The Jacobite Rebellion

It’s 1745 and Bonnie Prince Charlie lands at Glenfinnan on the shores of Loch Shiel in Scotland. He hangs around for a couple of days until a few Highland chums arrive, then sets off on a tour of Britain, taking in the sights of Edinburgh, Carlisle, Preston and Manchester, and getting as far south as Derby, before heading back the way he came, escaping on a small boat to Skye disguised as a washerwoman, and fleeing to Italy to become an alcoholic.

History calls it the Second Jacobite Rebellion, or more simply, the ’45.

In that ten-year period between 1993 and 2003 Rik and I do pretty much the same thing. We take in the sights of Edinburgh and Manchester etc., but we do a lot better than Bonnie Prince Charlie and penetrate much further south than Derby; oh yes, we put Brighton, Bournemouth, Exeter and Plymouth to the comedic sword, not to mention the capitals of England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and Ireland. Yet the similarity is striking – a long slog interrupted by moments of blind terror.

Of course nit-pickers will say we’re not engaged in deadly combat on a regular basis, but as anyone who’s done live comedy will testify, we come pretty damn close.

And the actual battles of the ’45 are all very short: Culloden lasts an hour, Falkirk Muir about the same, and the Battle of Prestonpans is over in twenty minutes – we’ve had difficult spells at the Sunderland Empire that have lasted longer.

The casualties in the Clifton Moor Skirmish are about a dozen killed and wounded on each side. Thanks to the slapstick violence of our live show – sledgehammers, frying pans, explosions etc. – we’ve spilled almost as much blood in an evening. Without the benefit of camera angles to disguise the gap between our heads and the cricket bats and pickaxes with which we ‘pretend’ to hit each other, distances are tight and can often be misjudged, and the results see us getting stitched up fairly frequently.

The difference between reality and make-believe is surprisingly thin. One night at Sheffield City Hall I accidentally catch Rik with a large metal milk jug. It opens up his eyebrow. Perhaps Rik’s ‘rubbery-faced intensity’ means he has more blood vessels there than most, because it fairly cascades down his face. Though he’s such a sweaty performer – his costume is wringing wet after the first five minutes – that he doesn’t notice he’s bleeding, and carries on. He’s a trooper, after all, and this is showbiz, darling. I’m game, and carry on too, though I find it hard not to laugh as he begins to look more and more like some bloodied devil in a painting by Hieronymus Bosch.

I’ve always wanted to do a study on the performer’s heart rate during a live show. I feel mine rising every night before I go on. I don’t particularly feel nerves after the first couple of weeks, but I still feel the increased heart rate. It must be a natural preparation for the fight ahead – maybe the MacDonalds and the Camerons felt the same as they ran headlong down the hill through the wind and sleet to overrun Hawley’s left flank at Falkirk Muir.

I’m pretty confident Rik’s heart is beating fast because the blood keeps pumping and pumping, and starts to soak into his white shirt . . . and it’s the audience that make him aware of it, because they stop laughing. We look at them and their faces are drained and worried, like children who’ve seen their parents arguing. Rik wipes the blood away with one of the towels we’ve placed around the set for the sweat problem. He tells them it doesn’t hurt, it’s just a flesh wound, and we try to resume the show, but the audience are still in a state of shock. They simply won’t laugh any more. We have to cut to the interval and get a medic in to stitch him up.

And this is the paradox: they’ve come out for the evening to watch two blokes knock chunks out of each other; the harder we hit each other, the more they laugh; but the moment we actually connect, they throw up their hands in horror – like the dignitaries of Falkirk who came out to ‘watch the battle’ from the sidelines, and ended up getting overrun themselves. Imagine their faces – well, that’s the audience at Sheffield City Hall.

Why do I keep mentioning the Jacobite Rebellion? I’ll tell you why: because touring is ultimately very boring.

During our first tour in 1993 we drink copiously. Too copiously. There’s a strict rule that we don’t drink before a show – because we need our wits about us – but afterwards, well, the end of each and every show is a cause for enormous celebration, the relief is overwhelming and we drink for the sheer joy of conquering the panic. A lot of people drink to celebrate the end of their exams – we get meticulously examined every single night.

It turns out, in the long run, that Rik isn’t very good at drinking. As students, lack of funds severely constrained our drinking habits – we couldn’t afford more than four pints of cheap lager of an evening, and four pints made Rik amiable and fun to be with. But now we’re earning good money, we can drink as much as we like, of anything, even spirits, which had seemed an unaffordable luxury – and half a bottle of Scotch makes Rik, by turns, belligerent, morose, and then unconscious. It’s no fun for either of us.

As I’ve said, our office overlooks the front door of a pub, and as we’re writing the second show in 1995, Rik turns up increasingly late, and I often see him nip into the pub first thing before we start writing. He thinks I can’t see him, and that vodka doesn’t smell – he’s wrong on both counts.

We’ve often wished that we could write drunk, what a life that would be, and don’t think we haven’t tried: many’s the time we’ve taken a notepad on a lovely pub crawl, but reading it back the next day we’ve confirmed the universal truth that drunks are not as funny as they think they are. And the same is true now as he sits in front of me, secretly half cut. I eventually challenge him. He swears he hasn’t touched a drop, but annoyingly for Rik, his lazy eye wanders further to the left the more he drinks, and right now it’s practically looking backwards. We finally have a friendly, truthful and rather tearful discussion. Rik doesn’t appear for a week, and when he finally returns he says he’s come to accept that he has a problem with booze.

So from the second tour onwards Rik doesn’t drink at all, and to make it easier for him, and because drinking alone is a bit sad, I stop drinking too. It helps Rik with his problem, but gives us another – what the bloody hell are we going to do instead of drinking?

Instead of drinking wine I read a lot about it, and my cellar back home becomes an ever-growing thing of wonder – stocked floor to ceiling with French and Italian wines that I will drink when the tour ends. I’m no expert but I can name-drop and bullshit my way round any wine list, and over the course of the tour I order so much wine that I’m still drinking some of it today.

Then, wandering around a second-hand bookshop in Leeds, I find two enormous tomes: The History of England and The History of Scotland. They were published in the 1930s and are full of articles about where to go to follow the history of these two countries. As we’re heading to Edinburgh we take a look at The History of Scotland and decide to fill in our time following the events of the Jacobite Rebellion. We settle on the 1745 rather than the 1715 because that was the big one.

Food is our other distraction, and now, after every show, we go back to our hotel – having carefully ordered a slap-up meal from the menu and had it kept warm – so that we can eat late. And as we munch we watch Newsnight on the telly, and discuss where we might go the following day.

We wake, refreshed and un-befuddled by hangovers, I borrow the keys to the Starcraft from Ian, and we drive out to see the historical sites. A slight disappointment is that often there’s not much to see. In later years these places will grow visitor centres and informative notice boards, but right now there is mostly nothing.

At Prestonpans (or as we call it, Not-very-well-pressed-on-pants), just outside Edinburgh, there’s a small cairn on a triangle of grass sandwiched between the busy B1361 and the road to Meadowmill. It has the number 1745 carved into it, but nothing else. We climb what passes for the largest hill thereabouts, which may just be a slag heap from the nearby coalmine, and get a really good view of . . . a power station. However, the guide book directs us to a somewhat larger memorial to Colonel Gardiner (a Scotsman fighting for the British), and tells us Bankton House, just beyond, was where he lived – he was a career soldier and fought major battles all over Europe but died just outside his own front door, in the one that lasted twenty minutes. This is the kind of thing that amuses us, and we drive away contented. Who needs booze when you’ve got the Jacobites?

Colonel Gardiner with his house in the background

A field near Falkirk offers another monument on which is helpfully written: ‘The Battle of Falkirk was fought around here 17th Jan 1746’, and that’s it. There’s no more information. Which is just as well because the book relates that the battle was such a confusing mess of bloody hand-to-hand combat fought in storm-force winds and torrential rain, that at the end of it neither side knew who’d won. Which is another striking similarity to our live show, on occasion.

The Battle of Inverurie is just a sheep field outside Aberdeen.

And Culloden is similarly unspectacular. It’s a piece of scrub the size of two football pitches covered in thistles, and the book tells us the Scots would divest themselves of their cumbersome kilts and charge bollock-naked at the English ranks. We don’t know if the thistles were as high then as they are now, but we laugh hysterically for nearly an hour at the thought of it.

There’s nothing to see in Carlisle either. The local militia, a handful of old codgers, just opened the gates because they hadn’t been paid for months. But we have some good fish and chips, and look at the castle walls without getting out of the van, because it’s raining.

Following the ’45 is one of the most enjoyable touring experiences we ever share, but, much as the wheels fell off for Bonnie Prince Charlie halfway through his tour, things start to fall apart for us too. And it isn’t drink, like you might imagine, it’s a kind of vanity.

Charles Edward Louis John Casimir Sylvester Severino Maria Stuart is an undoubted claimant to the throne, he’s the grandson of James II. He’s also a figurehead, both for Catholics and for nationalist sentiment in Scotland. He promises his supporters a French invasion force is on its way to join them and that they will attack London together. Trouble strikes when he reaches Derby; his promises are found to be wishful thinking, the French are nowhere to be seen, his supporters lose faith in him, and in a room over a pub in the town centre his generals say they should turn back.

Richard Michael Mayall is an undoubted comic genius, he is a cult hero riding the crest of a very successful wave, and he’s equally successful with the ladies. Richie Richard, the character he plays, is definitely not a genius, and is not at all successful, especially with the ladies. Trouble strikes a few weeks into the tour, when we hit the Derby Assembly Rooms and the line between Rik and the character Richie starts to blur. This is when the audience stop laughing quite as hard, and when Rik wants to turn back.

It’s hard to explain the difference between a good laugh and a diminishing laugh. The audience will not be aware of it, but all performers, not just comedians, will occasionally come off stage saying, ‘What a shit audience they were tonight.’ Of course, the opposite is usually the truth – that the performers haven’t been on top of their game – and it’s not really a problem until . . . you start to recognize the same feeling every night. Once you start thinking the audience are shit every night, you’re in trouble.

The writing is fun – we enjoy the writing – it’s where we get to hear the jokes for the first time, and we enjoy making each other laugh.

In rehearsals the crew laugh at every line. They’re not paid to laugh, they just do because they find it funny. That’s partly why they like to tour with us.

It starts to be less fun when Rik stops playing the character and begins to believe the laughter. I see it on his face. He starts to think that the crowd are not laughing because Richie is a funny character but because Rik is a comic god. And it’s complicated, because it’s both, but he starts being more Rik than Richie. Unfortunately, Rik the comic god isn’t quite as funny as the character. The character is humble, nervous, insecure, scared and desperate. The comic is none of these things.

Don’t get me wrong – Rik is a comic genius. But he delivers his comedy through characters. That’s when he’s funniest.

And then sex begins to rear its ugly head.

Richie the character isn’t confident of his sexuality because he’s never had it off. Rik is very sure of his sexuality and has had it off a lot. Playing one or the other of these makes the show very different. In fact he now has a choice of three: Richie, Rik the comic genius, and Rik the sex god. The more the sex god prevails the weaker the laughs become. There’s always a point a few weeks into every tour when he’ll say: ‘None of the stuff I have is funny, let’s cut all my lines.’ And I’ll try to point out that if he stayed in character the laughs might come back. If I had a penny for every time I said ‘just play the character’ I’d have £5.42.

Nothing wrong with being a sex god – well, I wouldn’t know, but I’m imagining it must be lovely – however, the jokes are written for the exact opposite. The character is wailing that he’s destined to be a virgin his entire life, whilst the sex god playing him is winking at a girl in the fifth row.

Our audience is probably only a third female at best, but occasionally Rik starts to shout ‘Scream, Girls!’ apropos of nothing, like he’s a Beatle, or a Monkee – he loves the girlie shriek that comes back at him. I respond by looking very confused and shouting ‘Scream, Boys!’ as if it’s some kind of experiment, and it gets a good laugh.

And this is basically the choice – shrieking or laughing. It doesn’t seem possible to have both.

He cuts huge sections of carefully written jokes which only he at his manic and sexually inadequate best can perform, and the show gradually loses any complexity it might have had and becomes a race to the next fight.

We usually save the Hammersmith Odeon in London for the end of the tour. The accepted wisdom is that Londoners get so much entertainment that we need our show to be at its well-honed, tip-top best to sate their jaded palates. Unfortunately this turns out to be the point in our tours when we’re basically doing the Chuckle Brothers version, and by the end of each tour, especially the later ones, I’m thinking, ‘I don’t want to do this again.’

No one’s sure whether women forget the pain of childbirth enough to consider doing it again because of time or hormones, but we forget the pain of touring through time and the rather more sordid promise of enormous financial reward. However, even that palls over the years, and everything comes to an end.

The Jacobite Rebellion ends in defeat at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. It’s a confusing situation and basically the end of a fight for the throne that’s been going since 1688. The Duke of Cumberland’s force is mainly English but includes a lot of Scots lowlanders; Charlie’s army is mostly Scottish but includes a lot of English Jacobites. Charlie’s men are knackered, they haven’t eaten for two days. The battlefield suits the Duke’s artillery and dragoons. It doesn’t suit the Jacobites, whose chief tactic is to charge at the enemy front on. Bollock-naked. Over the thistles.

Our Culloden in 2003 is the Watford Colosseum. Nothing specific happens – it’s just the last day of another 120-date tour, but it turns out to be the last time we do the live show. It’s the end of the road. The sex god within Rik has been fighting for supremacy since 1976. We’ve done five tours, more than 600 gigs, around 1,000 if you include our work before Bottom. We’re still pretty much charging front on, we put up a better fight than the Jacobites, and we aren’t exactly overrun, but I’ve had enough. I suppose the specific thing that happens is that I decide not to do it again – like Charlie, I want to run away to Italy and drink everything I’ve read about, and that’s more or less what I do.

And I know the 2003 show is possibly not as good as the 2001 show. It’s like being an investor in stocks and shares – you have to judge when the stock is at its peak and then bail out. To my mind we’ve reached that peak. We’re at the top of the mountain, there is nowhere higher to go, and we’re now looking down.

We all know comedy acts that have gone on beyond their sell-by dates. They can still be funny but look slightly damaged and increasingly desperate. Only by degrees, but it adds up over the years until they look like sad acts.

I don’t want to be one of those.