There is a man in my house. Its not me. I am here as well, but there is also a man. A man who is here to fix things. I’m not entirely sure what things needed to be fixed but Layla has left a list with words on it such as ‘sink’ and ‘TV’. These are all a mystery to me as I was fairly sure that everything worked ok, but I am obviously wrong. As penance for my wrongness I had to get up at 8.30 today which really hurts. The man is oblivious to this pain as he goes about doing ‘sink’ and ‘TV’. He is a very nice man and he has been here before fixing things I don’t understand about. He also doesn’t speak much English at all. I don’t speak any Polish. This makes communication past making him a cup of tea rather difficult. There is no small talk at all and I’m not sure if this makes it all more difficult or less. There’s none of that chat where I have to pretend I am more cockney than I am and say ‘mate’ a lot but at the same time it makes it harder to know what he is doing or if he needs anything. I have opted for giving him tea then hiding in whatever room he is not in and ignoring him. In our tiny flat this is hard but I am doing well so far by tucking myself as far into our living room corner as possible and denying any awareness of my surroundings.
The Man Who Fixes Stuff
There were communication difficulties at the gig last night too. I think this may be because students of Bristol Uni are so rich that all they understand is that their dads probably own my dad, and me and everything ever. It was impossible to tell whether they really enjoyed the night or not. Any banter with them went down very well but any jokes tended to fall a tad flat. I think I put this down to them all being self absorbed posh twats.
To be fair it didn’t start good. When myself and Steve Mould arrived the bar staff looked a tad perplexed as to whether or not anyone should know that we were there. After a very long time a man appeared and started setting up the stage. When we approached him he apologised for not being very professional before wandering off for 30 minutes without telling us anything. It was almost as if by speaking of his lack of professionalism he wanted to live up to it in its entirety. He eventually re-appeared and we managed to get enough information out of him this time to understand there was a backstage area we could use. The words he used were “sorry, its not very glamorous”. As a comic I don’t expect glamour. I don’t expect big fruit bowls or comfy sofas. All I want is somewhere I can hide during the interval and put my bag. However, the comment about the lack of glamour was the biggest understatement ever. It was a dirty cupboard behind the bar. Notch 2 on the bedpost of unprofessionalism. Both Steve and I were baffled as to why the cupboard had 3 large cannisters of liquid nitrogen. I became paranoid that like Lando Calrissian in ‘Empire…’ they would turn us into Vader and freeze us for Jabba’s bounty.
The first half went ok with the students constantly keeping Steve and myself on our toes by deciding to laugh loudly at some things and then not at all at others. This might sound like reasonable crowd behavior, but it wasn’t when you consider that sometimes they laughed at set ups and not punchlines. There was an awkwardly long interval so the bar could sell more drinks and I spent some time watching the ball room dancing in the other room. Its amazing how female ballroom dancers look pretty hot doing all fancy footwork while male dancers tend to just look uber camp. It could just be that all the men doing the ballroom dancing were uber camp, but I will never know and now will just unfairly judge all ballroom dancing. I think this is the correct mind set to take.
Second half was nicer but still odd, and I only got a really great response when I did material about the Welsh bloke in the front. Its amazing how xenophobia works in a rich crowd. Then Sean Percival went on, had a good one then left the stage and the building in ridiculously fast time. I have witnessed him do this before and its something I very much respect. I often want to leave gigs as quickly as possible but Sean is a master as just walking off stage and out of the building and into his car. I don’t know what he’d do if he got an encore.
Fat Tuesday tonight and a sold out crowd which is all a bit lovely. What is not lovely is that I now have to go Homebase with the fixing man. Here goes 30 minutes of uncomfortable silence in a car followed by asking Homebase staff where bathroom silicon is and waiting while their brain explodes with the complexity of the question.
