Do you remember the Blair–Brown summit that famously took place in that Italian restaurant in north London? The power-transitioning pact made over meatballs, gnocchi and affogato? Well, I like to think Mel and I got there first, when in 1993, at the food court in Victoria station, on plastic chairs nestled between the warring outlets of Singapore Sam’s and Spud-U-Like, we shook hands on a plan to take our first show to Edinburgh.
Mel and I had left it rather late to sort a venue for the festival, so after the highs of the Spud-U-Like summit we were forced to confront a more realistic reality. Come February, most venues are already fully booked, but we managed to get our friend Hartley, who was running the C Venue on Princess Street, to give us his last available slot, which happened to be at
10.05 a.m.
Yes, that holy grail of comedic timeslots, the hour of the day that every self-respecting performer wants to make their mark on. I can’t imagine why there wasn’t more of a clamour for the
10.05 a.m.
slot, since that’s universally acknowledged to be the most fun time of day. What you might not know, is that at
10.05 a.m.
your body and mind are at their most receptive to sixty minutes of surrealist, stream-of-consciousness sketches performed by total unknowns in an airless box overlooking a busy thoroughfare. And if that isn’t enough to convince you, the other amazing thing about the
10.05 a.m.
slot, is that it’s not the more conventional
10.00 a.m.
slot, which is when all the competing shows start.
What can I say? We were way ahead of the curve.
And so, for our first Edinburgh Festival together, an event world renowned for its bacchanalian excess and hedonistic splendour, we had the
10.05 a.m.
slot, meaning we had to get up at
8.00 a.m.
EIGHT A.M. Just as our peers were going to bed after a night on the tiles, we would be getting up and bracing ourselves for the long walk to Princess Street from our student digs.
Putting on a show isn’t cheap, so we scraped together what we could and borrowed money from our families on the understanding we’d try to turn a profit. Part of our crowd-luring strategy focused on the name of the show, The Naked Brunch. Great, eh? Eh? What do you mean, it’s shit? You’re obviously missing the hilarious subtext. It’s a play on both William S. Burrough’s seminal drug-vignette novel and the time of day we were performing. Brilliant, isn’t it? And in no way obscure/pretentious/doomed to failure.
I set off for this, our first Edinburgh Festival together, at around 8 p.m. one evening in August. I had a backpack and a large bin liner, which held my share of our vast array of props. Mum was having a dinner party, was elbow-deep in Marie Rose sauce and didn’t even hear me say goodbye. I slipped out of the house. It felt exciting. I felt like Dick Whittington.
The plan was for me to take the direct train from Sanderstead to Victoria and meet Mel at the coach station. From there we’d get the all-night National Express to Scotland. It was a perfect plan, although if there was a flaw in it, that flaw would be called South East Trains.
I waited at the deserted platform for the 8.03 p.m. train. 8:03 p.m. came and went. No worries, I thought – I can still catch the 8.33 and be in plenty of time. 8.33 came and went. Still no train. Finally a bored adenoidal voice on the tannoy, ‘South East Trains regrets to inform you that all trains have been cancelled due to a fault further up the line.’ The whine of feedback. Then a deafening silence.
I went into a flat panic. You can’t do this, I thought. You can’t have a fault on the line! Not now! Not today! I have to peddle my ‘barely rehearsed’** form of sketch comedy at the Edinburgh Festival. I need to be there!
I panicked. I didn’t own a mobile, and the nearby payphone was so lacquered in acrid man-piss it had long since stopped working. There was only one thing to do. This was a bona-fide crisis, so it followed I’d need someone who could embrace that crisis. I needed to get Ann Perkins – Mega-Mum – involved.
I left the station and walked home, fast. The bag of props rattled in time with my footsteps. There was the rhythmic squeak of a plastic chicken and the rustle of a nylon Swedish-blonde-fantasy wig. From a distance it looked like I’d murdered Britt Ekland and kept her hair as some form of trophy.
I arrived home just after 9.15 p.m. Mum was half-cut,** in a velour playsuit, breadcrumbing the hell out of some Icelandic prawns. Dad was exchanging blue jokes with his best mate Mick and his wife Eve.
‘What’s happened?’ said Mum, one eye on me, the other on a meringue nest.
‘There are no trains, Mum. They’re all cancelled. I’m going to miss my coach. I’m going to miss the festival.’ And I was so tired and so exasperated, I might just have had a little cry.
There were two ways Mum could have gone. She could have pointed out that the festival runs for a whole month and therefore I would hardly miss a thing. OR she could join me in making a mountain out of a molehill. My mum’s whole life has been about waiting and preparing for catastrophe to come knocking. And here it was. An actual catastrophe. And she wasn’t about to look that shit-horse in the mouth.
‘Right,’ she said with a steeliness which was thrilling, ‘I’m taking you. Call Victoria and be ready to leave in the next few minutes.’
I dragged down the enormous phone directory from the shelf and thumbed through its pages. Finally I arrived at the Customer Services number for Victoria Coach Station and dialled. Minutes later, someone answered.
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Hello. Victoria. |
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Me: |
Hello, Victoria. I’m Sue. I need you to do me a massive favour. I’m due to meet a friend of mine around about now and I am late. Very late. I need you to get a message to her. Can you do that? |
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Woman: |
Mmm. I don’t know. We’d have to put it out on the tannoy. Is it an emergency? |
I stared at the squeaky chicken in my bag. Yes, of course! I wanted to scream. I’m young! EVERYTHING is an emergency! ‘It’s very important I get in touch with her,’ I replied, moderately but firmly. ‘It’s urgent.’
‘OK,’ she said. ‘Who am I trying to contact?’
And then the full nightmare struck me. I was going to have to spell Mel’s surname out to her. Over the years I’d come to realize that you have to set aside a good fifteen minutes to get that properly through to someone. I looked at my watch. It was 9.28 p.m.
‘Mel,’ I said desperately, hoping that would be sufficient.
‘Mel who?’ she replied.
DAMN!
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Me: |
Won’t ‘Mel’ do? |
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Woman: |
No, it won’t. There might be lots of Mels. I’m afraid I’m going to need a surname. |
I take a deep breath in preparation.
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Me: |
Giedroyc. |
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Woman: |
[slight pause] Goodrich? |
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Me: |
Giedroyc. |
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Woman: |
Oh. Oh. OK. [Another pause] Say it again? |
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[slower this time] Giedroyc. |
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Woman: |
And how do you spell that? |
Trust me, that won’t help, I think, but carry on nonetheless.
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Me: |
G-I-E-D-R-O-Y-C. |
I hear the endless scratch of her pen.
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Woman: |
So that’s Guy-ed-ro-ik? |
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Me: |
[raising my voice in desperation] It’s pronounced Ged-roy-ch. |
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Woman: |
Gee-roy-cee. |
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Me: |
[bellowing] GED-ROY-CH. |
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Woman: |
Ged-royds? |
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Me: |
That’ll do. Perfect. Thank you. |
I gave her the message and put the phone down. It was now 9.31 p.m.
We ran down the front steps and hurled ourselves into the car. Then, of course, we had to negotiate the bloody garage.
‘MIND THE SIDES!’ shouted Mum. To herself.
It was now 9.35 p.m.
It’s around nine miles from South Croydon to Victoria. I have never known anyone drive it in less than fifty minutes. Ann Perkins had just twenty-five.
‘We’re never going to make it. Everything’s ruined,’ I whined.
‘Shut up,’ she said. ‘I’m concentrating.’ We sat in silence. I imagined her dinner guests trying to make the best of their uncooked prawns and unfilled meringue nests and felt bad.
‘Sorry, Mum.’
She gritted her teeth, the walnut of muscle in her cheek hardening. Ann was ready for business. She was heading for Victoria come what may. My heart was in my mouth as we sped through the leafy paradise of Thornton Heath and along the boulevards of Brixton.
Meanwhile, Mel had arrived on the bus station concourse and was waiting for me, oblivious to the drama taking place just a few miles south. She was loading her bin liner of props onto the coach when she heard the tannoy announcement.
You’ve never known true pain until you’ve heard a disincentivized transportation worker try to pronounce a Polish surname (before Poles were familiar visitors to our shores) over a public address system late at night. It was like someone firing vowels at a wall.
‘Will Mel …
[Her eyes taking it in] ‘Will Mel …
[Plucking up courage] ‘Mel Gee …
[Finally going for it] ‘Will Mel Gee-eye-ay-ee-dee-roo-ooo-eeck come to the information desk immediately.’
[Pretty cocky now] ‘That’s Miss Mel Gee-ee-der-ee-ooky-ck to the information desk.’
Finally, deducing that the only person on the concourse with a name even close to that being mangled was her, Mel approached the desk. The woman dutifully passed her a piece of paper with my succinct message on it. It read simply, ‘HOLD THE COACH, Perks x’.
Back in south London, Mum was haring up the A23 in a trance state. It was as if fifty years of compliant behaviour was bubbling up inside her. Here was a woman whose entire life had consisted of behaving well, doing the right thing, doing what everyone else wanted. Here was a woman who could not and would not take it any more. Screw you, authority! This is the real me. I’ve gone rogue! I swear she ran a red light or two. She screeched into the coach station in what may or may not have been a handbrake turn. I kissed her on the cheek and flew out of the passenger door.
10.03 p.m.
Mel, meanwhile, was putting on one hell of a show, demonstrating pretty much all of the reasons she had been rejected from every drama school in Britain. She had assumed a starfish position in the doorway of the coach, effectively blocking it open, and was pretending to cry. The driver meanwhile was trying to close the pneumatic doors and get under way. I skidded across the concourse floor, heart in my mouth and yelled as I saw her. With that, I hurled myself, a squeaky chicken, Britt Ekland’s hair and a load of miscellaneous junk into the bus, and the doors hissed shut behind us.
The coach was due to arrive at Edinburgh Waverley at 6 a.m. after an all-night potter up the M1. It transpired we were the only non-French-speaking people on the bus. Just Mel, myself and fifty-eight extremely shouty students from Paris. Our seats were in the shadow of the medicated toilet, which was continually in use – meaning that every time we tried to drift off, we’d be woken by a gust of something distinctly evocative of the second arrondissement.
Eight nostril-challenging hours later, we arrived.
There can be few less romantic starting points for any relationship than St Andrew’s Square bus depot in Edinburgh, yet it was there I first fell in love with Scotland. Since then I’ve slept on the warm beaches of Arran in November, I’ve underwhelmed audiences from Cumbernauld to Aberdeen and back again, I’ve cried at the immaculate stillness of loch and mountain in Torridon, and I’ve tried skiing in Aviemore and lived to tell the tale. Scotland has been the crucible for my double act, the site of myriad memorable holidays and the settling point for my wanderlust brother, who married a girl from Perth and together created my brilliant wee nieces.
But it was the festival that started it all. I’ve spent every August since the age of fourteen at the foot of Edinburgh Castle, marching up and down the cobbles of the Royal Mile at festival time dressed as a milkmaid or bunny rabbit or zombie to advertise my latest hare-brained dramatic endeavour. It began when the Children’s Music Theatre came to Croydon auditioning for their touring show. I managed to get a bit part and headed north for the summer with my oldest mate Gemma, who’d also bagged a role. It was the first time I’d been away from my parents. They saw it as a great artistic opportunity for their daughter; I saw it as a magical teenage sex workshop.
I went to the festival during my time at college too, taking part in execrable feminist reworkings and pretentious new writing. But it was that first show I did with Mel that truly sealed the city in my heart. The drunken ramblings on the cobbles of the Pleasance Courtyard. The late-night spicy haggis on the London Road. The thrill of seeing my peers Lee and Herring, Armstrong and Miller, the impeccable League of Gentlemen. My tribe, my new-found family. We lived on nothing but cold hot dogs and warm beer and the kindness of strangers chancing their hard-earned cash on our unique brand of utter silly. It’s perhaps the closest I’ve ever been to truly, completely happy.
Our debut show at the Fringe, as I’ve already mentioned, was called The Naked Brunch – a little bit like a sketch show, a lot like being cornered by a couple of inmates from a psychiatric facility.
We got off the coach with everything we thought we needed: bags and bags of props, interminable voice-overs lovingly recorded to DAT, play-in music, costumes and publicity posters. What we didn’t have, it turned out, was an end to the show. Somewhere along the line, due to laziness, forgetfulness or simple shame, we’d just not bothered to finish writing the thing.
The room we’d been assigned was a hot black sweat box on the top floor of the C Venue on Princess Street. It looked like somewhere you’d conduct an extraordinary rendition rather than pay to watch comedy. The heat was so extreme that later in the run, after numerous complaints, an enormous silver coil was put through the door to vent the steam and sweat. If it was hot at
10.05 a.m.
then I dread to think of the ambient temperature at 4 p.m. when the experimental troupe from Godalming began performing their production of Equus.
We treated the first show as a dress rehearsal. We hadn’t meant to. It was just that no one turned up – and after all surely a performance is only a performance if there is someone there to watch it. Without that, it’s just a thought experiment – or at best two nutters in a room shouting at each other in regional accents.
The second show was different. This time we had an audience, although ‘audience’ is a slightly grandiose term for a single person. This person came into the room wearing a large rucksack. Rather unusually, she didn’t take it off as she sat down, and so sat perched forward at a forty-five-degree angle for the entirety of the show. At points during the performance she would take out a large street map of Edinburgh, which she would unfold and unfold and unfold until it covered almost her entire top half. Then, after examining it, she would fold and fold and fold it back into a neat concertina. At several points during the show I wondered if she’d perhaps mistaken the venue for Edinburgh Castle and found herself somewhat disappointed by the dimensions of the rooms.
The initial idea behind The Naked Brunch was to showcase sketch characters within an overriding narrative. This ended up being a rather shoddy conceit involving them all being trapped inside a computer game. The result was that it was meta without in any way being good. The characters included paramilitary Brown Owls, some Dutch VJs, a pair of US East Coast post-feminists and a couple of lovelorn Aussie PE teachers, who expressed their desire for one another exclusively through the medium of sport. That’s one hell of a computer game, right there.
The problem was, the more we wrote, the bigger and more bizarre our characters became. And the bigger they became, the more constrictive and less credible the framework around them seemed. But, rather than ditching the whole thing and just delivering a simple sketch show, we persisted with the computer game theme, which petered out as the hour wore on. By the final sketch none of it, and I mean NONE OF IT, made any sense. So we did what so many young writers do when something isn’t working. Nothing. We just left it and hoped the problem would go away all by itself.
It didn’t.
Because there was no show-stopper ending, for some reason that has mercifully faded with time, we decided to end with our backs to the audience (singular) shining a torch on a croissant. Yep, shining a torch on a croissant. No dance numbers for us – no recapping, no show tunes – just a greasy baked semicircle caught in the thin beam of a cheap torch bought from Ali’s Cave on the Lothian Road.
Don’t ask me why. Even twenty-one years on. Don’t ask me why.
When the show finally ground to a halt, the voice-over stopped and silence again prevailed, we burst through the fourth wall to have a chat with our lone punter.
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Us: |
Hi! |
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Her: |
[American] Hi! [Folding up her map again] |
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Me: |
We’re really sorry about that. |
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Her: |
About what? |
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Mel: |
The accent. |
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Her: |
What accent? |
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Me: |
The American accent … the American post-feminists. |
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Her: |
Oh. Really? American? |
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Mel: |
Yes. We’re sorry. |
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Her: |
They were Americans? |
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Me: |
Yes. |
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Her: |
Oh. Oh, I didn’t notice. |
The run lasted for another three weeks.
Mel and I have been responsible for some truly disastrous performances over the years. Too many to mention. But let me give you my top four.
In 1994/5 we embarked on a tour of small arts centres. If there was a tiny, dilapidated, endangered cultural space in the UK, we’d find it and half-fill it. One such space was in Stockton-on-Tees. Our manager, Ted, a fabulous pint-sized dynamo in double-denim, booked us in for a gig starting at 8 p.m. ‘It’ll be great,’ he said. ‘There’s a do in there first and then a disco after, so there’ll be a guaranteed crowd. It’s all part of a package. It’s going to be amazing. Amazing!’
When we arrived, bags of props in hand, we became aware of a group of women in the theatre, sat on chairs in a semicircle. There seemed to be an awful lot of crying and hugging.
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Me: |
[nervously] What kind of ‘do’ is this? |
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Ted: |
Well … it’s not so much a do … [Suddenly sounding evasive] |
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Mel: |
Why is everyone sobbing? |
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Ted: |
Well, the thing is … |
Now I know we’re in trouble – no sentence ends well that begins with ‘The thing is …’
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Ted: |
The thing is, it’s not so much a ‘do’ as a support group. |
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Me: |
What do you mean ‘support group’? What support group? |
And then the truth emerged. We’d been booked to do our comedy show after a workshop for battered women organised by the charity Zero Tolerance. The audience was a mix of abused women and repentant, teary men. It couldn’t get any worse.
It did.
Because after the support group, and just before we were due onstage, the organizers decided to put on a film. This hard-hitting documentary charted the emotional journeys of both perpetrators and victims of domestic abuse, and was punctuated by deep sobs emanating from the audience.
After a truly devastating thirty minutes, and just as a close-up of a bruised and swollen face faded into black, our cheesy 70s intro music began. As awkward emotional gear changes go, it was right up there with Phil and Holly on This Morning going from Syria to Towie and back again.
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Mel: |
Shit! That’s us! |
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Me: |
[shouting to make myself heard over the keening] Oh God … |
And on we went, into the darkness. I never knew that bewilderment had a sound until that very moment. Now I know that it does.
After we finished the show (an hour-long affair that, it transpired, ran at only forty-three minutes without laughs) the disco began. No sooner had the smattering of applause died away than Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’ kicked in, and the crying started again.
I ended up slow-dancing with a sixty-year-old woman from Macclesfield; Mel was locked into a deep sway with a former offender, and Ted, well Ted had been grabbed by a rather substantial woman and was now being rocked from side to side, his head trapped between her space-hopper breasts. We left him there, gently asphyxiating, as penance. He needed to know that when it came to being mis-sold a gig, we had zero tolerance.
Billed as a glorious homecoming by nobody except us, we returned to our old stomping ground, gigging at the Cambridge University Playhouse as part of our tour in the autumn of 1995. In true Mel/Sue fashion, we had failed to book a lighting and sound operator for the show, hoping that local techie stalwart Liam would be available. I loved Liam – he was the stuff of legend. He was fuelled by two things: prawn cocktail crisps and an abject hatred of all performers. He also had the largest set of keys in East Anglia, which he hung from his belt, giving him his trademark limp. Liam huffed and eye-rolled his way through every piss-poor production I ever did at that theatre – and there were an awful lot of piss-poor productions – yet for some unknown reason he simply wasn’t available when we came back that autumn.
At that time my brother was working as a manager of a foreign language school near Cambridge. The night before the gig he came over to visit, which set Mel thinking.
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Mel: |
Maybe David could do the lights? |
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Me: |
David? What, my brother, David? |
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Mel: |
Yes. Why not? |
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Me: |
Have you actually met him? |
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Mel: |
Well of course I have … |
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Me: |
Then why are you even asking? He is the only person on the planet who is as technologically illiterate as I am. |
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Mel: |
He’ll be fine. Plus I’ve always had a slight crush on him. |
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Me: |
He won’t be fine. He’s mildly dyspraxic and easily distracted, with a healthy dose of ‘couldn’t give a shit’ thrown in for good measure. |
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Mel: |
I think it’ll be hilarious. He doesn’t even have to do much. Come on. It’ll be fun! |
The next night, the night of the performance, we received word from the front-of-house manager that the audience was seated and we were ready to go. Normally, when you get clearance, you make your way to the wings and get on with things as soon as possible, but our double act is a little different. It is exactly at that point, on the cusp of starting a show, that Mel’s bowels swing into action.
Mel’s GI tract is a source of wonderment to all those who know and love her. Or have sat on a bus near her. Or been in a room with her. Or a room after her. There is not one single event, emotion or situation that Mel’s digestive system can’t translate into instant and devastating flatus. And so, for decades, in those precious seconds before a performance – where you’d normally be riding the adrenalin rush, pacing, going through lines and focusing – I have had to endure the sights, sounds and aromas of Mel’s malevolent wind. Or worse.
At the Edinburgh Festival of 1998 we took part in a gang show called The Big Squeeze with the brilliant Geraldine McNulty and our mega-mucker Emma Kennedy. Straight after our slot a friend, Penny, was performing her one-woman show at the venue. It was getting near the end of the run and we felt it was the comradely thing to do to stay on afterwards to cheer her on. As we were called backstage for our opening sketch, Mel, as always, heard the distant call of nature.
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Mel: |
[whispering] I need a wee … |
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Me: |
Well why didn’t you go thirty seconds ago? You remember thirty seconds ago? When we were downstairs? Next to a toilet. |
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Mel: |
It’s not my fault! It’s like a Pavlovian reaction. I get stressed. |
Emma approaches, wearily.
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Is it Mel? |
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Me: |
Yes. |
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Emma: |
Does she need the toilet again? |
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Me: |
Of course she needs the toilet … |
Emma rolls her eyes and walks on.
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Front-of-House Manager: |
[emerging from the shadows] That’s clearance. |
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Mel: |
But I’m busting! |
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Gerry: |
[desperately trying to focus on the performance ahead] Well go downstairs, for goodness’ sake! |
Opening music starts.
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Mel: |
Oh God! There’s no time! |
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Me: |
Oh for goodness’ sake, Miggins, go in the bucket! |
I point over to the black bucket in the wings that has been there since the beginning of the run. A paintbrush sits in a thin puddle of liquid at the bottom. Mel looks at it in desperation then parks herself above it. We look away. The sound of a zip. A deluge. The zip again. Then we all run onstage to do the show. Ah, showbiz.
Once done, we collected up the costumes and props littered at the side of stage and plonked ourselves in the auditorium in preparation for our mate’s solo show. This turned out to be a marvellously involved affair with multiple characters and complex plots. We were lost in it – lost in it almost to the point of sleep – when suddenly Penny started talking in an Irish accent, transforming into the character of a raging fire-and-brimstone priest. There was a lot of vengeful Old Testament babbling and shouting at us, which roused us from unconsciousness. The character reached fever pitch, cursing us as sinners and telling us we needed to be bathed in the holy water of Christ the Redeemer. Whereupon she left the stage and reappeared a moment later …
… with the bucket.
Emma, Mel and myself sat suddenly upright, rigid with fear. Like animals on the plains who know instinctively that danger is coming.
Penny dipped the paintbrush into the bucket, then flung the liquid at the audience. The spray flew to the left and right of us. The audience laughed. ‘Don’t laugh!’ I wanted to shout. ‘You’re being drenched in piss!’ But I was stopped in my tracks by a frenzy of droplets raining down on my head. Mel refused to look, burying her face in her palms as the wee kept on coming and coming and coming.
That was the last time I went to an experimental theatre show. You don’t get that with Shakespeare.
Anyhow, I’ve digressed. We’re back in Cambridge, 1995, and my brother was in charge of operating the show. We’d been told to get to the wings and stand by, so we duly headed backstage and waited. And waited.
Finally, the intro music and voice-over began. Then stopped, abruptly. Then started again, this time at a deafening volume. We waited for the lights to dim in the auditorium. They didn’t.
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[bellowing over the din] Is that us? Should we just go on? |
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Me: |
I guess so … |
The intro music suddenly stops. There is an all-encompassing silence.
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Mel: |
[pushing me forward, hissing] Go on! Now! Now! |
The moment we stepped onstage a strange thing happened: the house lights increased in intensity, thus illuminating the audience further, and the spotlights went down, thus plunging Mel and me into darkness. We were now in total silence and total blackout. It was a devastating comedic double whammy.
I looked up to the lighting booth and saw David staring at the script and shaking his head. It’s not the sort of thing that inspires you to begin an eclectic offbeat hour of character comedy.
‘I told you,’ I hissed as another random piece of music exploded on the PA. ‘He’s a technological fucking idiot …’
A spotlight came on, stage left. Finally! We walked towards it. The moment we started to feel the heat of it, it flicked off again, only to reappear on the other side of the stage. So we turned around and walked across. The same thing happened. We began chasing visibility.
For the next hour we went on a voyage of audio-visual discovery. Sometimes we’d get a high-decibel burst of incongruous sound effect – a lion roaring, a juicy fart, some cicadas in the bush. Sometimes we would be squashed into a pinprick of light at the very back of the stage, desperate to be seen for at least a small percentage of the show. However, in the final ten minutes David appeared to find his mojo, opting for what became his signature lighting state – Guantanamo Bay. He decided to put every single light at his disposal on full – backstage, audience, side lights, spotlights – you name it. There was even a glitter ball going full pelt. He had also decided to alleviate some of the tension by stripping to the waist and donning a large Robin Hood hat that had obviously been lying around the booth.
The Cambridge Evening News review of that night said it all: ‘… it’s hard to comment on the quality of the show, as the multiple technical failures rather overwhelmed proceedings. In fact, in all my decades as a theatre critic it’s hard to bring to mind a more woeful display from a lighting and sound operator than the one witnessed last night.’
But hey, remember, ALL publicity is good publicity. Yes?
The old Komedia in Brighton’s Kemptown was one of my favourite venues ever – not least because its founders Colin, Marina and David were pretty much the only people who ever wanted to book us. It was like all great theatres – bijou and friendly, well loved by the locals, with good grub and a bit of jazz at the weekends.
It was 1996, and we were touring our third show, Women in Uniform. By now we had established a small (see also: negligible) posse of people who’d regularly turn out to see us – mainly sex workers, ex-offenders and those wrestling with their sexuality. Oh, and a man called Perv, who ran a nightclub nearby. I remember going to the Zap Bar with him one evening, and Mel had no idea it was gay night. At the end of the evening she merely said, ‘It’s nice that the women here are so friendly, isn’t it?’ I long for that naivety. Just for a second.
So, it’s the opening night of a week-long run at the venue. We are in the dressing room getting ready when we suddenly get the all-clear to head to stage. This news, albeit entirely expected, causes Mel’s digestive system, once again, to start firing on all cylinders.
‘Sorry, mate, I’m desperate …’
Her limbic system has gone into high alert. This is fight-or-flight time. She needs to run, and in order to do that most effectively, she needs to get rid of anything extraneous that might inhibit her movement. And what she decides to get rid of is her microphone receiver pack. She summarily drops it into my hands and dashes for the toilet.
There’s just one problem. The microphone equipment comes in two parts: firstly, the receiver, which I am now holding, and secondly, the microphone itself, which Mel is wearing on her lapel. Crucially, the two parts are connected by a metre-long cable. This expensive umbilical can’t be disconnected at speed without risking damage, which means only one thing.
Where Mel goes, I go also.
I find myself standing next to her in a cramped bog, palms up, holding the receiver like it’s the Holy Grail. She perches below making low moaning sounds. It begins like a distant rumble, like thunder. The hairs on my arm stand to attention. Then comes the noise. Like a thousand tins of beans being hurled against a wall. Then the toxic gust. I feel like Karen Silkwood: contaminated, angry, compelled to seek legal advice.
‘Cheers, chum,’ says Mel once the horror is over. ‘Ooh, let me take that,’ retrieving the receiver from my grasp and clipping it back on her belt. I say nothing.
Mel did the greatest gig of her life that night. She was light and springy and refreshed. I spent that hour dry-retching and trying to get enough oxygen in my lungs to say my lines.
As part of my rider,** we now have separate dressing rooms.
And so it came to pass, in the Year of Our Lord 1996, that we visited the Bedfordshire town of Leighton Buzzard. Sadly, it transpired that the residents were far from ready for our unique brand of poorly thought-out ‘fun’. The venue we had been booked into was the council-run Library Theatre, which appeared on first impression to consist of an awful lot of library and not a lot of actual theatre.
There was a smattering of people in the audience, all of whom seemed furious before we’d even started. Well, if they were furious then, I don’t have a descriptor for the hostile vibes we were getting a mere five minutes into proceedings. There is a profound telepathy at work in all close relationships – a shorthand, if you will. A flicker of the eyelid, a tilt or cock of the head, and you’re both on the same page. Mel and I have that telepathy. As the atmosphere became increasingly toxic, we shot each other a glance. A glance that said, Let’s get this over with as quickly as possible.
If we couldn’t make them laugh, we could certainly get them home before they turned violent.
We increased the speed of our delivery, making snap cuts, overlapping one another’s lines. We did not pause, because pausing is for laughter, and why wait for something that will never arrive? Under normal conditions our show ran for just over an hour. In Leighton Buzzard it lasted exactly thirty-six minutes, beating our previous record (Stockton-on-Tees) by a full seven minutes. We didn’t bother coming back onstage for a bow; instead we used the closing music to cover the sound of our exit from the stage door. We sprinted for the station. Sprinted. Mercifully there was a London-bound train waiting on the platform as we arrived. As we hopped on, and the doors closed behind us, we saw a gang of young men running towards the carriage. To this day I have no idea whether they were members of our audience desperate to take us to the Old Mill and burn us or just regular Joes on a night out. But we’ve never gone back, just in case.