Can't Stand Up for Sitting Down

by Jo Brand

  Major concerns round the country seem to be crime, parking and rubbish. The other bit of the paper I use a lot is the letters page, on which complaints about dog poo and petty crime feature heavily. The review of the papers can last anything from two minutes to fifteen depending on how well it goes. In Brecon once, I mentioned a story about a minor earthquake and an interview with a woman who’d said that when she’d heard the earthquake, she’d assumed it was her Labrador wagging his tail against the side of the bath. Of course, several people knew her!

  It’s quite interesting how the amount of material one does in a show can expand enormously or concertina down into almost half the length, depending on how relaxed you are and how responsive the audience is.

  I had a particularly difficult gig at the Hammersmith Apollo one night which was being filmed for TV. For some reason, I have always felt that the audience at the Apollo were not my natural constituency and so I always found it a bit of a struggle. But on this particular day it was even more difficult because my dear, lovely grandma Maisie had died the night before and I was feeling very sad and slightly out of touch with reality Maybe I shouldn’t have gone ahead with it, but I thought once I got on stage I could just work my way through on automatic pilot. I had prepared forty minutes of material, which is what they wanted but, given that the audience seemed a bit cold and I felt like I was on another planet, for some reason my set shrank down to twenty minutes because I rushed it and pruned all the excess, which one normally includes when one is relaxed and on a roll. Well, there was a slight hiatus and I marched off stage feeling defeated. The poor compere, Russell Howard, who’d expected me to be on for another twenty minutes, was in the lay so the audience was treated to an empty stage while someone rushed round in a panic trying to find him.

  The upshot of this was that the production company asked me to come back two days later and do some more material, as the pathetic amount I’d produced was not enough for my allotted slot on telly.

  Knowing that all my material had been used up, this meant that the material I’d have to do two days later would all have to be new stuff. This was terrifying, because normally new material takes at least five live shows to work in and to give you the chance to dump stuff which is crap. I didn’t have the luxury of this time available so I had to write some stuff and do it for the very first time in front of an audience of 3,000 people whilst being filmed for telly What a fucking nightmare. So off I went two days later to the theatre and just trotted it out to the best of my ability Lenny Henry was compering, the audience was up for a good night and thank God, on the whole the material worked. It didn’t storm it, but I would never have expected it first time out and I was just relieved that they didn’t stare at me for fifteen minutes without laughing.

  One concept comics are very familiar with is that of ‘getting on a roll’. This is when the audience seems to laugh continuously throughout the whole performance, and as the laugh dies down from one joke or remark it starts to build up for the next bit. Not only do they laugh at punch lines, they laugh at the build-up to jokes as well. It’s a glorious thing to be a performer in a show like that. It doesn’t happen all the time and on many occasions you get a sort of stop/start response to your jokes. Laugh-silence-laugh-silence is the pattern, and once it’s been set up it’s hard to break. ‘I never really got on a roll,’ is the lament of many a comic at a difficult gig.

  Encores are always lovely too, but it’s important not to expect them. There’s nothing better as you walk off stage than to hear huge applause, and then the shouts start to build gradually for ‘More!’ until they become a roar and feet are stamped too, and it’s so great to go back on and bask in it. It doesn’t always happen, but I suppose it is always the aim of the comic to get as many encores as possible. I think Billy Connolly is the King of the Multiple Encore. The most I’ve had is three.

  I discovered information about each town I performed in by reading the Rough Guide to Great Britain, and during the gig I would tell the audience, ‘Well, the Fucking Rough Guide in your case.’ Worked every time!

  Basingstoke

  Very hung over after a night in Hastings the night before. Had to stare straight in front of me on stage to avoid being sick.

  Bedford

  Bedford has a delightful entry in the Rough Guide to England which states, The town need not detain you. I’m sure the people of Bedford are mighty impressed by that.

  My favourite night at Bedford involved the sound and lighting man being quite pissed and falling over onto his desk, cutting the sound and lights at the same time. It was a real Carrie moment and I was expecting a bucket of blood on my head at any second. As well as this, a woman in the audience asked me to sign one of her bosoms: something that has never happened before or indeed since. She informed me that she wanted to show it to her husband.

  ‘Where’s he tonight then?’ I asked.

  ‘In the nick,’ came her reply.

  Birmingham

  Birmingham is always a joy People are friendly welcoming and happy to see you. It’s always lovely to get a really big cheer when you come on, with no holds barred. Many towns and cities withhold their initial reaction until they’ve had a look at the goods.

  Birmingham is also under the jurisdiction of King Jasper Carrott who, every year, does a huge show at the NEC (12,000 seats — ooer!) There is normally a cavalcade of interesting stars and I worked with Jack Dee, Dame Edna, Manfred Mann and some sweeties off The X Factor. Someone attempted a rather over-intimate massage to relax me before the show (he was actually a professional masseur), and I left the massage area as soon as was humanly possible.

  Brighton

  Vibrant, cool and good fun. The Dome in Brighton is the only time a rather disturbed punter found their way back stage and demanded to be put on the show to do five minutes. Typically, John the tour manager was right over the other side of the building, but I managed to phone someone called Joe from Off the Kerb and leave a message. Atypically, Joe called me back just at a critical moment when this bloke’s face was about an inch away from mine. Not only that, he’d obviously not realised quite how disturbed this guy was and was laughing uproariously at the end of the phone, saying, ‘Shall we give him five minutes? Do you think he’s any good?’ I was terrified that the intruder would hear what he was saying and deck me, but thankfully, at that moment John appeared behind me and our friend was ‘escorted from the premises’, as the euphemism goes.

  A slightly more pleasant experience involved Sir Ian McKellen, with whom I took part in a benefit at the Dome. I was sitting at the mirror in the dressing room back-combing my hair to produce The Bride of Frankenstein look, which I loved in the eighties, and Sir Ian went past. Spotting me doing my hair, he said, ‘Ooh, can I do that?’

  And he did — the one and only time I’ve ever had an acting legend sort my hair out for me.

  Bristol

  I love Bristol. One of my first big gigs was in a venue called the Bierkeller, which was obviously a music venue. The dressing room contained one of those wrecked, scuzzy settees I have already mentioned, and the stage was carpeted and looked well manky. It was. When I stepped on it my feet stuck to it as if they had been glued and each step towards the mic was accompanied by a tearing sound as I tried to lift my foot off the carpet. The audience was enthusiastic and drunk.

  You can tell how long ago it was because I had some material about the Chippendales, the delightful male dancers/strippers who were flavour of the month back in the early nineties. As I progressed through my little five-minute routine on the Chippendales, a voice heckled from the back in a perfect West Country accent:

  ‘They’re all queer, they are.’ Well, there were still a few steadfast pockets of homophobia round the country.

  ‘How do you know that?’ I asked.

  The reply came, again in that gorgeous accent. ‘I ‘eard it down the Colston ‘All.’

  The Colston Hall was a venue a little distance away that was bigger and I hadn’t quit
e progressed to it by that point. But I was interested in the fact that it seemed to be the fount of all knowledge on sexuality Years later, I actually made it to the Colston Hall and related this event to the audience, asking them, ‘How do you know?’

  A voice floated back across the crowd, ‘We just do.’

  Bromsgrove

  Bromsgrove is a little town lying just outside Birmingham. I came out of the dressing room to stand outside on the pavement just as three police cars, sirens blaring, swept up. I immediately, of course, thought they were after me. They weren’t. One of the theatre staff had laid into a female relative outside the stage door. A very surreal night indeed.

  Cambridge

  Oooh, posh as you like in Cambridge, comrades. Tried to get the audience to guess what my ‘wife leader’ was. (It’s a woven stick with an elasticated end to attach to your wife’s finger and lead her round by, used in the Caribbean 300 years ago.) Fantastic woman in front row threw out the suggestion, ‘Is it a cassava juice extractor?’ Blimey, what sort of kitchen shops do you have in Cambridge?

  Cheltenham

  Cheltenham is dead posh, no doubt about that. Performing at the Town Hall is like being in a museum, surrounded as you are by marble busts of various luminaries, giving the whole thing a bit of an historical feel. This doesn’t mean that the audience are staid and stuffy, even though they look it a bit, and any trawl I have done through the local papers there has always been good fun, obsessed as they seem to be with parking and dog poo. Oh, the great British sensibilities — you can’t beat ‘em!

  Derby

  Derby seems to me like a bit of a scary old town. The gigs I have done there have always been good, apart from having a bomb-scare at one all-women’s gig from a disgruntled male punter. However, there is a street in Derby which is full of pubs and clubs, all the doors fiercely guarded by bloody massive bouncers in dicky bows and evening jackets. (Always seems so weird to me that they are dressed up posh yet ready to punch your lights out.) After a show one night we went down this particular street to have a Chinese, and just walking down it terrified the life out of me. I take my hat off to anyone who is brave enough to actually go and have a whole night out there.

  Hastings

  My home town, where I grew up as a teenager. Always a pleasure to be there, despite receiving a letter in the dressing room once, saying:

  Dear Miss Brand,

  Please do not come back to Hastings again.

  Yours faithfully etc etc.

  I recently did a benefit for my nephew’s football changing hut which had been burned down, and took the piss out of a bloke’s hair in the second row, without realising it was my brother’s mother-in-law’s bloke.

  Note to self: wear glasses on stage.

  Ipswich and Norwich

  I have put these two cities together, not because they are particularly similar but because they suffer the misfortune of being in an area of the country which, for comedy reasons, is full of interbred people and very flat, and therefore the inhabitants doubtless are regaled endlessly with jokes about cousins marrying, fingers in dykes and being able to see your friends standing fifty miles away Consequently, I steered well clear of this when I was up there. They didn’t seem particularly grateful though.

  Leicester

  By the time we hit the brand new pristine council venue in Leicester, the smoking ban had kicked in big time and there were signs everywhere demanding No Smoking throughout the venue. It was in Leicester that we experimented with the idea of putting a condom over the smoke alarm. Worked a treat.

  Maidstone

  Maidstone, sorry, you had the worst toilets of any theatre 1 have ever been to, and the dressing room wasn’t much better. It seemed rather fitting then that I forgot my smart shoes and had to wear flip-flops on stage instead.

  Manchester

  I’ve performed in Manchester loads of times. The audiences there tend to be cynical, clever and discerning. I made a huge faux pas at the Free Trade Hall once, which interestingly was the scene of Bob Dylan’s metamorphosis from acoustic to electronic music, during which a member of the audience called out ‘Judas!’ I came close to knowing how that felt.

  At the time, our tour manager John was doing some security work and had a bullet-proof vest in the boot of the car. So for a laugh (how much trouble has that phrase prefaced?) I put the vest on, and when I went on stage, remarked that I was wearing it because we were quite close to the notorious crime area of Moss Side. BIG MISTAKE. The booing started at the back and swept forward in a great tidal wave towards me.

  Bloody hell, I thought. I’m going to have to get off now and I’ve only just come on.

  The only thing for it was to apologise, which I did, and it seemed to pour oil on troubled waters. The audience accepted it and I carried on, and getting to the end of the hour, I felt that I had managed to claw the evening back. However, it taught me the lesson that some towns and cities do not like having parts of their whole having the piss taken out of them, and it’s important to know which those places are.

  I remember once doing a phone interview for the Manchester Evening News to promote the show. I could hear by the journalist’s tone of voice that he didn’t like me. He was sarcastic and taking the piss at every opportunity I thought no more about it, as I don’t voraciously follow up every interview I’ve done to see if it’s positive. However, while I was in the hotel bar in Manchester with Jeff and John and a couple of sound guys who were touring with us, one of the sound guys, called Simon, happened to mention that he had seen the interview although he hadn’t read it all. Normally, there were lots of free copies lying around in this particular hotel, but I couldn’t see a single one. So I went to the desk and asked if I could borrow one. The concierge handed his over and I grew increasingly depressed as I read a complete demolition of my character. Apparently I was vain, full of false modesty not funny but boring… and so it went on. Our planned night out clubbing was replaced by me hiding in my room with a bottle of vodka, getting rat-arsed and refusing to talk to anyone. Yes, I know —self-pitying and childish … I just am sometimes. Poor Simon the sound man felt very guilty. What had actually happened was that Jeff and John had read the interview and, thinking it really unpleasant, had thrown all the free copies of it in the bin while I was in the lay. Not knowing this, poor Simon had mentioned it and led me right down the road to a dose of reality Still, by the next morning I was over it.

  On a separate occasion, in Manchester, John took on an entire rugby team — and came off worse, surprisingly — and I found one of our sound men asleep in the corridor of the hotel when I got up in the morning. Those were the days, my friend.

  Middlesbrough

  They don’t really laugh in Middlesbrough, but go completely mental at the end of the show. I have checked this out with other comics and they all say the same. Had a first there too. Got a note from some bloke asking me to propose on his behalf. It was accepted by said lady.

  I did a student gig there once and was told at the local poly which was about to become a university that the students had requested it be named Central University (of) Northern Tyneside. Yes, that acronym would certainly have been classy.

  Also, Middlesbrough is the place where I have been most off my head following a drinking sesh and foolishly accepting a blue tablet from a bloke I didn’t really know.

  Nottingham

  I have done Nottingham quite a few times and every time 1 step out onto the stage and face the audience, they appear to be completely pissed, even on a couple of Sunday nights when I’ve been there. Also, they seem to be really keen to join in, and a higher than average number of audience members just throw what appear to be random thoughts into the ether. None of it is ever particularly malevolent; they just want to join in.

  I once did a gig in Nottingham (I think it was Nottingham, forgive me, it may have been Leicester) next to a roller-skating rink.

  Rather foolishly, as we had got there early and had a bit of time to spare, we de
cided to go roller-skating. I have always been rubbish at that sort of thing, but got stuck in with enthusiasm, and within a minute or so, having fallen several times I found myself plunging towards the floor head first and gave myself a really nasty crack on the skull. I didn’t get knocked out, but I did feel quite weird. On top of that, ridiculously I had a few beers and by the time the show was due to start I felt decidedly woozy and out of touch with reality It may have been concussion, I don’t know.

  The show was delayed and because it was Nottingham (or Leicester) the audience weren’t having it, and after five minutes, set up a chant of ‘Why are we waiting?’ —the only time this has ever happened to me. As there was no back-stage area because of the way the stage had been constructed, I had to go on stage to introduce Andy — and given that I was a bit bonkers, I lambasted the audience in a far more aggressive way than I would do normally It didn’t set the scene for a very friendly night and poor old Andy had to go on after this and try to rein things in. We got through it, but it was perhaps the strangest mental state I’ve ever been in when faced with a performance.

  Oxford

  I was slightly on edge in Oxford one night, having received a weird letter the night before in Winchester, which made no sense whatsoever, apart from numerous, rather unsettling mentions of Peter Sutcliffe. Off the Kerb kindly provided a big scary guy called Tony, should the letter-writer turn up and try to do damage. Thankfully he didn’t.