LAST NIGHT IN RUTLAND THERE WAS A FANTASTIC AND WILDLY NOISY RECEPTION FOR THE START OF THE GREEDY BASTARD TOUR. WE HAD STANDING OVATIONS AND CHEERS AND LOUD HAND CLAPPING AND FOOT-stomping demands for encores. The house was packed long before the curtain rose and the atmosphere in the auditorium was electric. They came for a good time and there was almost nothing we could do to stop them. Right from the off they cheered and laughed and applauded. I know Eddie Izzard has got rather fed up with that big, warm, whooping American reception when he walks on (“I haven’t said anything yet,” he says reprovingly), but I can tell you on the first night of a three-month tour, that big warm, noisy hello as you walk onstage is a very heartwarming and encouraging welcome.
Rutland is a small place and almost everyone was there. They laughed at my jokes and sang along lustily in all the right places, and almost all the sketches went really well. It is still an odd thing to me that the best-known material goes over the best, but we had some good new zingers for them, and Peter’s rant about tourists watching the trees die went over especially well. John was unusually nervous and missed the first sound effect on “I bet you they won’t play this song on the radio,” which left me with a bit of egg on my face. I have never known him to miss a cue ever. He spent all day rehearsing it, which may be the problem. Sometimes you can get too anxious about stuff like this. Later he wandered off into a different version of the madrigal, but we recovered and still got our big laugh at the end. Ah well, that is what a first performance is all about, and the good people of Rutland were highly supportive and warmly encouraging. At the intermission the audience wouldn’t leave to go to the lobby, they just stood and cheered. I had to go out and tell them to take a break and buy some merchandise.
Tonight for the very first time on any stage anywhere we are introducing a brand-new concept in show business: Will you welcome please the encore bucket! Let me explain the concept. In most other shows, at the end you applaud the performers who go off, hide in the wings and then come back on and do an encore. For nothing. Not on this show, baby. This is the encore bucket. If you’d like an encore, then just feel free to come up and put some money in the bucket, and at the end of the show—we’ll talk about it.
The encore bucket surprised us all. At the start of the show I introduced this brand-new showbiz concept, explaining how, if they want an encore, they can pay for it. There was a big laugh as I produced a huge, shiny, silver trash can that remained prominently onstage throughout the show. What I hadn’t bargained for was people taking it seriously. Just before the final curtain Jen was supposed to discover that there was nothing in there, and I had written a few gags about what she found instead, but by the end the Rutland audience were already on their feet and making so much noise that we all took our bows and simply left the stage. When I came back on after a few minutes of stamping and yelling and screaming for more, I ignored the audience completely and walked straight over to the encore bucket. That got a big laugh. Imagine my surprise when I found it contained several dollar notes and loads of change! People were walking up and putting in bills and they were throwing down change from the balcony, chucking cash and screaming for more. One young boy came up and put a buck in the bucket and indicated he wanted the parrot that sits in a cage on one of the speakers.
“You can’t have that,” I said. “It’s dead.”
Big laugh.
They settled for “The Lumberjack Song,” with Peter Crabbe in a hat as an entire troop of Mounties. The final score for the encore bucket was twenty bucks, a love note, and a rubber ducky. Which raises the question, what to do with it? Peter Crabbe, the greedy bastard, suggests it should be donated to him as a tour bonus, but I decide unanimously that we’ll save it up and donate it to charity.
By eight thirty the next morning we’re already into Canada, rolling through the wide, flat, woodlands around Fort Erie en route to Toronto. Canadian Immigration insist we tumble out of our warm bunks to show our bleary morning faces to a foxy minx in a snappy uniform, and now I’m awake, sitting up in my queen-size bed with my lap dancer on my knee as we head up the highway. [I’m sure he means laptop.—Ed.] It’s a Saturday morning and in all reasonable worlds I should be watching Arsenal play Liverpool but I have the inevitable interviews awaiting me. We are sliding alongside a gray-blue Lake Superior. The morning sunlight glints on the water and the tall chimneys on the far shore look like graphs. Soggy rolls of hay lie like Weetabix in the damp green fields. Somewhere over to our right Niagara Falls is busy falling but, since I can’t actually see it, perhaps I should admit the philosophical possibility that it is not falling. (Somewhere in a forest a tree falls on a philosopher, killing him and his silly theory.) It seems incredible but post-9/11 it’s almost as quick to return to Toronto by road as it was for me to fly. The other day, as I was passing through U.S. Immigration, a large uniformed man came toward me snapping on a pair of blue rubber gloves. Oh no, not the anal probe! But he walked straight past me and my sphincter relaxed a little. What kind of a job is that? And what sort of man applies for it?
“We need someone to look up the butts of strangers passing through the airport.”
“Do you get a uniform?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll do it.”
It’s not romantic work, is it? I doubt there are anal probe work songs.
“O Lordy I bin probin’ de anuses all de lib long day…”
I know someone has to do it, but what does he tell his wife at the end of the day?
“And then I found a rabbit, and some flags of all nations…”