Determined to make a go of the stand-up, assuming today’s excessive granola consumption doesn’t finish me off prematurely, I have in the last couple of weeks began floating the idea to myself, and it’s a necessary move if I’m going to be able to make some living from this, of gigging outside of London. I’m not just talking the southeast. If the gigs pay right, I’d pretty much go anywhere.
The big problem is I don’t drive. That’s a long story but the bottom line is it’s not something that’s ever bothered me. Travel sickness has always been a problem ever since I was a kid. I always used to hear that if you’re a driver who used to get car sick as a kid, you’ll see it doesn’t affect you when you’re driving as your mind’s focused on the driving. That may well be the case. It makes sense. But there were other more important factors behind my choice not to drive that I felt were wise decisions made at a young age.
One, to this day I lack common sense. I’m not sure why or where that comes from. It infuriated my dad and it’s bothered girlfriends who often used it as a line of attack to vent their frustrations with me. Two, I can’t even follow maps as a pedestrian. Having to follow road maps, at least in the world before sat nav, would’ve been impossible. Half the comedy gigs I do, I get lost on the way to, and this is in London. So, imagine what will happen when I leave my city.
My grasp of Geography is also poor. But this brings me to the subject of this latest newsletter. I thought this was an opportunity to improve that. I’ve joined many very useful Facebook comedy groups to find out about shows and promoters all over the country and figured if I could double up on nights for paid gigs, if say there were two gigs in Bristol or Birmingham, and the money was right, I’d do them. Rail costs are a disgrace. I know from speaking to headliner comics that some are diving to gigs and with current petrol prices, their fee for the night all goes on the drive. It’s a bad state of affairs for emerging comedians looking to make a living from this.
Realistically, the only way for me to proceed, if National Express ever get their website working properly so it gives you return ticket prices, is via coach. There’s no way I’ll be making those journeys without travel sickness pills. The smell of coaches is one of my least favourite smells and as a kid I dreaded Fridays at secondary school. I’d always fell awful on the coach to Morden Park for games. Anyway, I’m rambling. If, I told myself, I could travel overnight, and return to Victoria Coach Station in the small hours of the morning rather than use up any fees on hotel stays, then this stand-up comedy business may just work if I’m good enough. This motivated me to start working on improving my Geography.
I told myself I would draw myself a map of Britain, at the very least England and Wales, realistic for now while I size everything up, and start mapping out where the gigs are city by city, town by town so that in the end, I have a comprehensive visual idea of the comedic landscape and what might be possible for me. These I would mount on my cork board, still hanging in the erstwhile study, these days a junk room whose roof has been wrecked by leaks for the last 8 years that have only just been finally fixed this week.
So much doesn’t excite me. And yet for some reason, this business with the cork board did. I don’t sleep well, haven’t since I turned 13, and that night, thinking about sketching this map out and adding these venues to cities and towns and watching this map take shape, really excited me. The following morning, bleary eyed, and these days having cut down from three decaf coffees, before even leaving the flat for coffee, to one, I sleepily made my way to the back of the flat to collect the cork board and check what kind of nails I needed to hammer it into the front room wall where I’ve worked from the last six years. Only it wasn’t a cork board…
It was a white board. Of course, it was. I put it there in 2015 and I rarely use it because I lost the eraser and spray I had for it. The white board is still marked with the outline of a 2016 project. So why was I convinced it was a cork board? And then I remembered.
Back at Mayflower, where I grew up and lived for 24 years until tragic circumstances forced me to leave a long time ago now, I’d bought a cork board and hung it up in the narrow opening that led to our old kitchen, which like the back of the flat here, regularly leaked. Living on top floors most of my life, leaking roofs have haunted me in every decade. Back to the cork board. It was only there for the last five or six years. It may have, it probably did, follow me into the many homes I lived in the first few peripatetic years after leaving Mayflower, but this is just a guess. So why was I expecting to see the cork board when I went into my old office the other day? I’m not sure. And it probably doesn’t matter. Obviously, the white board doesn’t lend itself to pins in the same way the cork board does, so for now, my physical comedy map idea is on hold. But I still couldn’t quite leave the memory of the old cork board and why I’d expected to find it there. Why had it lodged itself in my memory?
I remember that as a kid I didn’t do much with that cork board. It had appeared after I’d quit the best day job I ever had working in a picture library in Fitzrovia in the mid-90s. Quitting that job set in play a pattern of making difficult decisions that probably didn’t need to be made. There’s been some self-sabotage running through my adult life and this was one of the first examples of it coming through.
I decided I’d focus on writing full time when I quit this job and I remember in those early days, it was mainly comics I wanted to work in. The problem was the comics market was now unravelling in the UK with video games in the ascendancy. I’m of the generation where comics were a mainstream thing, selling millions of copies a week. Unfortunately, I was too young to be able to make the living I craved from that world. If I’d been older, that would’ve been my career though chances are I’d have probably passed away already from spending years passive smoking in some typewriter-audio-heavy office with other writers. As I started to sell my first comic strips in what was the final year or two of the old UK comics market before most of the titles folded, I’d list my achievements on scraps of paper and pin them to the cork board, stopping every now and then in that narrow kitchen entrance to see how my budding ‘career’ was coming along.
What I remember most about that cork board though was a motivational line I saw and copied onto a post it note that was still there six years later, albeit faded. ‘HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL’. Nothing original about that. You’ll be familiar with it. But I was a kid. I’d never come across it before. Things at home were so bad with the home in such a state of disrepair, that it was really affecting me by then. Every day I’d be checking weather reports in the Evening Standard in Victoria Station’s WH Smith or on the much-missed Teletext. If the reports showed it was a dry day and night ahead, my spirits would be transformed. If they showed rain was on the way, I’d be crushed. These were my peak SAD syndrome years. I needed all the help I could get mentally to wade through these final five or six years in the flat and every day I would stare at that ‘Hope Springs Eternal’ post it note and tried to make sure the message stayed in my head.
In the late noughties, reaching the peak of my success as a writer, I’d sold another show to broadcasters. This time, my best work up to that point, to Channel 4. The show had a great title, well I thought so at the time, taken from an obscure music track. These days I wouldn’t do that, even though it wasn’t a well-known song. I actually think it’s poor work on a writer’s part to name a show or a book after a song and I try to avoid watching or reading such work these days and certainly don’t do the same with my work anymore.
The title to my show though was changed. Not through choice. The financial crash had made Channel 4’s comedy bosses nervous. They felt, reasonably, that the title to my show was a little gloomy and that viewers needed something more uplifting given the country was moving into the Great Recession. Pressed by my producer for alternative titles and knowing I had no chance of hanging onto my favoured long-standing name for a show I’d worked on for two years, I posited a couple of substitute titles, including, yes, you guessed it, recalling that old post it note on the cork board that carried me through those difficult final years at Mayflower, ‘Hope Springs Eternal’.
By then, I thought it was a bit of a naff title. I wasn’t happy with it. I wasn’t happy with the change. But I’d run out of time to find something different with my producer needing a quick answer for Channel 4. My producer liked it.
The show had a brilliant cast. If I ever get into TV again, and it’s unlikely, I doubt the quality of that cast would be matched. But it deserved a better title.
And that is why I remember the cork board. That’s why it’s stayed with me, I’m guessing. Now I feel like I do need a cork board. Like my physical comedy map idea is worth the time and it can only be achieved by having a cork board and pins. The whole works. But not the faded post it ‘Hope Springs Eternal’ note. But it served its purpose, that note. In its own small way, it helped me through the final half of the nineties as things fell apart at home and I lost my family.
By the time ‘Hope Springs Eternal’ returned to my life in 2008 for the TV show, it was a bit like some boxer returning years after their retirement. It was a mistake, and it was just important to remember both the boxer and the post-it note first time around.
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