backstage area, sweating, waiting to get my breath back, I accepted the congratulations of the other comics, but I knew that this hadn’t been a real victory. Half the crowd was already on my side. I’d shown balls – yes – but not much else.
The next act went onstage and then Dave appeared in the waiting area. He summoned me over and calmly asked me why I had called him a wanker onstage in front of the audience.
I gulped. I had no idea he’d seen the gesture. I stammered an apology. He told me, his anger coming to the surface, how I’d made a huge mistake, that comedians must never ever undermine each other like that onstage, that he had given me a great introduction and encouraged the audience to applaud me afterwards, that it was an incredibly selfish thing to do, that he was furious and that there was no place on the circuit for that kind of behaviour. If he told other people what had just happened, he said, I would never get booked anywhere.
What had I done? That was it. It was all over. My name would now be mud. People who hadn’t seen my act yet – who hadn’t heard of me – would know me by this story and this story alone.
He was apoplectic, but of course totally justified in his anger. I continued to apologise profusely. I told him I was completely out of my depth, that it was my first gig, that I’d been flustered and surprised by the audience’s response. Unsure of what to do, I had made a grave error. I was genuinely contrite. I felt awful to have put us both in that position, had learned an important lesson and would never do anything like that again. He accepted my apology and we shook hands.
Outside I was met by friends and acquaintances and praise was poured on me, but I was very shaken up and just wanted to go home.
The following night, I arrived for the next gig – at the VD Clinic, a dedicated open-spot show which took place every Sunday evening in the downstairs bar of the White Horse pub in Belsize Park.
I walked in and my face dropped. There in front of me was Dave Thompson, the compère from the night before. By chance he was hosting this gig too. Sheepishly I went and said hello and he was a complete gentleman, making no reference at all to the previous night’s incident. Onstage I was already calmer, wiser, more focused. The audience had been primed for an evening of new acts and it felt like a more natural environment for me. To my surprise, the set went down well. Afterwards Dave congratulated me. I thanked him and apologised again and again until he told me I could stop. Over the next few years I often found myself on the bill with him and we always laughed about our first meeting.
So my third gig was a success – or rather, I had got away with it – but the following morning I phoned Don Ward at the Comedy Store and told him I was going to pull out of the gig that week. Don admonished me for letting him down, but also said he respected the fact that I was saving us both from embarrassment. We agreed that I’d call him again when I had a bit more experience under my belt.
And so I focused on playing the smaller clubs. I would use that stage time to get good, I decided, and then approach the more established venues.
The act was thin, but I would listen to the audience and take out stuff that didn’t work. And when all else failed, there was one thing that guaranteed a laugh . . . halfway through my set I would pretend to sneeze and then yank the wig off my head and use it as a tissue, before replacing it, all skew-whiff. Other times I would simply scratch my head, moving the wig in the process, and then continue talking without making any reference to it. I was eighteen years old and looked a lot younger – the audience was not expecting this to happen. They would half-gasp, half-roar. Sometimes they’d even applaud. At Churchill’s in Southend, one man in the crowd was drinking his beer when I moved the wig and was so shocked he bit straight into his pint glass. As he left the club for the hospital with blood streaming down his face, still laughing, he told the manager to get me offstage. He said I was a health hazard.
At one of my early gigs I moved the wig but didn’t get the laugh I was hoping for. One of the other acts pointed out afterwards that it was perhaps because I had walked in without the wig and put it on in view of some of the audience, while waiting at the bar. From that moment on, I always made sure to ‘wig up’ before I arrived at the venue. Often I would run into a neighbouring pub, into the toilet and ignore the raised eyebrows of the other occupants as I placed ‘Kimberly’ (David Williams had said I should give it a name) on my head.
On 8 November 1992, five weeks after that Punchlines show, I wigged up outside the Tube station, then arrived, as I now did every Sunday, at the White Horse to do a short set at the VD Clinic. You had to walk into the main room in the pub in order to get downstairs and, as usual, I arrived far too early, sat down and ordered my customary Diet Coke.
My jaw hit the floor when I saw, at the next table, my idol Bob Mortimer.
Was there a more brilliant, more vibrant, more original and just plain funnier act in British comedy in the early nineties than Reeves and Mortimer?
Let me answer that for you.
No.
In fact, no one came close.
Jim Moir, aka Vic Reeves, had been around for a while. I had seen him occasionally on Jonathan Ross’s TV programmes and he and Bob Mortimer had developed a bizarre spoof variety show called Vic Reeves Big Night Out, which had transferred from the Goldsmith’s Tavern to Channel 4, where it ran for two series on Friday nights.
As a teenager in Stanmore who wasn’t quite allowed out yet on a Friday night, I had watched the first episode with expectations that weren’t met. In fact, I was mystified. Reeves kept promising things that were going to come up later in the show that simply didn’t. And there were no celebrity guests. I couldn’t work it out at all. By the end of the episode I was so irritated that I pompously called up Channel 4 and told them that I didn’t get it.
I tuned in again the following week, but only because I was convinced that I was watching something historically bad, something that would almost certainly be removed from air before the series could run in its entirety. This time I recognised the return of some of the weird non-jokes from the week before, understood that none of the so-called celebrity guests would actually be appearing, that instead Vic and Bob and their pals would be playing everyone. By the end of the series I was not just a convert, I was a fully fledged apostle.
In the White Horse pub that November night in 1992, I rushed over to Bob Mortimer, who had left his small group of friends and was on his way to the toilet.
‘Hi Bob i am a huge fan i am also a comedian like you are you coming to the-show tonight?’
And it turned out he was. He said his friend Dorian was compèring.
Dorian Crook was (and still is) a man from another age. The late fifties, I would say. The clothes he wore, the car he drove – even the jokes he told – could have come straight out of a Terry Thomas film. By day he was an air traffic controller, by night he was an aspiring comedian. He had been at art school with Vic Reeves and subsequently had become embroiled in Vic and Bob’s antics, making brief appearances in their stage shows and joining them on tour. Now he was branching out on his own. His set – a parade of puns, one-liners and Christmas cracker-style jokes – was entirely original and of his own creation, but was so traditional in its tone and subject matter that it gave the impression of having been excavated from the distant past. Some audiences – hungry for something more biting and fashionable – resisted Dorian’s charms, but those audiences who had had their fill of knob gags and hectoring political invective, and who were willing to go along for the ride, laughed uproariously throughout. There was something joyous and liberating about watching Dorian. As with Vic and Bob, it was a bit like he wasn’t supposed to be there, like he had somehow wandered in and managed to get onstage. He was cheeky.
Downstairs the gig began. I lurked nervously at the back of the room, until it was my turn to perform. With the great Bob Mortimer in attendance, I decided to give it everything.
In the five weeks since my first ‘official’ gig at the Punchlines, I had added a dynamic new aspect to Sir Bernard’s persona. I’d been heckled a few times – often before the act had got going – and, terrified and without