It’s after the second TV series that our promoter Phil McIntyre, the man who organizes and produces all our live work, says we should take it out on the road as a ‘live sitcom’. This hasn’t been done before. Rab C. Nesbitt has taken a version of his TV show on the road but it’s not exactly what the show looks like on the telly. We say we’ll do it if the production values are high enough: we want the set to look identical, we want the same stunts and slapstick, we want explosions, and sound effects for the fights.
This is in the days before easily programmable sequencers and our ‘spot FX’ man has to constantly load floppy discs in and out of machines to play the various noises we want. But this attention to detail pays off well – when the theme tune plays and the curtain rises on the first show of the first tour to reveal the exact set, the cheer goes on for several minutes because people realize we’re going to give them the real thing. We’re not doing Bottom-like routines in front of a black cloth, we’re giving them the proper show. With added rude words.
Phil comes to rehearsals at the Dominion in central London one day and takes us outside to present us with . . . ‘The Starcraft’. It’s a converted Dodge camper van. It has no toilet or kitchen area, and there’s nowhere to play ‘one leg’, but it has two enormous seats like La-Z-Boy recliners, and behind them a double bed. This might be taking the Laurel & Hardy reference too far but we often find ourselves lying down together in our double bed.
We both have young families and we like to get home as much as we can. The double bed helps make this possible. We live in London and only start staying in hotels once we get as far as the arc that takes in Bristol, Birmingham and Nottingham. Any closer and the routine is to step off the stage straight into the Starcraft and get going. Once underway we change out of our sweaty stage gear and bung it in a bin bag to seal in as much of the stink as possible. It’s not ideal, but it means we get home to our own beds.
It also saves me from the boredom of wandering around town looking for something to do during the day and getting constantly bothered for autographs, which is what a lot of touring is about.
Oh! Spoilsport.
Let me try and explain.
We’re your fans!
I know, and that’s lovely, but being a fan is odd. And having fans is even odder.
I am a fan. I understand what it’s like being a fan. As a teenager I see Tom Baker – who in the mid-seventies is the current Doctor Who – walking in the street in York. It’s Tom Baker. It’s definitely Tom Baker. What do I do? I’ve seen him on telly. I know it’s him. He probably doesn’t know that I know he’s Tom Baker. He might think I haven’t recognized him. I ought to correct this. Plus, I could then tell all my mates that I’d met Tom Baker. I need to get him to sign something, to prove it’s him. Obviously he knows he’s Tom Baker, but I need the proof. What have I got for him to sign? The back of my bus ticket? My fag packet? I haven’t got a pen. Surely he’s got a pen? He must do autographs all the time, he’s bound to have a pen. ‘Tom,’ I shout, but he’s sloping away, quite quickly. He’s too far away now. It would seem odd to run a hundred yards to ask him if it’s really him, if I can have an autograph, and if he has a pen . . . and some paper. So I watch him go. But, from what I know now, he knows that I’m watching him, he knows he’s been recognized.
By the late nineties the Bottom Live show is doing very well and when Rik and I go touring we spend the full week in each town. And I’m not criticizing the noble towns of, for example, Newcastle, Leeds or Birmingham, but when you’re touring, and every day is just a slow preparation for the impending battle of wits that evening, filling in the time can be difficult.
You can’t work on other things because your mind is already occupied. It’s even hard to read when you’re keeping two hours’ worth of crowd control in your head. Hotel rooms soon lose their appeal – ironing the towels and making the bed immaculately to fool housekeeping is a game of diminishing returns – so you eventually head out onto the street to wander about, maybe take in the art gallery, the local beauty spot, the shops.
But of course, walking down the street undetected is more difficult than usual, because there’re posters everywhere, with your face on, which makes it easier for people to spot you, and to constantly interrupt your walk with requests for an autograph. This is perfectly lovely and very flattering . . . until you’ve done it a few times too many. And it’s hard to actually get anywhere.
So you learn to walk around looking at the pavement. Wearing a hat. You develop a sixth sense which understands when people have spotted you, and you scuttle off in the opposite direction before they can pluck up the courage to shout out. This is how I know Tom Baker must have known I was watching him. And that’s why he kept his head down. And wore a hat. And scuttled off in the opposite direction.
Things get more time-consuming when the mobile phone arrives. ‘Can I have a selfie?’ Watching for all the interminable minutes as people fumble their way round bits of technology which have suddenly become completely alien to them.
‘How do you switch it on? Oh, that’s looking the wrong way, oh, can you hold my bag a minute, you must get really bored of people doing this?’
Yes.
They co-opt another passer-by to take the photo – how is this a ‘selfie’? – then that person takes the opportunity to ask for their own selfie, and suddenly the self-perpetuating horror grows exponentially, until you have to be rude and more or less run away.
And none of them want you. Really. They have hardly any interest in you at all. What they want is to prove to their friends and family that they’ve met you.
Years later I try a different tack; I say, ‘Let’s not do the selfie/autograph thing, let’s just have a chat. What are you up to today? Where have you come from? What’s your day like? Do you live round here?’ And they don’t like it, they don’t want interaction, they only want the proof.
In the early 2000s, back in London, I’m in the French House in Soho when my sixth sense is alerted and I look up to see Tom Baker at the other end of the bar. And he’s looking at me. And I look back. He gives me the tiniest nod of the head, and goes back to his drink.
There’s very little music we agree on in the van. The only artists we both like are Little Richard, Dr Feelgood and Mott the Hoople. What am I saying – these are the only bands that Rik likes, plus ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ by Van Morrison. We listen to Mott’s greatest hits a lot. We particularly like ‘Saturday Gigs’. It’s brilliantly triumphant but rather sad and wistful at the same time, and it talks about the successes and failures the band had, and we relate to that. It contrasts the fun and apparent ease of success – no one really knows how they got there, it just happens – with the pressure to keep it up.
Mott happen ten years before us and we really appreciate the feeling of striving in the song. It’s very easy to look at any apparently successful act and wonder why they should ever doubt themselves, but we’re riddled with it. Especially when touring. We do five major tours, and, unlike a band, we can’t just play our hits, people want new material.
I’m accosted in the street by someone in Nottingham who’d come to see our show two nights running and is pissed off that we did the same stuff. That’s how much people want something new in comedy, whereas a band will be harangued if they don’t play the old hits. Like me with Procol Harum.
Every time we come up with a brand-new two-hour show we’ll be so worried that THIS TIME it won’t work. The live show happens every two years from 1993 to 2003 – with a break in 1999 to make our feature film Guest House Paradiso – and we live in constant fear of not delivering. Rik and I are almost catatonic before every first night of a new live show. The recurring thought being – ‘is this the one where we get found out?’ We’ve both had dreams of opening a new show and simply getting no laughs at all. Of some lone voice shouting out from the back: ‘But . . . it’s just not funny!’ Like the little boy who hadn’t heard about the magic suit in The Emperor’s New Clothes.
We’re both just accidental comedians.
Every time we tour we film the show to make a video. We usually do this two-thirds of the way through the run in a town where we feel confident of the audience response. On the second tour we do this at the Oxford Apollo, but the week before, the director comes to see the show in Bristol to write a camera script. We’re playing the Colston Halls – named after the slave trader Edward Colston whose statue was more recently tipped into the river. It’s worth rewatching footage of the event because the statue’s facial expression is precisely that of a man who’s resigned to being tipped into the river. It’s as if the sculptor knew.
The hall has since been renamed the Bristol Beacon and it’s a building that’s been through many changes. Its original purpose was as a concert platform and the backstage area is notoriously cramped and irregular.
Having seen the show, the director turns up the next afternoon and asks us to ‘walk through’ the more technical bits so that he can organize his script. ‘Walking it through’ is doing it at half the speed and stopping to explain the trickier moments.
At one point I’m explaining how Eddie runs across the whole width of the stage and dives through a closed window to avoid cleaning the toilet, smashing through the glass and the frame as he goes. I walk it through.
‘I run across here,’ I say. ‘And I dive through this window.’
By this point I’ve reached the window. It’s made of sugar glass, which breaks very easily but can scratch you quite badly. It’s more opaque than actual glass. I peer through it. Our set reaches the edges of the Victorian concert platform and my landing spot is down the narrow stairs that lead up to the stage. It’s a drop of about six feet. There are a couple of mattresses there to break my fall and the grinning figure of our tour manager, Ian Day, who’s there to catch me if I ‘overshoot’ – he’s a rugby player, which is why he’s chosen for the job.
During a live show I do this with consummate ease and a fair degree of relish. It always gets a good cheer. Looking at it in the cold light of the walk-through, I can see why – it’s absolute bloody madness. They’re laughing because you’d have to be clinically insane to do this.
Every Christmas after a tour the video of the show competes with Billy Connolly and Roy Chubby Brown for top spot in the video charts. We sell millions of them. People think you can earn big money from being on the telly, but it doesn’t compare to the money on offer from live touring and video sales.
Glory days.
So where does it all go wrong?