Janey Godley - not a woman to annoy
Last night, I go to see my chum Janey Godley compère in the spectacularly-designed Jongleurs comedy club at Oceana in Watford.
After the show, when we leave the first floor nightclub, we have to descend the stairs slowly, preceded by bent-over girls on stilts, gingerly picking their way down the steps like new-born foals. When we eventually get out of the building, we find the pedestrianised section of the long, wide high street outside has been hit by some sort of drink-and-drug fuelled cluster bomb and/or has fallen through a wormhole of time-and-space into an alternative universe in which Hieronymus Bosch has designed a fuzzily-lit surreal dream of a slow-motion Ibiza night. It is like the rush hour in dreamland.
There is a group of girls on stilts in Venetian Carnival style red costumes talking to tall men on stilts in formal black suits. Further along, multiple queues stretch in swaying straight lines out from buildings’ entrances into the street, police vehicles are parked higgledy-piggledy, as if dropped from on high, drunken men and short-skirted girls on mobile phones sway in and out of huddles of testosterone-drenched lads and a girl in a bikini dances to indistinct music in slow motion inside a slightly misty giant plastic bubble.
When I get home, the surrealism continues from the other side of the world with an e-mail from comedian Bob Slayer in Australia.
It reads:
__________
Last night, I was walking home across an Adelaide park at 4.00am and I just could not walk any more, so I crashed under a tree and went to sleep. I woke at 8.00 or 9.00am to the sound of monkeys. It turned out I was next to Adelaide zoo.
The sun was starting to roast and I was so hot all I could manage was to roll into deeper shade. It only got hotter and I finally managed to stagger out of the park at midday and get to the nearest air conditioning to cool down which, appropriately enough, was at the hospital. They do the cheapest breakfast in town.
The man whose house I should have been staying at – Matthew – is coming to my gig tonight with a blind date. That is very brave I think, especially as he has told me a great story that I will repeat to the audience.
A couple of Christmases ago, he is wandering up to the bottle shop and he meets two girls. He gets chatting and invites them back to his house. He has intimate relations with one of these girls and then, the next day, they tell him that they live in a care home.
He drops them off and foolishly gives them some cash. The next he hears about them is in the local paper.
It seems, with cash in their pocket, they do not go back to the home. They go out on the lash. And one of them is found dead. Murdered. (Not the one he got intimate with.) The next thing is the police turn up to question him. They ask him to let them know if he hears from the other girl, as they are worried about her.
A couple of days later, he is driving along and sees her in the street. He stops, picks her up and takes her home. He chats to her and she agrees that he should ring the police. They come around almost instantly, which surprises Matthew, but not when they handcuff the girl and tell him that she did the murder.
So I am living with a guy who fiddled a murderer.
I met a murderer once at the premiere for the movie Killer Bitch, which I introduced at the Curzon Mayfair cinema in London. The so-called Black Widow did 28 years for murdering three husbands and claiming on the insurance. While inside, she was Moors Murderer Myra Hindley‘s hairdresser.
On the week she got out of jail, she married a man that she met on day release.
The Killer Bitch premiere was full of assorted hoodlums and fighters including Stormin Norman Buckland – bare knuckle boxing champion of England – and, taking up the entire back row, a motorcycle gang that kills Hells Angels for fun. In-between was the football hooligan that Donal McIntyre put away, fighters, gangsters and assorted criminals.
My opening line on stage was “You are all a bunch of poofs!”
I have never raced to the punchline so fast… which was that they were poofs compared to the lovely old man who had married the Black Widow on the week of her release from prison.
SO IT GOES - John Fleming's blog 