Can't Stand Up for Sitting Down Read Online Free PDF Page B

had a brilliant comic brain and timing,
and I often thought he should be getting up on stage too.
    Grazio
is an utterly charming, very helpful and sweet-tempered man who has also toured
with the likes of Lee Evans and Michael McIntyre. He is a completely soothing
person to travel with, is very helpful, and his anticipatory skills are
nothing short of miraculous. He is reliable and calm and in short, probably the
perfect tour manager; in fact, he would win an award for tour managing, should
there be such a thing.
     
    ‘Getting Your Head Down’
    When I first started touring,
the tour dates tended to be continuous, one date after another with a break of
one or two days during which to recover before setting off again. Initially, in
the early days one of us comics would drive and we would be booked into cheap B&Bs
with suspicious couples eyeing us up over breakfast wondering why we were under
ninety years of age.
    As the
old career progressed, the B&Bs metamorphosed into cheapish hotels which
could be terrifying. I remember staying in a particularly scary hotel in
Liverpool one night. I arrived at the door of my room, having staggered up
there from the bar, to discover that it had been kicked in the night before and
had had a piece of hard-board nailed, very badly, over it. In the room next
door, a loud argument was going on between two blokes, with the occasional
sound of smashing glass or splintering wood. Pushing a chest of drawers against
the door, I lay on the bed with all my clothes on and eschewed the communal
toilet in the hall in favour of weeing in the sink.
    When
the tours were longer and more lucrative, we found ourselves in what I would
consider to be posh hotels, great big ones in town where you could have
breakfast in your room, raid the minibar and hang your clothes up on the
trouser press for want of a better thing to do with them if you were a lady.
    I used
to lie on the bed flicking through the hundreds of channels on the telly
necking a lager and thinking, How could I ever get bored with this?
    But the
weird thing is, you do eventually After seeing the inside of hundreds of hotel
rooms, they do begin to merge into one, and you long for the quirkiness of your
own place with all the familiar crap in it. It’s even worse when you have a
family you can’t go home to see. This was why, after I’d had children, I would
go home every night after a gig and start out anew every day This obviously
made days longer and tours harder, and meant that the distance I was prepared
to go shrank a bit, but I would far rather have done that than stay away for
days on end.
     
    At Last — Trying To
Make Them Laugh
    Once you arrive at a
theatre for a gig, normally two hours or so before it’s due to start, you
explore your dressing room. These range from sumptuous big rooms with the
clichéd mirrors with light bulbs round them and posh sofas, to tiny
suspicious-smelling hovels with one small settee that looks as if an
incontinent tramp has been sleeping on it for a fortnight. You then have to do
the obligatory sound check, which involves interacting with the techies at the
theatre — again a huge range of individuals, from cheery blokes who bung the
kettle on and are happy to furnish you with local knowledge, to teenagers
covered in heavy-metal tattoos who can barely look at you, let alone manage
anything approaching a word. It is a huge joy when people are friendly and
welcoming. Sadly, some of them decide in advance that you are a showbiz twat
and go out of their way to demonstrate this. As someone who goes out of my way
to be unerringly polite and friendly I find this a complete pain in the arse.
    After
the sound check, there is quite a lot of sitting down and talking bollocks
until the show starts. I have found I really need this time to get into gear
for the show. I don’t get as nervous as I used to (butterflies for a week
before a gig), but there are certain circumstances which are more conducive to
being in the