. Now, like me, he was starting to play the clubs, though his studies kept him from really making a fist of it.

Ashley had at least thought to come up with a few Jewish jokes for his set. There was nothing remotely Jewish about mine. As Sir Bernard cursed and screamed, my set – effective in the loud, smoky, combative atmosphere of a grotty pub backroom – played to total silence. My red-faced mum – who had been dubious enough when her son suddenly announced ‘I’m going to be a comedian’ – had brought a couple of friends and was understandably mortified by the whole thing. Is this what I had taken a year off for? As she drove us both home that night neither of us said much. Ashley too had generated more grumbles than laughs. He’d curtailed his set, telling the audience, ‘I know I’ve died tonight. If anyone’s interested, the shiva’s at my parents’.’ (If you’re Jewish, that’s a cracking joke, by the way.)

Autumn 1993. After a year on the circuit, having graduated from open spots to half-spots and now full twenty-minute paid spots in some of the smaller venues, and with agents starting to take an interest too, I put my stand-up career on hold and went off to Bristol University to study Theatre, Film and Television.

Within a few days of arriving there, I received a letter from Bob Mortimer. He said that there was going to be a new late-night ITV series called Comedy Club featuring stand-up comics and he thought I should audition for the producer, who he knew.

I phoned the Comedy Café and asked them if I could come down and do a short set. Bob and his girlfriend (now wife) Lisa came along, bringing the producer with them. Afterwards the producer said she’d love me to appear in the series. I was understandably thrilled. I was even more delighted to discover that I was going to be paid £600 – more than ten times what I’d normally get for a gig.

Comedy Club was taped on a Friday night at the Paris Studios in London. Backstage I sat waiting with Caroline Aherne, who I had seen on TV and been on the bill with a couple of times. She was doing her Sister Mary Immaculate character. I couldn’t help but notice how beautiful she was up close.

Some of the other acts could barely hide their surprise at my presence. They were all bill-toppers, seasoned pros, whereas I was not fully established throughout the London comedy scene. Many of them had seen me die a death, but there I was, on the same show and the same money as them. Despite my nerves, my set went down well, generating laughs in all the right places.

A few months later the show aired on TV. I was horrified – not only at my pale, sweating, tubby form onscreen, but also by the fact that my set had been trimmed down in the edit so much that almost all of the set-ups had been removed, so that while I appeared to get plenty of laughs, nothing made any sense. Worse, the large microphone obscured the lower half of my face. I had hoped that this appearance might help me get more club bookings, but many of the promoters I contacted told me that they had seen me on TV and didn’t think I was ready yet. It had done more harm than good!

Nonetheless I dug my heels in and continued to gig, and over the coming months I received more interest from TV producers. However, as much as I wanted to work in television I became anxious at the thought of having to surrender control to editors and producers. I was also concerned that I would be using up my best material on TV and would then have to drop it from my live act, as audiences would already be familiar with it. I wasn’t yet confident enough, prolific enough or funny enough to churn out dozens of new gags for each TV show – nor was I established enough to have writers working for me – so I became judicious with my TV appearances, preferring Sir Bernard to appear in conversation, rather than give away the most valuable jokes from my stand-up act.

My favourite TV appearance as Chumley was on Barrymore. Michael Barrymore was one of my heroes. While Vic and Bob were innovators on BBC Two, Barrymore was truly anarchic on primetime ITV. These days he’s remembered less for his work and more for events in his life, but at his peak he was in a league of his own. I was almost sleepless with excitement at the prospect of appearing on the sofa with him. He was perhaps the biggest comic in the country at the time, but he was generous and encouraging, both onscreen and off. Our chat finished with a duet – the Lee Dorsey hit ‘Working In The Coalmine’. I was allowed to choose the song and it amused me to pick the most random one I could think of.

Though I had intended to gig a lot less while at university, I found it hard to resist the lure of the spotlight. There were a couple of comedy clubs in Bristol which I would play, and I’d head off most weekends either to London or some far-flung corner of Britain to perform.

The best place to improve, though, was at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, not least because it was customary to take only one or two nights off. By gigging almost every night for a month, you could really sharpen and hone your act.

I went up four years in a row, the first time with Vic and Bob’s pal Dorian Crook in 1994, and the next three years with my funny friend David Williams – now Walliams, as there was already a David Williams in the actors’ union. As well as stand-up, the shows featured daft songs and we were joined by my university course mate Tim Atack on the keyboard.

It was during the Edinburgh Festival in 1995 that I had one of my most memorable gigs – and not for the right reasons . . .

Reeves and Mortimer had come to town, to headline a show at the Edinburgh Playhouse, which Mark Lamarr was hosting and which would also feature Harry Hill, Sean Lock and Charlie Chuck.

The gig was due to start at about 11 p.m. and the plan was for me to go on first and do ten minutes, and then dash off to the Assembly Rooms for my hour-long midnight show with David and Tim as usual.

However, on arriving at the Playhouse, I saw that the street was full of people waiting to get in. The ballet that was on before us was seriously over-running, so I went over to the Assembly Rooms, did my regular midnight show with David and Tim and then returned to the Playhouse, where the gig had finally begun.

I popped my head around the back of the auditorium. The audience – who had been kept waiting for over an hour – were not in a very generous mood. Addison Cresswell, who was promoting the gig, told me not to panic, that I had fifteen minutes before I was due on. What neither of us realised was that the act before me – who was having a bit of a nightmare – was cutting his set down radically as he went. Less than two minutes later I heard myself being introduced.

It was quarter to two in the morning. I walked out to the centre of the stage, blinded by the light. The place was sold out – there were over three thousand people there.

To my surprise – and relief – my opening few gags went down really well. My set was designed to reel them in with some humdingers at the start, before the more theatrical, surreal stuff would start to happen.

But on this night – or rather morning – the stranger stuff left the audience cold. And they stopped laughing. I was only supposed to do ten minutes, and the first three minutes had been great. The next two were a little quieter and then it started . . .

‘Get off!’ came the voice.

As I hadn’t had a laugh for a couple of minutes, I didn’t quite have the authority to take this heckler down, especially as he was joined by a couple more and then, within seconds, a couple more. Also, with the spotlight so bright in my eyes, I couldn’t see them, but I could hear that they were up on the balcony, miles away. Often in a small club you could wander over to the culprit, size them up and engage. Not here.

And now they could smell blood. There were maybe six of them in a room of over three thousand, but it was enough. They made so much noise that I was drowned out. To my credit I didn’t hang about. I got off stage within seconds. But I couldn’t pretend it had been anything other than a disaster, and a very public one at that.

For the rest of the evening – for the rest of the festival, in fact – comics and industry people came to commiserate with me. I’m sure the intention was to make me feel better, but each time it just confirmed that yet another important person had witnessed my humiliation.

It wasn’t the first bad gig I’d had and it wouldn’t be the last, but the scale of it felt enormous and very public.

Just a few weeks later, I faced another challenge when I was booked to join Blur on tour, as their support act.

I’d already met the band, having been asked to appear in the video for their single ‘Country House’. Director Damien Hirst (clang, split in two, preserved in formaldehyde and sold for a million) wanted a bald guy to get chased by some sexy girls – in a reference to The Benny Hill Show.

My memories of the shoot mainly involve having several asthma attacks as I ran round and round for hours on a hot soundstage full of farm animals crapping everywhere (them, not me). Even now, whenever I hear that song, I suffer a mild panic attack.

I had a laugh with the band, though. Alex, the bass player, had seen me on TV a week or two before the shoot and remembered some of my gags. At the end of filming, I said goodbye and that, I assumed, would be that – but during our Edinburgh run my agent called to tell me that Blur had been back in touch. They were doing a mini-tour of UK seaside towns, as a warm-up for a big arena tour, and wanted a comic to support them. Was I potentially available and did I have a video recording of my act that they could watch?

Yes and yes.

My dad dropped me off on York Way in King’s Cross where the tour bus was waiting. There would be eight shows in nine days. Usually the support act would travel separately, but as I didn’t drive, the band had agreed to let me travel with them.

It was the week of the release of The Great Escape album. The battle with Oasis had hit its peak and the two bands, constantly sneering at each other, were the darlings of the tabloids. Each morning we’d eagerly sift through all the papers and see what Noel or Liam had said about them. Damon or Alex would usually have a pithy response. They knew it was a game and they played it well.

The band wanted to watch my set on the opening night, but I discouraged them, telling them it might take me a gig or two to work out what the crowd wanted. I should have let them see that gig, because it was probably one of the best ones I had on the whole tour – or rather, one of the only ones I managed to get through. Well, I say ‘get through’ – I had been booked to do half an hour but I never managed more than fifteen minutes.

The following night, in Dunoon, where Blur were not only the biggest band in Britain but the first major act to play there since the Tourists fifteen years earlier, I lasted a full two minutes, before the crowd dispensed with my services as one, gleefully shouting ‘You fat bastard! You fat bastard!’

I couldn’t blame them. There they were, a horde of frenzied teenage girls and there was I, a doughy, pudgy, surreal stand-up. While I had a warm response in a couple of the venues, I would say at least five of the gigs were calamitous – and that’s me being generous.

While the audiences declared war on me nightly, the band at least took pity on me. I grew quite close to Alex James and Dave Rowntree, in particular – continuing to see them long after the tour was over – but any of my friends who came along would stammer in their presence. In Brighton, David Walliams came to visit and when I introduced him to Damon he was so starstruck he could barely speak.

After the show, the band and their crew would get plastered. I didn’t drink much – preferring to smoke pot, as ever. It had become a real habit by then. In Bournemouth we went into the sea in the middle of the night, then Alex swanned around the hotel, naked. I was impressed by the band’s lack of inhibition and their conscientious adherence to the rock lifestyle – all while absolutely killing it onstage every night.

Shortly after the tour ended, the first series of Shooting Stars aired on BBC Two (more of that later). I carried on gigging as Sir Bernard for another eighteen months – sometimes to audiences who heckled me throughout, calling for my TV persona George Dawes – but Shooting Stars was opening doors and I was keen to step through them. I’d slogged the circuit for four and a half years, doing hundreds of shows. I’d had the best of times and the worst. Now I was ready to move on.