One Ball and Boe

Warming Up

8134/21054

People said I'd never hit my target - I'd set it way too high. No one was going to pay me to not do something. The day started with us 2% of the way to the total but ended with us hitting 100%. I knew, that if I believed, it would happen. It's an ice cream miracle.

Another sparsely attended but very enjoyable RHLSTP tonight with Alexandra Haddow and John Kearns. John has done the show four or five times before, but never at the LST so it felt like the end of days to have him in the proper chairs. Like the ravens leaving the Tower, John Kearns being at the proper theatre is a herald of the end.

Like Timkey, he is one of those comedians who can reduce me to painful, heart attack inducing laughter by seemingly doing nothing. His special on Sky is amazing and at a couple of points in tonight's show I was unable to speak, shaking with the kind of internal, silent laughter that shakes you to the core and feels primeval. I couldn't even remember what he'd been talking about ten minutes later. His stories about the real Michael Ball and Alfie Boe coming to see his parodic show of Ball and Boe (with Adam Riches) was worth the entrance fee alone.

John seemed determined to try and make the show last until tomorrow, like the sprawling early RHLSTPs where 90 minutes in the audience would be quiet and in a state of shock and would then recuperate and laugh harder than ever. We certainly got to the stupor part. I was exhausted by the end.

I love how this show wraps itself around the guest and John's energy (or lack of it) infected everything. You have to see these live to get the full impact. Hopefully there will be some live ones for you to see. The next one is sold out, but we're back in April for what might be the last gig at the Leicester Square Theatre. The curse of John Kearns strikes again.

Came off stage and John looked at his phone. "Do you know Bill Dare?" he asked and both producer Ben and I said we did with a little more force than John had expected, which meant he had to slightly change tack and find a way to break the suspected bad news to us more gently. Bill had died in an accident abroad.

Stew and me worked with him a little back in the day on Weekending and Spitting Image. We must have liked him because we wasted some time writing a sketch called "Bill Dare's Bottom" which I think involved his arse appearing in the sky. A rare (terrible) pun from Lee and Herring there (Bill Dare=Builder, though we did also later submit the same sketch to a different producer (I think Peter Kessler) and it became Peter Kessler's Bottom, which made it a bit more surreal.

Bill took the sketch with bemused amusement, but recognised that affection with which it was proffered. We didn't do this kind of stuff for the also rans. Other will give more detailed tributes of his extraordinary career, but he was a faux grumpy but supportive presence in those early days on the LE corridor and for that I owe him a lot.

Rather than heading home, only to have to get up super early for my flight to Dublin (still a few tickets for this gig and Belfast on Thursday and all the other gigs) and then come back into town again, I got the tube to Heathrow and stayed at the hotel there. It was a long journey and everywhere in London seems to smell of skunk (the drug) or skunk (the smelly animal). The hotel rang to see where I was and I wondered if I might end up locked out and have to sleep on a bench, but they let me in when I arrived just before midnight and the room was surprisingly comfortable and quiet. I am almost guaranteed to make the wrong call in situations like this, but I guess it will be good to spend the morning at the airport rather than have to fight through rush hour trains, where the smell of shit (the drugs) and shit (in men's unwiped arses) will be even worse.

Retro RHLSTP with Adam and Joe up today.

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