Part and parcel of being a comic is travelling. Primarily because there’s a hell of a lot of it. If you can’t bear the thought of driving/sitting on a train or (depending on how well your career is going) on a Megabus for hours so you can have the pleasure of performing for 20 minutes to a room full of strangers then stand up comedy is probably not for you.
Several years ago I booked a certain open spot to perform a short set at my Birmingham gig. She showed a lot of promise and the gig itself is lovely and unlike at some clubs, the open spot was paid. Nevertheless, once there she continuously bemoaned the fact that she had travelled up from London to perform for a mere 10 minutes. The headliner, Shazia Mirza, looked on rather unimpressed, understandably given that she’d just been to Malaysia and back to perform for 20 minutes. It was then I knew that her joke writing and performance skills notwithstanding, if that was her attitude, it was only a matter of time before this particular open spot would stop gigging.
In a way, being an open spot and travelling around the country for little or no money is a rite of passage. Every comic has done it and it really does make you realise how much you want (or don’t want) to do stand up.
And thanks to English being such a universal language, British comics get to perform further afield. This September alone I flew to Oslo and Lloret de Mar in Spain to perform stand up. It may sound glamorous but the reality of performing abroad is often far more prosaic. For starters, you tend to arrive on the day of the gig, usually mid-afternoon, you are taken to the hotel, whereupon I personally tend to have a snooze/watch some telly/have a coffee, then it’s off to the gig and once that’s done and dusted it’s back to the hotel and next morning you’re off to the airport, having seen almost nothing of the city you’ve been performing in.
This time however part of the Spanish deal was that I got to stay in a 4-star hotel for the whole weekend. I remember a similar jolly in Cyprus a couple of years back where I spent 4 whole days sunning myself by a pool, reading a book and then had to work 20 minutes in the evening telling jokes to ex-pats. Its times like these I really love my job.
Staying in Spain. Sometimes I love my job!
Unlike the Cyprus job, this time we were in the same hotel as the audience. This can prove a double-edged sword, particularly if a gig goes pear-shape. There is nothing worse than dying a slow and painful death only to keep bumping into members of the audience for the next couple of days while you’re trying to sidle through the foyer or have your breakfast. I once died a very painful death at a weekender and then had to spend 6 hours in a coach the next day with a third of the audience. Before the show I’d joked how funny it would be if that were to happen. In reality, it turned out it wasn’t that amusing.
Luckily for Glenda Jaxson and my good self the gig in Lloret de Mar went well. At dinner that night in a local restaurant various audience members kept on coming up to us telling us how much they enjoyed the show. So much so that the British owner of the restaurant, believing we were famous, apologised for not recognising us. We assured her she wasn’t alone in not knowing who we were! This, sadly, would apparently include the bookers who had misspelled my name in the publicity.
You know you’re famous when the bookers don’t even get your name right!
As for Oslo, having never been there before, I decided to take a late flight back home and check out the city the next day. It’s a lovely city but as even fellow Scandinavians find it expensive, you can appreciate that as a Brit the prices are eye-watering. Just to give you an idea one of the comics bought a bottle of house red and it cost him £60! It is times like that I’m glad I don’t tend to drink (well, apart from spirits).
Given the cost of living in Oslo I opted for a visit to the Vigeland Sculpture Park. The main advantage was that it was free entry but as it was bucketing down, it was also very wet. Then once I’d seen the sights, there was the question of where to have lunch without having to take out a small bank loan. I had come prepared, armed with numerous Boots meal deals but having mistaken a raspberry vodka drink for fruit juice and downed 3 of them in pretty quick succession the night before, (obviously I wasn’t buying), once home, in my rather inebriated state, I had felt the need for carbs and managed to demolish most of my supplies. So by lunch time, there was only one thing for it: I had to bite the bullet and go to McDonalds where I ended up paying £13 for a meal deal. Luckily I paid in Norwegian Krona and somehow using foreign money made it seem a lot less painful.
Explaining to Jen my Oslo adventures.
Then I made the most of the fact that you can use a £3.50 public transport ticket for an hour’s boat ride round the Oslofjord which must make it one of the best value-for-money activities in the whole of Norway and cheaper than the bottle of lemon tea I later bought at the airport.
Enjoying the sights in Oslo.
As for gigging around Britain, it has had the advantage of making me an expert in wangling cheap train tickets and becoming rather well-acquainted with numerous service stations along the M1. The night tube has proved a blessing for London-based comics as there is nothing worse than arriving in the early hours of the morning where the designated driver dumps you on the wrong side of London only for you to have to take several night buses back to yours. At times it can take longer to get across London than the actual journey back to London from wherever you were gigging in the first place.
On one memorable occasion with Jen Brister we were coming back from Birmingham on the last London-bound train and didn’t get back to mine till 4 in the morning. First the train was delayed, so we arrived in London just in time for us to miss the night bus, which meant a half an hour wait for the next one which promptly broke down so we had to wait another half an hour for the one after that. Jen was so pissed off she actually stopped speaking. For Jen to be so pissed off she doesn’t even feel like a rant is quite something and also something ideally I never have to experience again. On the plus side, we were on the train for so long that we managed to record one of our award-winning (not) podcasts. Unaware what lay before us, Jen is in full rant mode, buoyed up by a couple of small bottles of red wine, and I’m in hysterics. It’s probably one of the funniest podcasts we’ve recorded which is slightly worrying (for me) as I hardly contribute anything to the conversation.
https://soundcloud.com/jen-brister/maureen-jen-9
Then there are the car journeys. Ideally, you want to be in a car with people you like. I would think most comics have lied at some point or other to avoid being in a car with certain people. I once chose a 6 ½ coach journey (including being stuck for 3 hours at Birmingham Coach Station) over going back to London with the designated driver. Mind you, when I mention who the designated driver was to most comedians, they tend to agree that I made the right decision.
Often on these journeys comics tend to have a good old gossip/bitch about fellow comics. You have to be careful though as in this business you never know for sure who might be friends with whom. In other words, it’s always best to check. However, there are some comics who, as a general rule, it’s easy to gossip about as they tend not to be held in particular high esteem so you can be pretty sure of the response. But don’t do what I did once. Talking about one of these comics, on what had proved to be a very long and tedious car journey, my quip was met with silence. This surprised me somewhat until it dawned on me: the comic in question was sitting behind me.
