What was it like to be a finalist in the New Act of The Year Comedy Awards show last night in Bloomsbury, London?

I told comedy act Candy Gigi I was likely to go to the final at the Bloomsbury Theatre last night but, at the last minute, could not go. So this text correspondence ensued late yesterday afternoon:

Last night in London, the final of the contest

Candy Gigi: I’m shitting it. That’s what I’m feeling now. Literally SHITTING IT. Can you tell I’m nervous? I’m gonna make a mess of every loo that I walk past today. My bowels are OK now actually. Later they’ll let rip no doubt. Anyway, out of the 550 people in the audience tonight, 549 of them are going to be my mum’s friends so, if nothing else, I know there will at least be support from people. Loud Jewish people too. The best kind of audience, really.

John: All that chicken soup. No wonder you’re on the loo.

Candy Gigi: Ha. You can put this in your blog. My mum said to me this morning as soon as I woke up: “Candy, why DO you hold a celery like it’s a baby and put it to your breast? Do people ACTUALLY find that funny? Do you HAVE to do that tonight? I don’t understand it.” – As if I didn’t have enough to worry about, now I have to think about how I can make breast-feeding celery make sense. I didn’t ask to be born.

John: I should Google for some knob gags ASAP. After the show, tell my answerphone what happened. I will get back home very very late.

Candy Gigi: My dad’s driving so I’ll do it in the car home.

John: Get your dad to shout things out while he’s driving. It may not get in the blog, but it will scare the shit out of pedestrians on zebra crossings.

Candy Gigi: He probably would do that anyway. When I was younger, I used to walk him down the road on a dog lead and he would bark and pretend to be a puppy. Welcome to my life.

John: Now THAT’s an Edinburgh Fringe show. Or a career for you in certain parts of Soho.

Candy Gigi: All true. Explains a lot, really, doesn’t it?

John: Still doesn’t explain breast-feeding the celery. But that’s probably for the best.

Candy Gigi: You’re probably right. Would it not be a fair argument if I just put it down to me not wanting the celery to wilt?

John: I think an explanation of how and why you keep a stick of celery in a non-flaccid state is probably something for an entirely different type of show. If you actually explained it in any way, of course – ironically – it would lose its point… not that there is one.

Candy Gigi: I couldn’t explain it as I don’t understand it myself. It’s like an out-of-body experience and I’m watching someone else do it.

John: You mean an out-of-body in-body experience.

Candy Gigi: Yeah. Except I don’t put it in as it isn’t circumcised and my mum would kill me. If I’m going to go for celery, it had bloody better be Jewish.

John: Kosher celery? There might be a market for that.

Candy Gigi: Celery is good for chopping, so could easily be converted. That’s why I chose celery. Out of all the vegetables, it’s the closest to marriage material.

John: The normal vegetative material for comedy is cucumber. The word is funnier than celery, though not as funny as banana.

Candy Gigi: Yeah, but cucumber is everybody’s cup of tea, whereas celery is the underdog. And I love an underdog.

John: I will take some time to find a double meaning in that. Bananas are always funny in any context.

Candy Gigi: Yeah, bananas are OK. But not as useable as celery.

This morning, I woke up to this text message:

Candy Gigi – Different. And “different is unsafe”

Candy Gigi: I’m so sorry I didn’t call your answerphone last night. I ended up getting the train home late as I needed to ‘network’ but basically I didn’t win. I think it’s because I genuinely scare the shit out of everyone, including myself. I get up there and literally lose the plot for five minutes and people don’t know what to do with that.

I’ll never be a winning act and I’ve realised that’s OK. What I do is different and different is unsafe and I like not being safe. It makes me feel safe. I can find my own little audience who know what’s going to happen when I get up there and who enjoy that.

That’s all I want. A little group of kooky people who like vegetables and unhinged women. I don’t think that’s a lot to ask.

John: Now you join the ranks of those other New Act of The Year losers including Harry Hill and Eddie Izzard. It ended their careers in much the same way. They were too niche. Who has ever heard of them now?

Never perform comedy with intelligent dogs

The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club.

The first rule of showbusiness is you never perform on the same bill as animals or children.

Last night, there was a very good line-up in the New Variety Lives! show at the Shaw Theatre in London. But what can you do when, also on the stage, unbilled, is ‘Sid Russell’, a small Jack Russell terrier who has bafflingly had over 1,730,000 hits on YouTube in a month – for just running up and down steps –

and who, last night, kept a blue balloon in the air by death-defying leaps upwards to bop it with his cute nose?

On any other night, top-of-the-bill US comedian David Mills, one of the smoothest new acts on the UK comedy circuit – indeed, he was New Act of the Year 2011 – would have been a difficult act to follow, but even a highly charismatic comedian is no competition for a leaping Jack Russell.

Compere Jo Brand, excellent new female comedian Tania Edwards, Nathaniel Tapley as cast-iron-TV-show-prospect ‘Sir Ian Bowler MP’ and New Zealand comic Javier Jarquin who had an excellent street-theatre-type act which I have never seen before and which built to a cracking climax – all those and more were trumped by an acrobatic Jack Russell terrier…

But then, earlier in the day, I had learned with others at the Fortean Times UnConvention all about the species superiority of Canine Intellectuals and Celebrated Talking Dogs.

Jan Bondeson was plugging his new book Amazing Dogs: A Cabinet of Canine Curiosities and, if his book is anything like his one-hour lecture, it must be a cracker.

We had tales of Rolf, the militaristically-inclined German dog who could discuss religion and philosophy but who, at the outbreak of World War One, demanded he should join the German Army despite the fact he was a Yorkshire terrier.

And we had Don, an alleged talking dog who was so intelligent he was earning 12,000 marks per month in German music halls even before he went to the US in July 1912 to perform at Oscar Hammerstein’s famous Roof Garden theatre in New York, where he shared the bill with a man with a 9-foot beard and a troupe of dancing midgets. Don was insured for $50,000, kept profitably touring the US until August 1914 and met Charlie Chaplin, Harry Houdini and Buster Keaton.

At my school, I never got taught any of this in history lessons.

Apparently Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, taught a dog to say, “How do you do, grandma?”

And even the Nazis took an interest in super-intelligent dogs. When they transported Jews, any ‘innocent’ pet dogs were given to ‘good’ Aryan families and there were even Nazi research institutes for educated dogs.

All this came as enough of a shock to me yesterday without It being topped by ‘Sid Russell’ and his acrobatic, balloon-bopping antics.

I think I need to lie down.

Is there a bias against American comics performing on TV and radio in Britain?

(This blog was also published in the Huffington Post)

Last night, American comic Lewis Schaffer played his 250th show at the Source Below in Soho – London’s longest-running solo comedy show. He has been playing there every Tuesday and Wednesday (and sometimes also Mondays) since well before we failed to elect a government.

I could not see his show last night because I had long-promised to go to Daphna Baram and Alex Love’s always interesting Cantaloopy comedy club in Shoreditch. Arthur Smith was headlining but also on the bill was the wonderfully charismatic American David Mills.

I first saw David perform earlier this year at Cantaloopy and was shocked I had never heard of him despite the fact he won the 2011 Hackney Empire New Act of the Year. I must pay more attention to what is going on outside my living room. As a result of being so impressed by David, I also went to see the wonderful Edinburgh Fringe chat show Scott Capurro’s Position hosted by Scott and David and booked the two of them to very successfully host this year’s Malcolm Hardee Awards Show.

All three of these comedians have totally different acts. I will get crucified by the three of them for my trite descriptions. But I guess Lewis Schaffer is a rollercoaster observational ride with a brilliant butterfly mind. Scott Capurro is an insightful camp comic with a razor-sharp tongue that could cut a heckler’s throat across a crowded room. And David Mills is an American reincarnation of Noel Coward who could play the O2 Arena and make it seem cosy and friendly.

What these three utterly different acts share is that they are American, they have been based in the UK for at least ten years (so there is no cultural problem) and television & radio have not picked up on them (in general – obviously Scott does have some profile, but you could not say he is an established TV or radio star).

All three can be cutting-edge but are perfectly acceptable for middle-of-the-road audiences.

So why do they not get the TV and radio exposure they deserve?

Following on from my recent blog about what TV and radio producers actually want, I think there may be the possibility that, if an American comedian suddenly appears on TV or radio from nowhere, there is (as seen by producers) the risk that the audience may think they are vast successes in the US and have not been ‘discovered’ and whisked up from the relative obscurity of comedy clubs by talented UK producers. And/or there may be the complaint that producers should be showcasing British comics not American comics.

I can think of no other reasons.

Reginald D.Hunter has had some success on shows like Have I Got News For You, but (unsayable as it may be) he has the distinct advantage of being a black American rather than just an American and the advantage of the first adjective is strong enough to outweigh the disadvantage of the second. He is also very funny and very talented, of course, which helps – though it is not vital, as many BBC3 shows demonstrate.

Three comedians – Scott Capurro, David Mills, Lewis Schaffer – all different but all with two defining characteristics – they are American and they are funny.

Three of a kind. But different.

It sounds like a format for a TV show, doesn’t it?

_____

PS Someone pointed out I forgot Rich Hall, of course. Oh lord. Exception. Rule. Proves. Re-arrange.

I blogged about Lewis Schaffer’s response to this blog the following day.

Shoreditch dreams – Satanic stand-up comedy and Lycra-clad policemen

Perhaps it was the fact I only had two hours sleep the previous night.

But what is it with Shoreditch in London?

It seems to have aspirations to be trendy Islington but its pockets of aspiring Yuppieness have been dropped down into what, at night, seems like a set from a Jack The Ripper film – jet-black stone streets with added 21st century traffic. It’s like King’s Cross but darker and with less investment.

Shoreditch is a dark night-time nether corner of schizophrenic Hackney, where partly-trendy-yet-immensely-downmarket Hoxton meets a corner of Hackney proper and the world that was the Kray Twins’ Bethnal Green, which now has 1950s Brits intermingled with penniless immigrants who have nothing but hope in two generations time.

And round the corner from all this sit the glass towers and stone solidity of the City of London.

Shoreditch is a very strange place.

The area is like some darkly surreal imagining on the thin border where a dream may or may not turn into a nightmare.

So, a couple of nights ago, I went to Shoreditch after only a couple of hours sleep the previous night with these thoughts in my mind and comedy in my heart.

Yes, I have no fear of bad writing.

I went to see the weekly Cantaloopy Comedy show run by Miss D aka the interesting part-comedian, part serious journalist that is Daphna Baram.

Last time I went, the Cantaloupe pub cat stole the show, meandering across the stage and occasionally finding high points from which to look down disdainfully at the performing comedians.

This time, sadly for me, there was no cat but also, sadly, no headliner Arthur Smith, whose mother had had a bad fall. Daphna reckons I am bad luck when I go to one of her gigs. She may be right.

But the Cantaloopy bill was so choc-a-bloc, the lack of the two main attractions did not damage the show.

One highlight for me was Janet Bettesworth, who is just plain weird and I cannot for the life of me figure out why.  It had nothing to do with my lack of sleep. It has something to do with her Joanna Lumley voice, the dry sometimes almost literary delivery, the unexpected shock of red hair and her extraordinary transformation late in the act into a comedy ventriloquist with Hammer Horror hints. It was like watching a refined relative talk sweetly to you but with a whiff of the Satanic and dark deeds behind the curtains of Middle England wafting from the stage. I began, at one point, to think I must be hallucinating.

Highly entertained and utterly fascinated… but hallucinating.

This can’t be happening, I thought.

Yet it was and I was pleased it was.

I knew it wasn’t my lack of sleep. I had seen Janet Bettesworth before and was equally mesmerised before.

I had never seen David Mills before despite the fact he was recently crowned New Act of the Year – the highly prestigious award formerly known as the Hackney Empire New Act of the Year and proof that something good can occasionally come out of Hackney.

But I was amazed how a totally top-notch professional camp American of this quality had  escaped my radar. Especially as he has apparently lived in the UK for a decade. Much like Maureen Younger being a new act for me at a Pull The Other One gig a couple of weeks ago.

Curiouser and curiouser.

A few weeks ago, someone mistook me for Antipodean intellectual Clive James. At Cantaloopy, David Mills said I reminded him of Shrek. I know which I prefer. But alas I know which is more realistic.

Altogether an unusual night in Shoreditch especially when, on my walk back to the car, I bumped into Noel Faulkner just leaving his Comedy Cafe venue and, after crossing Shoreditch High Street, he became fascinated by the sight of two police cars pursuing a man on a skateboard.

“The guy should just keep going,” Noel said to me. “Police cars will never catch a skateboard.”

When I reached my own car I saw, up an adjacent side street, two policemen and a policewoman milling around in the middle of the road while another two policemen were climbing up on a wall to look over railings into a graveyard.

I wondered what the man had done. Perhaps we are on the cusp of a spate of major skateboard robberies which will be countered by Scotland Yard establishing a Skateboard Squad of Lycra-clad coppers.

Or perhaps I just need more sleep.

A man with Tourette’s Syndrome and an FBI file… Plus how comedian Ricky Grover insulted me.

So, the story goes like this…

On Monday night, I went to the New Act of the Year auditions at the Comedy Cafe in Shoreditch, one of the jolliest and most brightly-coloured comedy clubs in Britain. A film crew was coincidentally filming scenes for an upcoming movie called The Comedian.

The Comedy Cafe’s owner, Noel Faulkner, has had a ‘colourful’ past which he revealed in his astonishing 2005 Edinburgh Fringe show Shake, Rattle & Noel. I first met him when we were both helping-out our mutual chum Ricky Grover by appearing in an early pilot/showreel for his planned movie Bulla, which Ricky has recently completed as a ‘pucka’ feature film with Steven Berkoff, Omid Djalili, Peter Capaldi etc.

Noel has Tourette’s Syndrome which doesn’t mean he swears uncontrollably but does mean he occasionally twitches uncontrollably… except, oddly, he doesn’t do it when he’s performing on stage or on film. This non-twitching while performing caused surreal problems during the autobiographical Shake, Rattle and Noel show, as he was talking about how he twitched uncontrollably without actually twitching uncontrollably.

Noel has lived a life-and-a-half and he isn’t through with it yet.

After being brought up in Ireland by the Christian Brothers and working on fishing trawlers and having some peripheral encounters with the IRA, he was in Swinging London at its height where he got involved with the young Malcolm McLaren & Vivienne Westwood and sold Gary Glitter his first glitter suit. Noel’s twitching made him a wow in discos – people thought he was a great disco dancer – and it was assumed to be drug-induced, so he fitted perfectly into the very Swinging London scene.

Then he went to hippie San Francisco before Haight Ashbury turned into Hate Ashbury and became a friend of the young, before-he-was-famous Robin Williams. Noel ended up on the run from the FBI, went to New York as an actor and comic, dealt directly with and smuggled dope for the early Colombian drug cartels, was caught and deported from the US, returned to London and set up the Comedy Cafe, one of the few purpose-built comedy venues in the capital.

So this – the Comedy Cafe – was where I found myself on Monday night for the New Act of the Year comedy auditions, the 28th year of the contest – it used to be called the Hackney Empire New Act of the Year (Eddie Izzard came 12th one year). The final used to be held a the Hackney Empire, which organisers Roland & Claire Muldoon ran. This year, the final takes place at The Barbican on Saturday 19th March.

It was well worth going because I saw for a second time the promising up-and-coming stand-up Pat Cahill and, for the first time, the very interesting indeed Duncan Hart who had a dark and very well-crafted set about a heart problem in a hospital, a drug overdose, a mugging at gunpoint and much more. Not obvious comedy subjects and potentially difficult to tailor for comedy in a 5-minute spot, but he performed it flawlessly.

The only downside was that, looking around the Comedy Cafe’s full room, I was, as usual, almost certainly the oldest punter in the room. This depressing scenario is even more depressing when I am up at the Edinburgh Fringe and street flyerers ignore me without a second glance because – clearly, at my age – I can’t possibly be interested in comedy.

Ricky Grover cast me as a bank manager in his Bulla showreel because he has always said I look like a banker (and I don’t think he was using Cockney rhyming slang). After the financial meltdown, I should take this as an insult. And I will. But I won’t tell him.

It would be far too dangerous.

It will be our little secret.

Just you and me.

OK?