Fear of flying for cult comedian Charlie Chuck?… Only ducks and pianos fly…

Charlie Chuck was feeling under the feather...

“Your mission, should you accept it” I said, “is to think up something for my blog tomorrow. I’m off out to get milk, eggs and baked beans.”

It was around midnight and Charlie Chuck was staying at my eternally-un-named friend’s flat behind Up The Creek comedy club in Greenwich, which was founded by comedy godfather Malcolm Hardee.

The club, not Greenwich.

So I left Charlie Chuck and my eternally-un-named friend with my hand-held tape recorder, embarrassingly like the one occasionally used in I’m Alan Partridge.

When I got back from the Sainsbury all-night supermarket, I listened to what was on the tape recorder:

“Malcolm Hardee,” Charlie Chuck was saying, “used to book me to go over to play the Laughter Lounge in Dublin. I used to go over in the ferry with him. He used to come back by plane; I used to catch a boat. I wouldn’t get on a plane.”

“Have you never flown?” my eternally-un-named friend asked, slightly surprised.

“Once,” said Charlie Chuck. “In 2007. Canada. I went to see Notre Dame in Canada. It’s a replica of the one in Paris. When we went to Notre Dame in Paris, I were disappointed because it wasn’t as beautiful as the one in Canada.”

“You only went over to Canada to see Notre Dame Cathedral?” asked my eternally-un-named friend.

“No, to perform in a stage show,” he replied.

“Ah,” she said.

“If it hadn’t been for John,” said Charlie Chuck, “I wouldn’t have gone. He went to the airport with me. It were a big thing for me to fly. There were quite a bit of money involved – around £20,000 – and, if I hadn’t gone, they would’ve sued me. They wanted me out there for six months, but I were only there for three weeks.

“They offered to pay me to go to Canada on the QE2 liner; it would’ve cost ‘em £3,500. It would’ve taken about three weeks, but I looked up about the QE2 and it were in a hurricane once with 90 foot high waves and I thought I don’t want three weeks of this. So I flew out but I were terrified.

“On the plane going out there, people recognised me and they were saying Tell us a joke, but I were nearly crappin’ meself.

“I were out there to play the part of Jean Lapointe, a Canadian senator, eighty years old, who had done the Ed Sullivan Show and about 30 films. The routine I did were his routine when he were a younger man.

“The tour people told me that, on the show, I’d be on wires and I ‘d probably be 10 or 20 feet above the stage. But it ended up I was playin’ this piano that were lifted 30 feet high in the air and upside down. I were strapped to it. I were playin’ Moonlight Sonata and In The Mood and talking to the piano. It were a routine I did. I climbed across the piano but kept the arpeggio going. I sneezed and the sheet music went three-quarters of the way across the piano. It were a bit like an Andrew Lloyd Webber production.

“It were for Franco Dragone. He’s big. He does Cirque du Soleil and Las Vegas and makes elephants disappear like David Copperfield. He books acts from all over the world. It were a big thing.

“So, after I sneeze and the sheet music flies away, I start playing again and the piano turns over and the moon comes out. And the piano goes up and tips over upside down and back again and the big band kicks in. It were on hydraulics but you couldn’t see them; you only saw me and the piano.

“It were going to be filmed and be on national television in Canada. But, when the piano were upside down, there were technical problems,. It banged into me leg and nearly broke me ankle. It bruised all me leg and they had to take it away to sort it out and they called the whole routine off. I’d rehearsed for a week but they didn’t do it. It were too risky.

“Because they knew I played drums, they brought in a brand new £2,000 drum kit for me to wreck, because that’s what I do in me show. I talk to me drums and wreck the kit and bite me hands and all that. I used to do a forward somersault off me drums when I were younger.

“They’d have to get me a lot of money to get me on a plane again.”

“Why?” my un-named friend asked.

“I just think of Jim Reeves,” said Charlie Chuck. “He died in a plane crash. Otis Redding. Buddy Holly. They all went down in plane crashes.

“But I’m not bothered about going anywhere either. I’m not bothered… I’m just not bothered. Where’s John?”

“He’s gone to buy some milk,” my eternally-un-named friend said.

“Milk?” asked Charlie Chuck, “It’s past midnight.”

The Scotsman’s 4-star review of Charlie Chuck’s Edinburgh Fringe show – uncut

For space reasons, The Scotsman shortened Claire Smith’s 4-star review of Charlie Chuck’s Laughter Lounge at the Edinburgh Fringe. This is the un-cut version; it was part of a piece reviewing various cabaret shows…

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I think it was when I was sitting in Lili la Scala’s show and started dreaming of a martini that I realised there was something missing in all the cabaret shows I’d visited.

So I was delighted when I stuck my head into Charlie Chuck’s Laughter Lounge, (filed under comedy but subtitled Cabaret, Absurdist), and clapped eyes on a working bar. Hooray.

The demented legend that is Charlie Chuck bursts onto a stage brandishing a lump of wood and proceeds to play/demolish a drum kit, which at one point seems to be fighting him back.

To begin with he’s barely articulate, thumping his chest, stamping, walloping said bit of wood on the floor and making cat noises. When the speech does start to form it begins like speaking in tongues before developing into shouted jokes and eventually philosophical observations and bursts of tangential erudition.

This is a moveable feast and tonight’s turns are Barnaby, whose speciality is wildly inaccurate impressions of famous actors – Michael Caine as a giant winking slug and Peter O Toole as a foetus.

Then Pat Cahill kicks off with a couple of brilliant songs. That Dog is not in any immediate Pain and Too Much Chicken a rap about chicken restaurants performed to French techno music.

When the absurdmeister himself returns to the stage he is laughing so much he can barely maintain his onstage anger, so he steadies himself with a long rambling story about a crab then bursts into his heart thumping wood slamming foot stamping exercise demonstration Chuckaerobics.

Wayne the sound technician, who must have seen the show seven times already, is creasing with laughter. And you can’t get any greater tribute than that.

Cabaret heaven.

4 STARS

For comic Charlie Chuck, the Edinburgh Fringe is just like juggling spaghetti

One day is a long time in the run-up to the Edinburgh Fringe.

In yesterday’s blog, I mentioned that cult comedian Charlie Chuck was thinking of staging a semi-serious show called Charlie Chuck’s Guide to the Universe at next year’s Edinburgh Fringe.

At this August’s Fringe, he is staging Charlie Chuck’s Laughter Lounge at SpaceCabaret @ 54.

Just a few hours after I posted that blog, a production cancelled their show at the Fringe and their six-day run became available in theSpaces @ Surgeons Hall. Because tickets for Charlie Chuck’s Laughter Lounge are already selling well, suave and ever efficient Charles Pamment, who runs the SpaceUK venues, offered those six days at Surgeons Hall to the esteemed Mr Chuck.

So now – pay attention – there will be a show called Dave Kear’s Guide to the Universe (Charlie Chuck’s real name is Dave Kear) running 15th-20th August the Fringe. It won’t be listed in the already-published main Edinburgh Fringe Programme, but it will appear in SpaceUK’s printed programme and their online webpages.

Ah! The Edinburgh Fringe!

It’s like juggling spaghetti in a high wind.

Who knows what tomorrow may bring?

Who knows what today may bring?

Did I say juggling spaghetti?

That’s another story.

To be continued.

Surreal cult comedian Charlie Chuck – balancing on the cusp of a big change

I spent an afternoon with comedian Charlie Chuck this week. Mad, bad and dangerous to know. Staring eyes. Shouting. A plank of wood in his hand. Talking gibberish with occasional mentions of a donkey. That’s Charlie Chuck on stage.

Whenever people hear that I know him, the inevitable question is:

“How dangerous is he?”

The answer is Not at all.

Off stage, he is a lovely, gentle person. He is a Christian.

In the early 1990s, I was up at the Edinburgh Fringe with the then-relatively-unknown Charlie Chuck. He was playing at new Venue 45 in Old St Paul’s Church, hidden away under the North Bridge and, with an unknown venue and a relatively unknown comic, audience figures were – at best – variable. He was thinking of giving up and going home. My advice to him then was – and to anyone at any time is:

“It’s the Fringe. Even if you have an audience of one person or no audience at all, play the gig and play the full run of the show because you don’t know who may be in the audience or who may turn up.”

A few days later, there were only four people in the audience. Charlie Chuck performed the show. Two of the audience members were preparing an upcoming BBC TV series The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer and, as a direct result, Charlie Chuck was cast as ‘Uncle Peter’ in the series.

Well, in fact, there was no ‘Uncle Peter’ character created; they just shot the established Charlie Chuck act. Personally, I have always thought they ripped him off and took the script credit.

Now Charlie Chuck, under his real name of David Kear, has just finished filming a small role in a short film Teddy starring Sally Carman of Channel 4’s Shameless and directed by Rebecca Papworth who won the 2011 UK Film Council/ CTBF John Brabourne Award. It was a straight acting role played with his trademark hair slicked back.

He came down to London to talk to me about his Edinburgh Fringe show this year, still called Charlie Chuck’s Laughter Lounge but now – like many a Fringe show – somewhat unlike its description in the Fringe Programme. It will include two guest comics each night and it may or may not also include snippets of a ‘testimony’ show called Charlie Chuck’s Guide to the Universe which he had been going to perform at Old St Paul’s Church this year but which he will now develop for the 2012 Edinburgh Fringe – either as a play or as a one-man show.

This year’s show in SpaceCabaret @ 54 will be his traditional surreal mayhem and non-sequiters and, I suspect, much talk of ducks and donkeys and waving around of a plank will be involved.

Charlie Chuck’s Guide to the Universe next year will be about why he is a Christian, the effect on him of his father’s death and about how, by changing your perception, you can change your reality.

“Do you know,” he asked me, “that you grow a new stomach lining every three days? Our entire blood renews itself every three or four months. You get a new liver every six months and a new heart every six months.” But he could not resist adding: “An apple pie could be part of your back leg by next week.”

Charlie Chuck certainly seems to be on the cusp of a big change. But I think bits of surrealism may hang on in there.