LAST NIGHT I TOOK THE CAST AND SOME OF THE SCURVY CREW OUT TO DINNER. YOU HAVE TO FEED THE GREEDY BASTARDS, AND BOY CAN THEY EAT. THEY CONSUMED VAST QUANTITIES OF EXPENSIVE CHINESE FOOD AT DYNASTY, on Bloor, a favorite of mine in Toronto. I have decided to make some cuts in the running order. I outlined the changes while they muttered darkly about not having been paid. You’d think they’d pay me for a chance to be out on the open road with such an agreeable and pleasant leader, but no, here I am feeding them at expensive watering holes, putting them up in fancy hotels, and they expect to be paid as well! We were never paid in the old Python days. We’d be lucky to have a bag of dry oats and a good slap about the head. Some days we never ate for twelve weeks. Paid? We would have to cry ourselves to sleep in the damp seedy costumes we’d stood up in, while that John Cleese thrashed us to sleep wi’ his belt. PAID?? I promise them meekly I’ll see what I can do.
We are “hubbing” from Toronto, making little darts up and down the same stretch of freeway, returning to sleep in the same hotel.
I love the fact that “spam” has come to mean unwanted garbage on the Internet. Every day I receive four or five offers to add three or four inches to my penis. All of which I accept. And now I have a nine-foot penis.
“It’s a dartboard tour,” says English.
“What?”
“The agent threw darts at a dartboard to determine the route.”
We are cocooned in our own world now: bus, theater, bus, theater, hotel, bus theater, strip club. Mall! Sorry. Strip mall. Major issues of the day mean nothing to us. Will Arnold Schwarzenegger become governor of California on a minority vote? Everyone in the media seems to think I have the answer. The answer is, of course he will, the media have already seen to that, but it will serve him right. He will have to go and live in Sacramento. That’ll teach him. (Be careful what you ask for.) Actually he’ll probably just commute by private jet. Private jet lag is so much more acceptable, don’t you think? I love the delicious irony of someone whose movies go spectacularly over budget campaigning to solve a budget crisis in California, but then Pumping Irony is the story of Arnold’s life; he is the man who single-handedly popularized the sport of waitress lifting.
Tell people you are playing Belleville and they look at you strangely. Actually these small places are invaluable and have been hand-picked by the Greedy Bastard’s agent so that we can iron out the kinks from the show. (No, Ray Davies is not in it.) The capacity of the Empire Theatre is only 700, but Kitchener, on Tuesday, holds 1,800 and Massey Hall, on Wednesday and Thursday in Toronto, holds 2,545. Even the Théâtre St-Denis in Montreal next Monday holds more than 2,000 so tonight is our last chance to feel close to a smallish audience and experiment a little with the running order. The pitfall of comedy is going on too long and tonight I want to try and get to the intermission quicker. I’m looking to take out about ten minutes from act one. The main victim is Jen, and I know these cuts are hard for her to take. I’m cutting my own Nigel Spasm piece as well, but I can see that’s not much consolation for Jennifer. It’s not her fault. The main problem is that Peter’s Homeland Security rant lifts the audience to such a high pitch that it’s hard to follow it with gentle stuff about the Rutland Isles. So tonight I’m going to try removing all of that and simply come in with the Bruces after John’s Bad Beethoven. This should help to move the show along.
I was very sorry to see Roy of Siegfried and Roy was savaged by one of his performers. At least I don’t risk getting bitten on the neck and dragged offstage, though I’ll have to watch it by the look in Jennifer’s eyes.
We leave our hotel by camel at dawn in a swarm of flies after beating off some local beggars with a brolly. …[Stop that. This is not Michael Palin’s diary.—Ed.] Sorry. We climb into our luxury coach for the short journey to tonight’s gig. As if perfectly timed Chelsea v. Middlesborough kicks off on Fox Sports World. Thank you, thank you, Soccer God, the satellite works! It will not be a football-free three months. Sex I can do without [Yeah, right.—Ed.] but to do without soccer is asking too much. Reminds me of the old English gag “Football’s better than sex. Where else can you get forty-five minutes each way and a brass band in the middle?”
Talking of sex, who are these kind ladies who leave their phone numbers in the encore bucket for an ancient British comedian? I mean, it impresses the crew and it’s very flattering to the ego, and I don’t wish to seem rude, but I am now over thirty. [Double thirty, you lying bastard.—Ed.] My wife has always said I can sleep with as many women as I want: but if I do, she’ll kill me. So I choose life. Also she is a cutie. And I do miss her. And so would you if you’d spent twenty-seven years with her.
Belleville is a quaint little place on a picturesque river with several beautiful churches about ninety-five miles northeast of Toronto. As we drive into town on a Sunday afternoon there is no one to be seen. All the shops are shut, and the streets deserted. It looks like a ghost town where all the people have been carried away by aliens. It has obviously been hit hard economically with several shut-down shops and businesses and we are given dinner in a very nice little French restaurant, which has a notice up that it is closing this week. So it is very impressive that at the end of the show the audience line up in the foyer for me to sign tons of merchandise.
I ’m a happily married man—if that ’s not an oxymoron.
My favorite sexual position is the Male Marital Position: flat on your back with your wallet wide open.
They’re a much quieter audience, and we have to work harder to win them, but we do. I am very proud of my cast and crew. Where do I begin? Obviously with me. I am the greedy bastard, after all. As you know most people in showbiz are out there performing just for the benefit of their audiences, purely from the goodness of their hearts. [Irony detector just went off again. Now stop it.—Ed.] But not me, oh no. I am in it just for the encore bucket, and tonight they are out of their seats dropping in Canadian dollars (called “loonies,” appropriately) and hundreds of tire dollars (fairly useless vouchers from a hardware chain). I realized quite early that they were a listening audience. They weren’t whooping and yelling; indeed they were an older crowd, very polite, the first act passed swiftly at fifty minutes. The cuts worked, and Jen was great, and Peter was great, and John was brimming with confidence and picked up many extra laughs in The Four Yorkshiremen, so that even when Peter had a brain fart and didn’t show up for Nudge Nudge it didn’t bother me one bit. In fact several of the people said they liked the mistakes! Maybe we should keep them in. Act two is much more reflective and far less filthy, and I talk about myself more, and I felt very relaxed and easy with them, plus we really made them laugh and won them over so that by the end they were as noisy as Rutland and gave us several standing ovations.
When I was born in England in World War Two, Adolf Hitler was trying to kill me. I don’t think it was personal.