Comedians bitching in the fantastical Gaucho Club at the Edinburgh Fringe

I was talking to someone last week and we thought it might be quite jolly to have a comedians’ club at the Edinburgh Fringe throughout August, catering not for the VIP top-of-the-billers but for the ordinary riff-raff of comedy. But, of course, it’s far too complicated and time-consuming to organise an 18-hour-a-day venue with inevitably essential access to drink.

Oh, alright, it was not so much an idea as a cheap pun.

We thought it might be jolly to have somewhere called the Gaucho Club or the Grouchy Club for comedians at the Fringe – a club for ordinary scum whom London’s Groucho Club would never want to have as members.

You know you’re getting old when you talk about how Glastonbury has changed and remember the ‘good old days’ at the Edinburgh Fringe when, after comedians had performed their shows, they would end up in the bar of the old Gilded Balloon in Cowgate – before it burnt down – where they would drunkenly bitch with others of their ilk while the Late ‘n’ Live show rambled along anarchically on stage.

Now, during August, there are late-night clones of the old Late ‘n’ Live show (including the current Late ‘n’ Live show and Spank!) all over town and late-night performers-only places to schmooze-in like the new Gilded Balloon’s Tower Bar (too-exclusive and somewhat snooty) or Brooke’s Club at the Pleasance Dome (too Pleasance-centric); the Fringe Central building closes too early for any of this and is, in any case, a tad lacking in atmosphere.

Even if you could find an ideal physical location like the ultra-atmospheric Bannerman’s Bar in Cowgate where the likes of Arthur Smith and Malcolm Hardee used to hang out – the timing is difficult.

I once phoned a comedian in London at 4.00pm in the afternoon and he said: “Are you mad? It’s 4 o’clock… I’m still in bed!”

That’s a little extreme but, after a few days at the Edinburgh Fringe, even normally early-to-bed-at-midnight people involved in shows do certainly get into a rough rhythm of perhaps getting to sleep around 3,00 or 4.00am, then getting up around midday.

Midnight would be the best time for a comedians’ club, but lots of them are still performing or seeing shows at that time. Before shows start would be a theoretical possibility – perhaps 11.00am to midday daily.

But, at that time, most comedians are still turning over in bed, groaning, dreaming of getting their first booking on a TV panel game or thinking they really have caught a sexually-transmitted disease this time.

And then there’s the general throng of punters and tourists. You can’t bitch properly if the audience is sitting at the next table in the bar.

So perhaps next year, eh?

A set time and place for comedians and associated hangers-on (among which, of course, I include myself) to meet for a regular schmooze in the Gaucho Club or the Grouchy Club at the Fringe – for a whinge and a bitch.

Or not. Fuck it! Who would turn up?

Steve Coogan to play porn baron Paul Raymond in new Winterbottom movie?

Apparently plans are “well advanced” for Steve Coogan to play British porn baron Paul Raymond in a film directed by the extraordinarily prolific Michael Winterbottom – they previously worked together on the excellent 24 Hour Party People in which Coogan impersonated Tony Wilson to a tee. I encountered Tony Wilson when I was working at Granada TV and Coogan’s voice was uncannily spot-on though I found the hair strangely unsettling. Paul Raymond had a hairstyle even more extravagant than Tony Wilson, so this could be the start of a movie hair trilogy.

The planned new movie – currently called Paul Raymond’s Wonderful World of Erotica – is based on Paul Willetts’ biography Members Only: The Life and Times of Paul Raymond.

Willetts said he originally wanted to entitle his book Panties Inferno after a long-ago American burlesque revue but, mystifyingly, there were legal problems.

I heard about both the planned movie and the book title last night at a publicity event for the book on a suitably sweaty night in Soho. Other long-ago US burlesque show titles loved by Willetts because they tried to make strip shows classy were Julius Teaser and Anatomy & Cleopatra.

Those were the days.

Paul Raymond also tried to make strip shows seem classy – “nudity without crudity” was the phrase he used. And he is a perfect movie subject – larger than life and with pretensions beyond his art. The best biographies are often akin to naff 1950s travelogues:

Paul Raymond – Land of Contrasts…

When he was 13, he wanted to be a Catholic priest – so maybe his later porn career ironically turned out to be less sexually seedy than it might have done. And, in latter days, he bankrolled Mark Thatcher’s failed motor racing career. Perhaps as a thankyou, he was once invited to Downing Street by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as “an exemplary entrepreneur”.

When he got rich, he inevitably bought a boat and even tried to give that class by naming it ‘Get ‘em Off’ – but in Latin. His girlfriend Fiona Richmond’s mother was, at the time, a teacher in a convent and got the nuns to translate the words into Latin, though quite how she managed this without suspicions being aroused remains a complete mystery to me.

I only went to the Raymond Revuebar once, in the 1980s, when it was hosting alternative comedy shows. My clear memory is that regular comedy evenings were being run there by a young Eddie Izzard, though a quick Google tells me it was the Comic Strip.

Who knows?

In its early days, alternative comedy in the UK overlapped with dodgy Soho clubs.

In his early days, before the Revuebar opened, Paul Raymond had been a theatrical agent/producer with a winning formula he called ‘the comic, the conjurer and the girl with her tits out’.

In an interview in a 1969 LWT series called On The Record, Paul Raymond was interviewed by Alan Watson and rather bizarrely compared stripping to stand-up comedy. He said (I paraphrase): “Comedians tell gags to get laughs. Stripping is like comedy. If the act isn’t having the desired effect, then the stripper has to work harder.”

No wonder Margaret Thatcher thought he was an exemplary entrepreneur.

But the character Paul Willetts chatted about from the Soho ‘scene’ of that time who most interested me was not Paul Raymond but his acquaintance Paul Lincoln, an Australian who made his name in the ring as wrestler Dr Death, then started and co-owned the legendary 2i’s coffee bar in Old Compton Street, Soho – birthplace of UK Rock n Roll.

Paul Lincoln died in January this year but, back when Paul Raymond was starting his seminal Revuebar in Walker’s Court in 1958 – allegedly the first strip club in Britain – Lincoln was promoting wrestling bouts around the country as well as running the 2i’s.

The two Pauls – Raymond and Lincoln – had a falling-out over an allegedly genuine German aristocrat – a baron – who wrestled on Lincoln’s UK circuit. The baron lived in a flat above the 2i’s and had a pet cheetah which he took for walks in Hyde Park.

These were innocent days.

The Raymond Revuebar, at the time, had novelty acts performing in its entrance area and Raymond effectively nicked the baron from Lincoln and started having wrestling bouts in the Revuebar entrance. Not only that, but he got the baron to train his cheetah to join the strippers on stage and undo girls’ undergarments with its teeth.

These were, indeed, the much more innocent, golden days before Health & Safety rules kicked in.

The Raymond Revuebar also reportedly featured a horse removing girls’ underwear with its teeth – sugar lumps were attached to relevant parts of the underwear to encourage the horse.

What encouraged the cheetah or how they got the horse into the club I don’t know.

Some of life’s most intriguing questions are doomed never to be answered.

(There is a follow-up to this blog HERE; and the comedy industry website Chortle picked up on this blog as a news item HERE.)