Melanie knew how much it meant to me to give the comedy a go, and she never once suggested I shouldn’t do it. Prior to our marriage split, the option would never have been considered; we were both too conservative for that. Now we knew that for the benefit of the relationship we had to try new things, although, to be fair, leaving a well-paid job to be a comedian is a bit more than trying ‘a new thing’. It is a leap of faith, and we jumped at it together.
When I left the office for the final time, I was doing so with the support of everyone I left behind. Nobody said, ‘Are you mental?’ which you would have perhaps expected; instead, people patted me on the back and wished me luck as if they would have liked to do it themselves. Having said that, people do the same to boxers on the way to the ring, but that doesn’t mean you are ready to get punched in the face.
The truth was, I was leaving a salary of nearly £70,000 a year to go and do gigs, which paid £200 a slot. If I got it wrong, being punched in the face would be the least of my problems.
The first thing I had to work out was how much money I needed to earn to try and reduce the impact on our family. I figured that if I had one sportsman’s dinner a month, for which I charged around £750, and I worked every weekend with a couple of mid-week gigs, we could cover our bills. That was my target – to meet the existing bills. Anything above that would be a bonus, but anything below it would be a problem.
It was September 2006, two months before my fortieth birthday, and I was now solely dependent on my ability to make people laugh to earn a living.
There is nothing more likely to sharpen the senses than to realise this, and so I sat down with Danny to draw up a plan. I suggested that since I was not getting any TV work, perhaps I should do a small tour, possibly of arts centres around the North West, where I had a small following.
This was greeted with less than lukewarm enthusiasm. As my agent quite rightly pointed out, there was no reason for anyone to buy a ticket to see me, so I would probably lose money. Not a situation I could afford to be in. Instead, he suggested I should just carry on working on the circuit till something came up.
I realised then that the agency no longer saw me as a person of potential. They had signed Alan Carr and Michael McIntyre, both of whom had more exciting prospects than me. The message was loud and clear, and so with no hard feelings I decided I should leave and try things on my own.
So, within a short space of time, I had left my job and my agent. Most mid-life crises result in people getting a sports car, a tattoo or a new young girlfriend; mine resulted in me leaving my job and leaving the only person who had got me any work in my new profession. I was well and truly in with both feet now, and I had to make it work.
I put a little tour together called the ‘Going to Work’ tour. It began on 4 March 2007 at the Brindley Arts Centre in Runcorn and was due to finish on 26 April at the famous Leeds City Varieties. I managed to get 15 venues to agree to take me, which was encouraging, as they would only do so if they thought people might come to watch. In the end, I only did 13 dates as two, one in Bradford and one in Rochdale, cancelled as nobody had bought a ticket.
Overall, the tour did well because of reasonably sized audiences in Liverpool and Manchester. The biggest crowd was at the Royal Court in Liverpool, where 745 people came along – not bad for someone nobody had heard of. It was nights like those that made me feel I might have had an audience out there somewhere. Yet five of the 13 venues sold less than 100 tickets. It was hard to justify the effort.
The final date was to be a celebration. Leeds City Varieties has a great reputation as a venue to perform in. Virtually every comedian of note from as far back as Charlie Chaplin has played there, and I really wanted to finish my first ever tour with a bang.
The problem was, it’s very hard to generate ‘a bang’ when you have only sold 15 per cent of the tickets.
Faced with doing a gig for 55 people in a 563-seater venue, my heart sank. The box office assured me there would be some walk-ins, but unless something dramatic happened – like every television in Leeds breaking, thereby forcing people to go out to be entertained – there was never going to be enough spontaneous custom to fill the place.
I sat in the kitchen totally dejected. The tour was supposed to have been the launch pad that was going to generate interest in me beyond being a good club comedian; it was supposed to have got industry people excited and add fuel to my career, endorsing my decision to leave the day job.
The reality was that it was not going to be the tour that changed things for me. And it also had to pay, as I had to at least make the same as I would performing in the clubs. My commitment to Melanie had been that I would manage to cover the bills; now I had to end the tour in a venue where the majority of the seats would be empty. There is no greater indication of failure in show business than empty seats, and my triumphant finale to the tour was to be played out in front of a sea of them.
Melanie came in and saw me sitting, deflated, drinking a cup of tea that I had been staring at so long it had gone cold. That only served to enhance the misery of the situation. Tea is what we give people in England to make things better or to make them feel welcome. Cold tea is what you drink when life feels so shit you can’t even be bothered to put the kettle on.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ she asked.
‘Nothing.’
‘You’re drinking cold tea – you’re depressed or mad, so what’s wrong?’
‘Hardly anyone is coming tonight.’
‘How many?’
‘Hardly any.’
‘How many?’
‘Fifty-five now, maybe a few extra.’
‘Well, that’s good, isn’t it?’
‘It would be if there weren’t four hundred and fifty more empty seats looking back at me. Over eighty-five per cent of the seats will be empty.’
‘Well, don’t tell the empty seats any jokes. You chose this job, so you have to make sure you’re good at it. Go and make the people who have come laugh, and they will tell people they know to come next time. Walk on there with a face like the one you’ve got on at the moment, and nobody will come back. Hurry up, you’re going to be late.’
That was it. A straightforward, Northern wife’s view of the situation. There was no pandering to creative sensitivities; this was my job and, just like a plumber who didn’t want to unblock a drain, my feelings were secondary. It was my job and I had to get on with it.
I got in my car and drove to Leeds.