Comic Sarah Hendrickx has a mid-life crisis & plans to ride Gérard Depardieu

(This was also published by the Indian news site WSN)

Sarah Hendrickx yesterday – from dreadlock kid to Depardieu

Comedian Sarah Hendrickx is 45, twice divorced, a mum of two, grandmother of twins and an expert on autism – she has published five books on the subject (plus one on student cookery).

She trains professionals – care workers, doctors, psychiatrists, foster carers, teachers – who have to deal with autistic people.

“And when you were a kid?” I asked her yesterday.

“Council house kid,” she said. “Scholarship. Private school. Croydon. Left at 16. Went to live in squats. For years and years, I was a squatter. Squatting in London in the early 1980s, as soon as I left school. Dropped out completely. Punk. Got pregnant. Lived in a van with my daughter. Dreadlocks. Dog on string. Travelling around a bit. Moved to Devon. I’ve only looked sensible in the last ten years. I’m a bit of a late starter.”

“And you have Tourette’s Syndrome,” I said.

“Yes,” Sarah said. “Facial ticks. Eye ticks. I used to blink around 100 times per minute. Now I have Botox injections around the eyes on the NHS – I get free Botox, which is what every middle-aged woman wants, isn’t it? But it’s a horrible, horrible process.”

“And you’re an international expert on autism,” I said.

“Apparently so,” said Sarah.

“Because…?” I asked.

“Because I’ve written books, I guess,” she replied. “And because not that many people know that much about it.”

“You’re autistic yourself?” I asked.

“Yes. The only people who really understand it are people with it, because it’s about a different neurology. Even people who are married to it don’t really understand it, because it’s a whole different way of seeing the world. It’s all about cognitive processing. It’s much easier to have set rules about something. There’s no grey. Everything’s black and white, because that makes your life easier and calmer. The logic is not necessarily perfect logic, but it’s your own logic. There’s always a logic; it may be a flawed or a skewed logic, but it’s not random thinking. You can’t make judgments very well, because judgments are grey.”

“But isn’t the whole thing about performing comedy that you can suddenly take off on a flight of fantasy?” I asked.

“Not my comedy,” said Sarah. “Because I have no imagination. I don’t get the surreal humour. The Mighty Boosh. I don’t get that at all. Oh I have a fish and you have binoculars! Really? Why is that funny? My comedy is all true.”

Hans Asperger working in Vienna, c 1940

“Asperger’s Syndrome interests me,” I told her. “Robert White, who won the Malcolm Hardee Comedy Award a couple of years ago, has it.”

“There was research on stand-up comics a few years ago,” Sarah told me, “which found many were quite unusual in standard personality-type profiles. They might be extrovert on the stage but, in their personal lives, they were socially awkward.”

“I’ve found with quite a few of the comedians I’ve tried to help,” I said, “that they’re extrovert on stage but do they want to publicise themselves? No they bleeding don’t. They want to hide in a cave rather than be interviewed.”

“Well,” said Sarah, “you stick me in a networking event or a party… I’ve been to autism events as a speaker and I’m the one out of 300 people who’s hiding round the corner because I just can’t bear to be visible.”

“So how can shy people who want to hide away be comedians?” I asked.

“Because,” explained Sarah, “they stand in front of people with a microphone, a script, a set period of time to talk and a plan of what they’re going to talk about and, when they’ve had enough, they get off. It’s not a two-way dialogue. It’s not socialising.

“My experience of the comedy circuit is it’s like a special interest group. Most people aren’t the traditional type of friends. We turn up and say Done any gigs lately? How you gettin’ on? What you doin’ next week? There’s very few other comedians, for example, who know the names of my children or what I do for a living or where I’m going on holiday – which is my understanding of what friendship is supposed to be about. But that suits me fine.

“I think the comedy circuit includes a whole bunch of people who don’t have many ordinary friendships – we are, after all, people who are happy to spend all their weekend evenings away from their loved ones, driving round the country by themselves. That totally fits autism or, at least, it’s a lifestyle that suits someone like me very well.

“To me,” Sarah continued, “comedy is a puzzle. It’s like a scientific experiment. These are the words. This is my material. Did it work? Feedback from the audience tells me whether it did or not. If it didn’t, I go away and try to work out why and try to fix it. To me it’s a system. Trying to write the perfect joke, the perfect set, trying to analyse it. It’s all about analysing it. I never go home and worry about having had a bad gig, because it’s nothing to do with ‘me’, it’s to do with ‘that’ which I’ve created. I am separate from ‘that’.”

“So,” I asked, “if you get a bad audience reaction, it’s not a personal rejection, it’s a rejection of the product you created?”

“Yes,” agreed Sarah, “it’s like baking a cake and it didn’t taste very nice. I don’t have any emotion in it at all.”

“So why did you want to be a comedian in the first place?”

“Oh,” said Sarah, “that’s a long story about wanting to be an actor as a child. I got pregnant at 18. I got a place to do Drama at Exeter. I got down there with my daughter aged three. I realised that drama courses and three year olds do not go together. I couldn’t do the course and that was the end of that.”

“So you were a frustrated performer?”

“Very much so. Now I’ve got a 25-year-old daughter and two grand-children and a 16-year-old son who lives at home. When my son got to the point where he was able to be left on his own, I took myself off and started doing a bit of comedy.”

“And now you’re preparing to do your first solo Edinburgh Fringe show in August,” I prompted.

“Yes. It’s called Time Traveller.”

“Why?”

Scene of Sarah’s panic attack – Sagrada Familia in Barcelona

“It’s about going back into my own past to an event which happened to me about twelve years ago. It was a pretty unfortunate time of my life. I was camping in Spain with my now ex-husband and kids. My mum had just died. I went up the Sagrada Família in Barcelona, had a giant panic attack, got agoraphobia, got relatively disabled by that though not house-bound.

So it’s kind of going back through that and saying Well, I was always a bit of an anxious kid and a bit of an odd kid. This thing happened. It all got worse. Stuff about my marriage. Stuff about my kids. Then this moment of clarity where I decide what I need to do is go back to Barcelona and sort all this shit out. And then I decide to go by bicycle.”

“And you are actually doing that?”

“Yes. I’m going to cycle to Barcelona at the end of May.”

“How far is it?”

“800 miles.”

“Have you done something like that before?”

“No.”

“And you’ve decided to do it, because…”

“I’m having a mid-life crisis. I’m just scared of everything. That’s the general premise. I need an adventure. I bought my bicycle off eBay. It’s called Gérard, after Gérard Depardieu. And I’ve written a song for the show.”

“You can play the guitar?” I asked.

“No,” said Sarah. “Playing the guitar when you can’t play the guitar is quite liberating.”

“I would pay to see this free show,” I said. “Have you practised for the bicycle ride by putting a scouring pad under your bottom and rubbing it backwards and forwards?”

“No. I haven’t even been on my bicycle for four months or so. I keep looking at my bicycle and thinking Ooh. I really should have a little go on it.”

“Will you be stopping at hotels along the way?”

“No. Camping. On my own.”

“Where will your camping equipment be?”

“On panniers.”

“Mmm…” I said.

“I know,” said Sarah. “It’s mad. I’ve never been camping on my own. I’m terrified. I’m terrified of everything. I’m terrified of being on my own. I’m an absolute weed. This is for the Edinburgh Fringe show but it is also because… well, I have been a mum since I was 19, my kids are now grown-up. This is genuinely a mid-life crisis. It’s the first time I’ve had the chance to do anything like this in my life, really.”

The future of UK comedy according to a grumpy comic and a grumpy club owner

(Shorter versions of this piece appeared in the Huffington Post and on Indian site We Speak News)

A grumpy Lewis Schaffer forces himself to smile

In yesterday’s blog about the alleged crisis in the UK comedy business, I quoted an anonymous club owner who disagreed with comedian Lewis Schaffer’s opinion expressed in a previous blog that “comedy club owners want repeatability. They should not want people coming out of shows and saying It’s always good. No, they should want ‘em to say Oh my god! Something fucking amazing happened there!”

Yesterday’s anonymous club owner claimed:

“Lenny Bruce said you can be amazing AND be consistent – the two are not mutually exclusive and this should be the aim of all performers in comedy – aiming for an 80% wow rate. Anything lower and you aren’t a pro standup.”

This annoyed British-based American comedian Lewis Schaffer yesterday.

“I am not going to continue talking about this,” he told me, “but never trust anyone who doesn’t want to be quoted, ever. And, John, you should never quote anyone, especially in such depth, who refuses to let people know where he stands unless you have a blog post to get out.

“I don’t remember reading Lenny Bruce saying You can be amazing AND be consistent. In his later days he was hardly consistent and not that often amazing, and rarely booked. And not just because he was being arrested all over the place.

“I would bet that the person you quoted so extensively would never, ever, have booked Lenny Bruce. And no comedy booker would tolerate a comic who was amazing only four out of five gigs – 80%. If you die once out of ten you’re on very rocky ground. If you die in the first three or four gigs you can kiss that club goodbye.

“This is the last I am talking about this as it seems self-serving and I have a show to do tonight.”

Shamefully, I did not go to Lewis Schaffer’s show last night. I was going to go to the Alternative Comedy Memorial Society’s show but I never saw that either. I got side-tracked talking to Noel Faulkner at his Comedy Cafe Theatre venue.

The successfully diversified yet rather grumpy Noel Faulkner

“What do you think about dependable repeatability versus brilliant but hit-and-miss comedians?” I asked, adding: “I prefer the hit-and-miss ones myself.”

“Unfortunately,” Noel replied, “club owners have to have a guaranteed act but, as regards putting together a good show, you do want the guy who’s hit-and-miss and taking risks.”

“So, is the UK comedy business in crisis?” I asked.

“Huge crisis,” said Noel firmly. “I think what’s happening to the comedy business now is what was happening to the music business when the internet and downloading got up-and-running. But at least in the recording business they knew it was the world of computers that was sabotaging their business. At least they knew where it was coming from. In the comedy business, other than the recession, we don’t know why it’s gone downhill.

“With the comedy business, the saturation of talking head comedians on television has done some damage. But you can’t walk up to a comic and say Oh, by the way, I wanna keep live comedy very pure with the masses crying out for it and I don’t want you to do six weeks on television and pay off your mortgage and feed your wife and kids.

“People are saying If you put on a good club and put on good acts… but that’s not working.”

“One way to survive is to diversify?” I suggested.

“You can diversify,” said Noel, “but ice cream just doesn’t sell that well at Christmas. We’re a comedy club, how much diversity can you do?”

“Music, comedy management?” I suggested.

“The punters who are coming to the comedy club just want to see good comics,” argued Noel. “I’ve already diversified. I’ve shrunk the comedy room. I have a huge building with huge rent and that’s why I have diversified.

“We’ve turned the main room into a music venue because it’s more profitable and helped keep the doors open. If we hadn’t done that – because of the decline in the comedy audience – we would have had to shut down. I’ve taken in a music partner, a very strong promoter, who’s become a partner in the company and he’s really pushing the music side and now we’re the only live music venue in Shoreditch. We don’t give you one band: we give you three or four bands.

“And I’m back in the management game. I handle four strong acts.”

“You once told me,” I reminded him, “you were not going to go back into management, because you couldn’t face acts phoning you up after midnight with their personal traumas.”

“Yeah,” Noel agreed. “When I quit the management business, I vowed I’d never go back in because of acts phoning you up at midnight asking which train they should be on. The truth is I don’t fucking care, mate. But then I stumbled across Prince Abdi and Kate Lucas and I couldn’t resist wanting to have a hand in their careers, because they really have great potential. And then Nick Sun and Jimmy James Jones came along. So I got seduced by their extreme talent.”

“Someone won £136 million on the EuroLottery last night,” I said. “What would you do if you won the EuroLottery?”

“I’d write a letter to everyone in the business and tell them to fuck off,” replied Noel.

“That’s good,” I said.

“No, if I won the Lottery,” Noel continued, “I’d put out a free Edinburgh Fringe brochure and buy a tower block in Edinburgh, rent it to students at reasonable rent all the year round and then, in the month of August, I would give it to all the comedians for £150 a week.”

“You would be a popular man,” I said.

“I would have a lot of people at my funeral,” Noel agreed. “I mean, £1,500 to put an ad in the bloody Fringe brochure is outrageous! It’s crazy! People with no money having to spend £10,000 just to struggle through Edinburgh hoping that some brainless 21-year-old talent scout from the BBC will spot you doing your show and you can make your millions in the land of television.

“I think if anyone wants to get a TV show now, the way to go is paedophilia. If you’re a paedophile, you’ve got a great chance of getting into television and the BBC will be behind you all the way.”

“So will you be going up to Edinburgh next August?” I asked.

“If I’ve nothing else to do,” said Noel, “but I might do something more productive. I’m thinking of knitting all my family scarves for Christmas.”

“There are lots of young comedians up there,” I prompted.

“A lot of the up-and-coming skinny-jean comics,” said Noel, “are just annoying, irritating, not funny and have no life experience so have nothing to talk about. Sure they can end up on telly fast, because the TV researchers are all in their early twenties. They see a cute middle class twat in skinny jeans and think Oh, he’ll be great! and they’re not interested in the big fat guy or girl who really has something to say.

“I ran a comedy agency many years ago and, maybe twelve years ago, I remember my partner in the agency, when I approached her about Milton Jones back then, she told me Oh! He’s past it! 

“It was the happiest day of my life when Milton finally broke big and now he’s definitely in the Top Five comedians in England. And, besides that, he’s a fucking diamond geezer.”

“There’s no one definite route to success,” I said.

“Well,” replied Noel, “in Hollywood, if you wanna succeed, you gotta suck seed. The future of comedy though is – if you have a good act – you have to build up your own audience, your own fan base, keep tending that audience, keep your act fresh, so they keep coming back and, eventually, you’ll have enough of them to fill the O2. Forget about whoring yourself to television.

“Be a comic with something to say, take care of your audience and that is the way forward. You have to look ahead to when your breasts are saggy and you’re not right for television because all the talent scouts are 23 without a brain in their heads. They wouldn’t know fucking talent if fucking Elvis sang to them. The aim of the business is to have longevity. You gotta look ahead to when you’re fifty and you want to still have a following and still be booked.

“It’s very difficult to be funny when you’ve got £5 million in the bank. It’s really hard to wanna write jokes then. As much as you can use other people to write, you really need to have the initial inspiration and give the ideas to the writers. If I had £5 million in my pocket, I wouldn’t be talking to John Fleming. I’d have learnt Russian so I could speak to my girlfriends in the hot tub. Have you seen Jimmy James Jones?”

Jimmy James Jones performs at the Comedy Cafe last night

“No,” I said.

“Stay and see him,” urged Noel. “He’s on here tonight.”

So I did.

When Noel Faulkner last had an agency, it made Jimmy Carr into a star and ‘discovered’ Daniel Kitson.

I have seen endless comedians. Many are extremely good. But it is rare you see someone with real knock-you-down charisma and star potential which screams through your eyeballs and your ears.

Jimmy James Jones was that last night.

Perhaps UK comedy does have a future.

When you see it, you recognise it.

And Noel Faulkner, unlike most, is not a bullshit artist.

He can spot real talent.

He has in the past. And now he has again.

Long may he be grumpy.

What do street performers & comedians earn and why don’t they just give up?

Paolo Ferrari – reaching a spaghetti junction in his career?

(This was also published in the Huffington Post)

For decades, Covent Garden Piazza in London has had a pitch for street performers. One of the regulars there is Paolo Ferrari who also plays comedy clubs. I had a chat with him in Covent Garden yesterday afternoon.

“It’s all about guts,” he told me. “A performer had to have the guts to get into the business in the first place, but often they don’t have the guts to leave the business. They don’t know when to call it a day.

“I am not at all thinking of leaving the business myself but I am 35 and, when reach that age, you think OK. I can see myself doing this for another three, four, maybe five years, but what then?

“For me, street theatre has always been a stepping stone for comedy. When I perform in Covent Garden, I have to slightly change my act but, for me, it has always been an outlet to try things out so I can have an edge over my fellow comedians: the fact that I can play street theatre.

“What I was trying to say to you the other day was that I think I can tell you with a high degree of confidence that I will not become a mid-40s, goodish street act who is incredibly bitter because, for one reason or another, he or she hasn’t quite made it to the top.

“Ultimately, for me and lots of performers, street theatre is just an outlet to better yourself at what you do. In my case, it’s comedy. Street theatre is just a start and then you move on. But it’s not something you can do forever.

“With street theatre, when do you call it a day? Or comedy or performing in general. There must be an age when you should just give up and realise you are not going to get any further.

“A friend said to me last week: I’ve been doing it for years, Paolo. It pays the bills. Sure, I am 47, but I’m still fit. What else can I do? I can’t see myself doing anything else.

“This friend is scraping together a fairly good living, given the nature of the business. But what do you do when you have reached a certain stage… a certain age?

“I was at an audition recently. I was the oldest one there and I am 35. All the others were, I guess, between 19 and 23.

“What do you do when you’re 47? You can re-invent yourself provided you have acquired a certain status over the years but, if you’re just a street performer – perhaps even a sublime street performer… Well, maybe some of them don’t want to progress. Some just don’t have any other options. They know they can put food on their table with the money they currently make.

“What sort of money,” I asked, “can you make playing Covent Garden regularly?”

“I could tell you,” said Paolo, “but then I’d have to kill you.”

“It would be a blessed relief,” I said. “But people probably make more money than being a comedian on the London club circuit. I don’t know how much the average run-of-the-mill, top-of-the-bill gets now in a middle-of-the-road club. Maybe £120? And they can only get that two or maybe three days a week and with luck and that’s topping the bill.”

“I have a very good friend,” Paolo told me, “who’s a very talented performer. Been doing it since, maybe 2002 or 2003. He’s my age, predominately playing the Jongleurs circuit. He reckons he can make £400 to £600 a week.”

“I think they pay a bit more than most,” I said. “But it’s less for comedy clubs in the suburbs… and for street theatre?”

“I would say,” said Paolo, “a very hard-working performer willing to play the game… Obviously, you need to sell the right product, especially at places like Covent Garden… I would probably say you could take home, at the end of your year, £20,000? I’m talking about someone working, on average, six days a week for ten or eleven months.”

“And,” I suggested, “to reach that point, they’d probably have been doing it for six or seven years?”

“Yeah,” said Paolo. “My earnings reflect what I do. I don’t ride a tall uni-cycle. It’s just me, my jokes and a couple of silly gimmicks. Whereas, if you are really, really trying to enhance your earnings, then you have to have much more marketable skills like juggling, unicycling, fire-eating and all that malarkey – though you can’t do fire at Covent Garden. But the more daring your act is – or appears to be – the more you can get in theory.

“The problem is lots of people get trapped. They start making decent money. It’s easy, in that you don’t have to do anything if you’re not in the mood. You don’t have a contract. If you’re good and if your product sells, it’s very hard to give up.

“Even if you don’t make £20,000. Let’s say you make £17,000. How many people can survive on £17,000? You can survive on a lot less and, being able to make that amount of money by just performing whenever it takes your fancy, is quite an achievement. It’s a very enticing way of living.

“I think the average annual wage for ‘normal’ people is around £25,000 now?” I said.

“Yeah, in London, maybe around £25,000 to £28,000,” Paolo agreed.

“Well,” I said, “They’d be better off working behind the counter in a building society.”

“I think a lot of people just get trapped,” said Paolo. “I recently asked a friend: In five or six years time, what will you be doing? and he couldn’t answer. And I feel the same. I don’t know what I will be doing.

“It’s not like you say to yourself: The 4th of March 2015 or 2017 is going to be my D-Day, my traffic junction, my Spaghetti Junction.

“Some people get bitter, old, twisted, angry, frustrated, but they don’t have the guts to leave the industry. Which is sad, because they had the guts to get into the industry in the first place. And it does take guts.”

“I guess they hope,” I said, “that, tomorrow someone will see their act and change their lives.”

“I think it’s habit,” said Paolo. “Human beings are creatures of habit; they get used to things. A business psychologist friend of mine told me recently that a lot of people have had problems during the current recession when they lost their jobs. Not, as such, because they lost their £50,000-a-year job but because, all of a sudden, they got stripped of their own identities. The job had become their identity. And that’s the hardest thing to cope with. You identify yourself with your job. You pull strings week-in-week-out and, if someone says No more string… That’s a problem. John is the writer. Paulo is the buffoon.”

“That’s the title for your show,” I said.

“Urban Buffoon,” Paolo laughed. “That’s it! We got the show! We’ve got an hour-long show!”

“But surely,” I asked, “the last thing a performer would want to do is leave the industry? Because he/she would be so frustrated for the rest of their lives. You have to keep playing every card. The thing is to be in the right place at the right time, so you need to put yourself in as many places as possible as often as possible.”

“Well,” said Paolo, “if you have fired all the bullets you have at your disposal, there may be a level of peace that you may be able to acquire. If you’ve done everything in your power to achieve your goal… If it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen.”

“You can never second-guess what may unexpectedly happen out of nowhere, though,” I said. “It’s better to try and fail than not to try at all. And to keep trying because, if you don’t try, on your deathbed you will still be wondering What if?… That’s the ultimate lifelong frustration you would face eating away inside you: What if?… What if?…

“There is no answer,” said Paolo.

“I don’t think there is,” I said. “Do you want to buy a Big Issue?”

“Are you selling one?” Paolo asked.

“Not at the moment,” I replied. “But I think maybe I should research the potential market.”

Ed Miliband and Ed Balls – Are they the Laurel and Hardy of British politics?

What is happening with Ed Miliband and what has happened to the Labour Party’s once-feared PR machine?

Young Ed looks like he is being paid by the Tories to undermine his own party and Alastair Campbell’s once gleaming and perfectly-oiled Labour PR machine seems to have seized up with rust or is being operated by 5-year-old children who are too small to reach the levers they have to pull.

That Labour Party conference speech yesterday and all the interviews around it were an unmitigated piece of failed image-building tripe.

The long-thought-out line – they are supposed to have worked all night on the speech – seemed to be:

“We, the Labour Party, would like to apologise for the things we did wrong which we humbly admit, sort of, but it’s the Tories’ fault for anything we did really and, if they are doing now what we said we would do or what we would have had to do, well, that’s what comes of all those years of Tory… erm… government… erm… oh…

“Oh… and the government should make things better and tell other people to make things better. We have had long discussions about this and decided that both the people and the country would be better off if the Economy were in a better state and not worse. Vote for us next time because we are new people not the ones who made any of the mistakes before. Well, sort of.”

One of Ed’s problems is he cannot ‘do’ passion. Someone is writing passionate speeches for him, but he is unable to deliver them. He tries to be passionate, but his lightweight voice is just not up to it and his heart is clearly not in it. It is like he is reading Chaucer to the English class.

I saw an interview he gave a couple of days ago in which he said, basically: “The government should not lecture the Europeans and tell them how to make things better. The government should make things better and, if we were in power, we would be pro-active and tell the Europeans how to make things better.”

The main problem young Ed has is not difficulties in writing credible speeches and an apparent lack of any actual policies. The even bigger problem is a superficial presentational one.

Before Margaret Thatcher came to power, she listened to her very wise advisors. She softened her hairstyle and she lowered the pitch of her voice.

Tony Blair was already a master of fake sincerity when he got the Top Job – that’s what comes of being a good lawyer – lots of experience telling barefaced lies. His technique was so good he almost made me believe in David Icke’s theory that all the top-nobs in Britain are actually alien lizards in human skins.

But no-one seems to have given poor young Ed any advice at all. He is an apprentice lizard.

He still looks like a scared schoolboy unexpectedly made into a prefect and, with his rabbit-in-the-car-headlights eyes, looks shit-scared that people will find out that even he does not believe he is up to the job.

A couple of days ago, there were staggeringly mis-judged PR pictures of slim Ed Miliband and chunky Ed Balls – and there is an image problem here to begin with, as Ed Miliband looked like Stan Laurel to Ed Balls’ version of Oliver Hardy and who wants Stan Laurel as their Prime Minister?… I almost expected Ed Miliband to scratch his head and stare at the camera in innocent confusion with those big open calf’s eyes.

Anyway… there were the two of them walking across a square, being filmed smiling for the TV News, smiling and chatting in an attempt to look in relaxed conversation, but the separated body language and the appallingly stilted audible conversation appeared to show there was no chemistry, no amiability, no ability nor desire to communicate with each other.

They looked as if, in a party – let alone in a Party – they would stand alone at opposite sides of the room and try to avoid ever meeting because they knew there would be an embarrassing, awkward silence.

In this case, two Eds were not better than one.