IT’S ALWAYS BETTER WHEN IT’S FULL
I would love to say that the gig was fantastic and that I was carried out of the venue shoulder high, but that would be a lie. It did go well, apart from a heckler who kept interrupting. When you are performing in an empty venue, it is hard enough to generate an atmosphere, but when someone keeps butting into the show it makes it even harder.
I tried every normal heckle put-down, but he still kept getting involved, to the extent that it began to affect the rest of the audience, so I just let him have it with both barrels. All my angst and frustration were let loose on him, and I embarked on a character assassination of his hair, his clothes, his teeth, his face, his job, his accent, his very being – at the end of which, he stood up and said:
‘There was no need for all that. I’m leaving.’
The small audience cheered, and the man turned to leave, at which point I heard myself say:
‘Don’t go. I think you’re a complete tosser, but you do make up a significant percentage of the audience, and I can’t afford to lose anyone!’
He left, and the gig genuinely did go well afterwards.
The tour was over, and though I had proved to myself I could do it, I also proved that I could not do it very well on my own. It was time to find a new agent.
I spoke to three people. One said to me she could not see anything to work with and didn’t think I had much to offer. One said if I was ready to come to London he could try to get things moving, but he had a big client who had just got a part in a movie and so was expecting to be in LA a lot over the coming months. Only one made the effort to come and see me on tour. And she was also the only one who said, ‘I will take you as you are.’
Lisa Thomas was Jason Manford’s agent, and Jason was then, and still is, one of the people I met on the circuit whom I consider a friend. It was through him that we met; he had told me about her and her about me, and had suggested that we would work well together.
First off, I went to Lisa’s office for a meeting with one of her juniors, who didn’t impress me at all because she spent the whole time asking me if I was as funny as Michael McIntyre. Then Lisa called me to apologise for not being at the office that day, and asked if she could come to one of my gigs in Manchester.
She came and saw me do two hours to 500 people, and met me in the bar afterwards, along with Melanie and my sister, Carol.
‘What do you do?’ Carol asked Lisa.
‘I’m an agent,’ she replied.
‘So you’ve come to try and rob our John of all his money,’ Carol said, before I could stop her.
‘No. I hope to make him a lot more,’ Lisa batted back.
There was someone I needed to say hello to so I left them talking. Some 10 minutes later they were all laughing and, if nothing else, I was impressed that Lisa had made the effort to come up from London, had managed to overcome my sister and wife, and was clear about what she wanted to do: she wanted to move me up. I agreed to join her and, within a very short space of time, I knew it was one of the best decisions I had ever made.
For her part, Lisa has since told me that she could not understand how I could attract a fair-sized audience for a one-man show, while nobody outside the North West had ever heard of me. She knew there was something to work with; she just wasn’t sure what, as everyone she spoke to within television had written me off.
Being on television was still not a priority for me, but it has become obvious that TV exposure brings more people to see you live. The catch-22 was that the more people who came to see you live, the more likely you were to be asked to be on television.
Lisa had spoken to the handful of people who booked most of the TV shows in the country, and the overwhelming feedback was that I had three main problems:
1) My accent. Some of the bookers saw this as a real barrier, but there was nothing I could do about that unless I tried to be something I wasn’t.
2) I was too old to be new. Television, particularly television comedy, is always looking for the next new thing. It’s very rare that the next new thing will be a married man in his forties with small children. That is not the next new thing, that’s the bloke who lives next door and washes his car on a Saturday.
3) I don’t tell jokes. Instead, I tell stories – anecdotes which are not punchy and quick like jokes, but which require an investment of time. This style of comedy was never going to work for a panel show, which by now was the universal access point to television exposure for most comedians.
So, unless I wrote a sitcom about a bloke from Liverpool who was married with kids and enjoyed telling his mates stories, there was little chance I would break through on to the small screen.
A couple of TV executives also apparently said I didn’t look funny enough, whatever that meant. It was what I immediately liked about Lisa: the honesty. She had decided to become my agent, but had been told there was no place for me on the only medium that could actually raise your profile quickly, so she felt it was only right she should tell me.
Nothing was going to happen fast. I listened to each of the points and decided that I couldn’t change points 1 and 2, and even though I could change number 3 I didn’t want to. If I changed to suit the tastes of others, I would forever be changing, so I decided it was best to continue just being me and try to make my stand-up as good as it could be. I reasoned that if you are funny, people will come eventually.
I made the decision that year to return to the Edinburgh Festival. I had no job, so I could really give it a push. Lisa introduced me to Ed Smith, who was going to promote the show and try to get me a decent time slot. He came back with 11pm, a bad time slot. My last two attempts at Edinburgh had resulted in poor audience numbers, so they basically gave me what they had left.
I was to do a month in a venue called the Beside, which held 80 seats when it was full. I decided to do a show explaining how I ended up in this position: being 40 years of age and performing my third show at the Edinburgh Festival in another disused shipping container. The show was called ‘Stick Your Job Up Your Arse’.
This time I prepared properly for the run. Those critics who had already decided they didn’t like me came back again simply to reaffirm their dislike, but others suggested the show had promise and the audience numbers were up, also. The story touched a few people, who wrote to me afterwards to say they had used the tale to re-evaluate their lives and a few of them subsequently left steady jobs to fulfil their dreams. If any of those people are reading this, I hope everything worked out as you would have wished. If it didn’t, then it was not my fault and refunds are not provided.
Having decided that there was no point in waiting for my big TV break, and buoyed up by the fact that Edinburgh was not a complete disaster, I took the show on tour. Five of the venues sold less than a quarter of the tickets. At Leeds City Varieties, I scraped by with less than 50 per cent of the venue being full, but the Memorial Hall in Sheffield sold just over 50 seats at a venue holding 500. No matter who you are and how much the audience is enthusiastic, when 90 per cent of the seats in the venue are empty it is hard to feel that your career is moving forward.
A few years later I received a letter from Leeds City Varieties asking people who had performed there if they wanted to contribute to their planned refurbishment, perhaps by sponsoring a chair. For £350, I sponsored chair G10 in the stalls, on the back of which is a plaque saying, ‘It’s always better with an audience. John Bishop.’ I hope that chair will be there long after I can get booked there, just as a reminder.
After the tour, I began to prepare for my return to Edinburgh the following year with a show called ‘Cultural Ambassador’, a reference to Liverpool’s status as the European Capital of Culture in 2008.
It was my fourth solo run in Edinburgh, and it marked a real turning point for me. For once, people bought tickets prior to any reviews, and even when some bad reviews were written, it still did not stop people coming. I was finding an audience or, more to the point, they were finding me, despite me being a story-telling, middle-aged man with a Scouse accent.