With the family unit back together, I could consider going to the Edinburgh Festival for the first time. This was obviously impossible when you share child care, because it requires you giving up the whole of August to do gigs night after night.
Everyone had suggested that I should go up to try it – it was the place where you could be seen by television executives, the kind of people who held the key to you potentially moving on to the next level. The reality for me was I was not sure what that ‘next level’ was, or even if I wanted it. But my agent advised me it was a good thing to do, and everyone who I had spoken to about the Festival said that no matter what happened, if you did an hour of stand-up every night for a month, you would get better, and that was reason enough for me to go. I loved stand-up, and I wanted to improve.
I first went up in 2003 with a show called ‘Freefall’. You have to give a show a title even if it bears little relevance to the content, just so the audience can be assured you have given some thought to the hour that they will invest in watching you.
The truth was that I had never been to an arts festival before I performed there; they had not figured highly during my childhood or my youth, so I turned up expecting to be able to do what I was doing in the clubs – ad-libbing, messing with the audience and saying a few funny things.
I was in a venue called the Cellar, which was what it was: a cellar with about 40 seats. I was on at 9.40 p.m., which was a difficult time because it clashed with some of the bigger acts, however I was pleased because it was a good time, and I was in the courtyard where I had a chance to pick up passing trade.
In the end, though, very few people came, a few shows were cancelled because nobody bought a ticket and what reviews I had made it abundantly clear my show was rubbish.
Being a comedian is like being a stripper: you expose what you have to the world and hope it impresses it. When it doesn’t, you can’t just put your coat on and leave. You have to cavort around to try and get someone’s attention and it can be belittling in a way few other professions are. You alone receive the praise and you alone have to deal with the energy-sapping indifference of a world that doesn’t care if you get on stage that night or not. Unless you have lived that life, it’s hard to explain, but one of the things that makes you carry on when the world says you shouldn’t bother is that we see the moments when it does work; although in the middle of a long, hard Festival, looking for those moments can be like panning for gold.
In order to spend a month in Edinburgh, I had to use two weeks of my annual leave. The other two weeks I worked from the flat I rented, or did field visits with the local sales rep. I would also fly to meetings in the London office on the 6.30 a.m. flight down, and return on the 6 p.m. flight back, before going to do a gig to whatever handful of people turned up to the Cellar. Of all the performers on the Fringe, I have no doubt I was probably only one of a few with a full-time job, and certainly the only one doing the Fringe whilst still engaging in discussions about the next five years’ marketing plan with our European head office.
I just felt that I needed to try the Festival, to pit myself against the best around and to learn more about the craft of putting a show together. In order to do this, the support I needed from my company and from Melanie was a lot to ask. And when you consider that, at the end of the month, the only conclusion I could draw was that I wasn’t good enough, it was an even bigger commitment.
Melanie and I had just moved into a larger home that was akin to the one we had lived in prior to the split, but this had stretched us financially. To return from the Festival with £8,500 of debt was not what I could dress up in any way as a success, and it was not what I had expected.
Lessons I learnt about Edinburgh for all potential performers:
1) You will lose money. This is because you have to pay for everything: venue rental, the venue staff, the flyers, the leaflets they give out, the posters, the PR person who tries to get reviewers to come and see you, your accommodation, your food, your beer (optional, but always more than you think – my advice is avoid where possible), the promoter – some of whom charge a fee rather than take a percentage of sales just in case they don’t sell enough. Apparently, you have to take a 150-seater venue and sell it out every night to break even, and I would say 75 per cent of venues are probably smaller than this.
2) Your heart will be broken. If you get a bad review, and you will, you will feel as you walk around the streets that everybody in the world has read it. If you get a good review, it will be the day it rained and nobody bought a paper.
3) Being good in clubs does not guarantee success in Edinburgh. My first show was not a show; it was me sticking jokes together. You have to do more than that if people are going to watch you in a dungeon.
4) You will get better and by the end you will be brilliant. The only problem is, if you were rubbish in the first week, all the reviews and word of mouth will mean that you will be brilliant to an empty room.
5) You will love it. Being a comedian is like being a Goth: it’s a lifestyle choice not many make, and it can be a very lonely one. Edinburgh allows you to be in the same place as others just like you, and standing in a bar in the wee hours of the morning and looking all around at ‘your people’ makes it worth being there.
I went home with my tail between my legs, but decided to give it another go the year after with a show called ‘Peddling Stories’, based on my bicycle ride back from Australia. I just knew that if I wanted to get better as a stand-up comedian I had to keep trying.
By now I had won North West Comedian of the Year, which gave me a boost to my confidence, and also came with a degree of kudos because of previous winners like Peter Kay. It also meant more reviewers came to see the show than the previous year.
They quickly came to the same conclusion as their fellow scribes from 2003: I was rubbish. I wasn’t completely rubbish; it was just the show was meant to be about the bike ride from Australia but my ad-libbing style meant that I’d digress from the story and would rarely get past Brisbane, so people felt short-changed.
I was beginning to feel that Edinburgh was not right for me. I gave up a lot to be there and would arrive full of anticipation, but audiences remained low.
Melanie brought the boys up to go to the children’s shows and to enjoy the magic of the Festival. On one of these days, I left them in our rented flat to go and do my set, only to be greeted by Helena, the show manager, who told me that I had only five people in the audience.
The venue was a converted shipping container called The Hut. It had a capacity of 50 – which I never managed to achieve during the run. This was the third week, and that is what is so hard about the Edinburgh Festival. You commit to be there for a month, in the same place at the same time every day. However, by the end of the first week it is obvious if it has been worthwhile coming. Audiences and reviewers have already decided if you’re any good, and if the answer is ‘no’, then you still have to keep turning up and trying to impress anyone who bothers to come, who are generally people who can’t get into better shows which are on at the same time. But it is these nights that make you a better comedian, as you learn the ability to put on a show in which neither you nor the audience are convinced there is much point.
The thought of doing an hour of comedy to five people who were probably not that interested anyway, whilst the family, whom I hadn’t seen for the best part of a month, sat in a flat 15 minutes’ bike ride away, seemed pointless to me.
‘Can’t we give them their money back?’ I asked. ‘It doesn’t seem worth it for five people.’
‘No, we can’t – only two have paid.’
The logic of not being able to refund people because they had not bought their tickets in the first place brought it all home to me: it wasn’t even possible to give my tickets away.
So, I did the gig. Firstly, I dispensed with the microphone, which seemed at best a little unnecessary when you have an audience you can fit in a taxi. I also bought everyone a drink as a thank-you for coming, and we shared a pleasant hour together.
It was not the last time I would buy a drink for everyone in the audience to apologise for the low attendance and to thank them for being there. The last time was at the Leicester Comedy Festival in 2009, when 17 people came to see me, and two weeks before television changed my life for ever.
• • •
After the failure of the 2004 show, I decided that I could never go to Edinburgh again until I was free from the constraints of a full-time job. Although the company had been as flexible as they could, I was still running a sales team in a very specialised field, and despite using part of my annual leave to attend, it was not a sustainable situation.
I was also beginning to see people I had been on the circuit with, like the brother and sister team of Alan and Jimmy Carr, move to the next level. I was outgrowing the circuit, but I had nowhere to go.
There comes a point for a circuit comedian where you are being booked to close all the best clubs in the country and, within the dressing rooms, nobody questions that you are at the top of your game. But the reality is that when you reach that point you have to capitalise on it, because sooner or later you will not be regarded as special: someone else will come along who is just as good and the light will shine on them.
I had begun to consider leaving the day job but it was such a big decision. My then agent Danny introduced me to Addison Cresswell, who owned Off the Kerb and is known within television and comedy circles as having the unique ability to be a prick and a genius within the same second. Danny had told Addison that I was unable to commit to the things that would improve my comedy career prospects because of my 9–5 job. I had even had to give up doing The Jonathan Ross Show warm-ups because it was clashing with sales meetings.
Addison came into the room at such speed that it was clear this was a busy man who was not going to waste time. In his Cockney lilt, he declared, ‘Danny says you’re not sure you should leave your job. Leave your job. I’ll make sure you get enough work.’
‘It’s not that simple.’
‘Of course it is. What are you on? Twenty-five grand?’
‘No, more.’
‘Thirty.’
‘No.’
‘Forty.’
‘No.’
‘Fifty.’
‘No.’
‘Keep your fucking job.’
With that, he walked out and hardly spoke to me again before I left the agency. Yet he was to play a vital role in changing my life, years later.
I was now facing the option of taking a huge gamble in leaving my job, or forever being the bloke who headlined all the comedy clubs and earned a few quid for the odd after-dinner speech, but who would progress no further than that. I loved the comedy and was excited about the prospect of making it more than just a hobby but, ultimately, I had a good job and a family to look after. The most sensible thing to do was to stay where I was, and keep doing gigs as a second income to help chip away at our big mortgage.
Then Luis García scored in the semi-final of the Champions League against Chelsea at Anfield, and started a chain of events that resulted in Liverpool winning the Champions League, and in me questioning everything.