In most ways, I could not be less of a typically machismo-oriented man (to my delight, two separate old flames of mine independently described me as a butch man-hating lesbian trapped in a big man’s body) but I often wish I was better at crying. I’ve spent most of this week feeling on the verge of tears, wet eyes in the darkness of the night, but my crappy man’s body really is very bad at getting the tear ducts working. So I’ve been wandering around just feeling like I’ve been slugged in the nuts for days now.
The emotions are worsened by the sheer pressure I have been under up until now – my priority is my family, my little boy and my wife, our house out in the sticks and the day job I do to pay for it all – proofing huge US music mags Guitar Player, Guitar World and Electronic Musician. The amount I have taken on this year has stretched my magazine skills to breaking point, and Future Publishing has been pressuring me about how it’s affected my work day after day. Add to this a sudden family tragedy which makes my Mum a great worry. Then we come to readying the Blackadder audiobook (of which more below), 17-odd hours of me jabbering about comedy which had to be listened to and re-listened to to get it ready in time for the 40th anniversary on the 15th June. On top of all this, I was preparing for my first Tales of Britain show in four years, for the Ludlow Fringe. And most exciting of all was the forthcoming Fab Fools Live show, suggested and staged by the Bristol Slapstick festival.
It was stressful enough to get the cast all fully booked – and I couldn’t have been more excited that this problem was solved by the kind involvement of the great Philip Pope, one of the very few comedy greats to have appeared in every single one of my books, thanks to the incredible nature of his career! So on Wednesday 7th June we finally had a Zoom meeting/partial readthrough which I wish to God I had screenshotted at the time, but which suggested it was going to be HUGE fun… except that the show was so stuffed with Beatles laffs, it was going to run up to an hour too long. The subsequent pressure to cut the script down to the very marrow in time for what was to be the first proper rehearsal, in a studio in Reading tomorrow, Saturday 24th June, has been the most painful nightmare.
So that’s what’s been driving me towards a Connery for the last couple of weeks – Fred, Day job, Mum, Ludlow Fringe, Blackadder, cutting this script down. I even had a bit of a barney with the hitherto entirely cuddly Slapstick bosses about them wanting to cut the Douglas Adams/Graham Chapman comedy script for Ringo Starr down to nothing, when bringing rarities like that to life for-the-very-first-time-in-recorded-history-like-ever is what the whole show was really about for me. By this Wednesday, I felt I had just about got the script down to a 49-page fair compromise that could be printed in time for Saturday… and then the bad news arrived.
Anyone who has flicked through these blogs will know that my career has been anything but smooth, but this feels like the worst brickbat I have had to deal with since I signed my first contract in 2007. I’ve bragged to everyone that I would soon be sharing a stage with Phil Pope – of Blackadder, KYTV, Spitting Image and Only Fools fame, the composer of The Chicken Song! – and in a professional theatre, no less. My family has also built our entire summer around the show, and I know the other cast members really put themselves out there for us, and are almost as dazed at the sudden disappearance of this wonderful event which we were all looking forward to, as I am. It’s like being Wile E Coyote ten feet over the crevasse. Doing the show was going to make up for all the weeks of ill-making stress I’ve suffered leading up to this first rehearsal.
Kate Harbour, Dave Catlin-Birch, Phil Pope and me were going to be a really great team of ersatz Fabs, and the laffs we were going to get were epic. But yes, fewer than 100 tickets were sold with a month to go. I’ll admit I had been eyeing the recent Mark Lewisohn weekend in London with chagrin, seeing all our steam for the Bristol FAB weekend sort of leeched away – but I’ve since heard that all but the Johnny Marr event was massively undersold too, so we were in good company – apparently since Covid there’s never been such a shortage of punters for live events, attendance hasn’t recovered anywhere.
And so, dear friends, with deep remorse and gigantic arse-bruising regret, the organisers have decided to pull the plug…
… Or rather, to *POSTPONE* the show, until the Bristol Slapstick festival proper next February. This whole thing was their idea, and I have been brought to the edge of insanity making sure it was the best show possible, so I very much hope that promise will be honoured. Yesterday I had long emotional chats with all the cast, and to my delight, every one of them is committed to returning to Bristol next February to finally do the show, ideally in a much better venue, like the Bristol Old Vic. Poor David, besides wasting fortunes on printer ink, printing defunct scripts, even bought a brand new bass amp! And I’ve also spent money I don’t have on fixing my old hardbody uke, and all sorts of stuff.
Please do message Slapstick if you can to let them know how much this show needs its moment in the sunshine next winter – the directors of the festival know what I’ve been through, or at least I’ve let them know about 80% of the pains I’ve suffered, but the great fear is that when the arrangements for Slapstick’s 20th anniversary year come to get properly nailed down, that somehow they may have gone cold on the idea of remounting the production. We can only keep everything crossable crossed and pray to “God as a thing or whatever it is” that this doesn’t happen, and we’ll have solid good news for you in just a few months, once these Fresh Wounds have begun to scab up a bit.
We will all just have to keep the faith. Actually, the one inadvertent positive to come of this entire debacle is that the show’s booking compelled Candy Jar to commission a reprint at last, with all sorts of little fixes in the text – like not misgendering Eddie Izzard, for a start. So do get ordering nice perfected second edition copies now!
Still, this sudden sweeping away of the last show on my performing calendar for 2023 has left me very bereft, and feeling pretty desperate for any gig going, fatherhood permitting! Let me know if there’s any slot going for family folktales, filthy comedy songs, or whatever! Maybe even an Unrehearsed Show! Anything to lose this feeling of such deep, dark disappointment and suddenly pointlessness.
In The Beatles comedy stakes, this is how I feel right now:
Oh well, to leave things on a slightly less suicidal note, at least The True History of the Black Adder is finally out there, in the ears of the Adder fanbase already. Chortle has kindly agreed to do a giveaway competition for a few lucky listeners – though I was a bit disappointed that they went for the easiest questions I provided. My first suggestion was:
What was the occupation of the last known member of the Blackadder family portrayed by Rowan Atkinson?
(A: BANKER, though he may have had a more detailed job description we could accept.)
This was deemed too geeky, so I suggested:
What makes Blackadder a monarch with panache?
A Spontaneous wit B Natural cunning C He’s got a nice moustache
Which was deemed too silly, so they settled on the offensively simple:
Who played Oliver Cromwell?
A Warren Clarke B Rik Mayall C Jeremy Hardy
Come on, you know the answer, if you’ve got two braincells to rub together. Get entering.
Jem Roberts 