Tickling the English Page 8
Later in the year, at the very end of the tour, I had the blood vessels in my eyeballs checked again, albeit indirectly, by having a blood test with my GP. The results were a wake-up call to cut down on my cholesterol and do some exercise; a few months later I was able to repeat the test and find out that I was out of the danger zone. All this was handled briskly and efficiently by the doctors and nurses in the clinic; when I was there later for my child’s MMR shots, they made a point of checking how my own health was again and offering encouragement.
This was a great experience both for me and for the food-delivery boys of Eastbourne. With the cheese removed from my diet, there was no place for pizza. And no longer must they be ordered to wait, frightened, by the back of the theatre, wondering what will happen to them when the mysterious Irish man appears, hungry, with cash.
Chapter 7:
All This Clean Living Had to End Sometime
Canterbury Marlowe Theatre
Dave, chief executive of a derivative software company:
‘Couldn’t do something original, could you?’ (Nobody got that joke.)
1 bed-and-breakfast owner – 6 guests tonight
1 paladin
2 wizards
2 geomancers
4 orcs
Canterbury is an inordinately pretty town, almost entirely populated by visiting French schoolchildren.
This prettiness was almost its undoing in 1942, when it got bombed by the Luftwaffe despite having no military significance. It was chosen, alongside York, Bath, Norwich and Exeter, from a German travel guide, the Baedeker Tourist Guide to Britain; reportedly, Nazi propaganda officer Baron Gustav Braun von Sturm said, ‘We shall go out and bomb every building in Britain marked with three stars in the Baedeker Guide.’
Which is unfortunate, because the Canterbury Tourist Board was initially quite proud of the good review. They even had banners printed: ‘Canterbury: three stars in Baedeker!’ The campaign has never been revived.
I’ve played the Marlowe Hall once before and I learned an important lesson there.
In the front row that night was Bob, who designed university courses for a living. At one stage I asked, ‘Where is the last place you bought a bed?’ (someone got asked this every night, it was part of a routine). In answer, Bob pointed vaguely off into the distance, as if all beds in Canterbury came from a mysterious valley just yonder…
When asked to name this bed-producing wonderland, Bob just said, ‘Planet Thanet,’ which, and I cannot stress this enough, TOOK THE ROOF OFF THE PLACE. They stamped and roared and clapped. Clearly Bob had said the funniest thing ever heard in Canterbury. I didn’t understand what he was on about and just repeated it – ‘Planet Thanet?’ – to more huge acclaim, feet stamping and laughter, and so we had a five-minute chat about this wondrous far-off planet and its mattress-mining alien population. All to insane laughter. Eventually, I had to tell the crowd, ‘I literally don’t have a clue what we’re talking about here,’ which got another cheer.
I found out later from people gathered at the stage door that Thanet is a nearby district and the people living there are regarded as slightly different by the inhabitants of Canterbury. Hence Planet Thanet. Comedy, eh? You spend your entire life learning how to craft punchy and hilarious material, when the better skill is simply to spot a much-loved local joke and just shut up and let the crowd enjoy telling it to each other.
So, I have a history with this town. And not just onstage. I once spent a weekend here for an ITV documentary with some Live Action Role-Players, or LARPers, or, commonly, ‘people who dress up as Hobbits for the weekend’. During the course of my stay, they taught me magic (spells on scraps of paper) and combat (foam swords with a carbonfibre core) and made me wear rubber, pointy ears. I had to create an elfin character with elfin traits to go with the elfin ears. I even gave him an elfin-sounding name, Morgan Fairchild, which none of the Orcs recognized, because who remembers Falcon Crest? I was also coached in the history and customs of the world I was entering, the name of which I can’t remember, but it sounded a little like, but not exactly, Middle Earth.
And then we went to a scout camp just outside Canterbury and ran around having adventures. We fought battles and cast spells, and defended plywood castles and attacked MDF keeps and followed a carefully constructed narrative which had been specially written for the weekend. And when we got thirsty, there was a pub, in a large plush tent, run by a lovely couple who spent their weekends selling people mead and ale at LARP events and Civil War reenactments. This couple even went as far as to contact the organizers of each weekend in advance to find out the plotline and invent characters for themselves that would fit into the story. Although, to be fair, their characters were invariably inn-keepers.
Everyone stayed meticulously in character all day, and were duly sullen, or uncommunicative, or aggressive, until midnight, at which point the story was put on pause and we all instantly reverted to being normal people getting pissed in a beer tent, in silly clothes.
At the end of the weekend, I then had to perform a stand-up show to them, about them.
I think the LARPers presumed that this was the point at which I would unleash my scorn.
The default position, it seems, when dealing with people with unusual hobbies is to be arch and superior. All weekend, they had been friendly to me, but there had been an undercurrent of worry that I would turn on them at the end and start slagging them off. This is what had happened when some reporter from Richard and Judy came down; ‘God, look at this lot,’ was the tone. They’ve let us come along and film them – but how tragic are they?
This is a common stance among junior reporters trying to look cool on the telly, of course.
People with obscure passions are essentially fodder. And it’s best to appear to be poking them with the far end of a shitty stick in case any of their ‘not cool’ rubs off, and they can smell it off you when you get back to Soho. There is an army of people like this in telly, who care about nothing outside what they’re told to care about by Heat and Closer magazine, and who dream of being ‘Entertainment Correspondents’, despite it being the dumbest, most regurgative, most pointless job in the universe.
When I was eighteen, I studied maths in college, which I loved, but I ran away from my classmates the minute we were out of lectures and hung out with the ‘cooler’ kids instead. I was deeply self-conscious about looking nerdy and unattractive; painfully so, on reflection, and probably quite rudely too, to the rest of my class. I don’t think I was one iota more successful with women because of this; still, I persisted in denying myself the chance to enjoy a heartfelt passion because I didn’t have the self-belief to be independent. I was the trainee Entertainment Correspondent. My LARPing friends in Canterbury learned this confidence, years before I had.
So, this smug scorn is no national trait, by the way, as much as a by-product of the global explosion in celebrity culture. It does weaken the argument, however, for some unique English regard for eccentrics.
By the end of the LARP weekend I had really come to admire this lot. They were funny and friendly, and despite what the man from Richard and Judy would like to think, they didn’t really think they were orcs or trolls. The whole weekend was just a giant board game brought alive by their enthusiasm and imagination. They had a hobby that was no more an irrational waste of time than following football teams or bands or Coronation Street and for which they only got grief, but they carried on because they found joy in it. When it came to their private comedy show, I did it in character. Morgan Fairchild did the one and only show of his/her stand-up career.
And when I returned to Canterbury on this tour, a pair of rubber pointy ears had been thrown up on the stage for me and I wore them with pride.
Cheltenham Town Hall
1 Sainsbury’s branch manager from Cardiff
1 aircraft engineer
1 secondary-school student
1 quality-assurance manager
The Café Rouge was booked o
ut in Cheltenham tonight.
This is the massive knock-on effect of a tour like mine. This is the huge economic benefit to local traders. Oh sure, there may be traffic congestion, public drinking and occasional crowd violence, particularly when the audience spills out of the theatre and on to the streets, joked up and ready to fight, but, to a local mid-level restaurant like Café Rouge in Cheltenham, the benefits of being booked out between six and seven thirty on a Tuesday night are immeasurable.
I didn’t even know you could book a table at Café Rouge. It’s one of those perfectly adequate chain restaurants, like Pizza Express and Est Est Est, which are on every high-street in the UK, where you know exactly what you’re going to get, and that includes a table. I’m not saying that these places can’t be full; I just don’t expect them to be booked out. It sounds like a low-quality phone prank – ringing up Café Rouge to make a booking:
‘Hello, I’d like to reserve a table for next Friday please.’
‘I’m sorry, you’d like to… what?’
‘I’d like to reserve a table for two, for next Friday.’
‘This is Café Rouge. You just come along. You can’t book.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because… because… because I don’t know where I’d write it down. It’ll be a completely different set of staff by Friday, and it’s not like we have a board or a book for this…’
I was wrong, though. You can book Café Rouge, at least in Cheltenham, at least in the hour before my show. There was no table there, no table in Pizza Express, no table in Ask. In each of them, my future audience members watched me walk in, enquire, get turned down and shuffle out again.
In the end, I had chips in the dressing room.
Cheltenham proved to be a lot more hospitable after the show. After a couple of dry weeks of driving straight home immediately, Damon and I were overnighting, and fuelled with talk of England’s twenty-four-hour drinking culture, we headed out into the night.
Now, I know that there is a long history of Irish people getting drunk in Cheltenham. The National Hunt festival held in March each year can attract upwards of forty thousand punters from across the Irish Sea and has come to be regarded as a particularly Gaelic week. So much so, it has led a lot of people in the UK to overestimate just how much of a shite Irish people give about horse-racing.
‘Big week for you,’ I remember a taxi-driver saying to me once in London, when he heard my accent.
‘Oh really? Why do you say that?’ I replied, buying time while I wondered how this guy knew about my upcoming root-canal, my VAT deadline and my plans to sit around for a couple of days playing Gears of War 2:
‘Cheltenham, of course. I’m surprised you can tear yourself away from it.’
‘Oh, it’s not really that big a deal for me actually.’
‘Of course it is. You’re Irish, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, but we’re not all into horse-racing.’
‘Of course, you are. All the Irish love Cheltenham.’
‘Well, actually, most of us don’t really…’
‘Yes, you do. All Irish people do. Cheltenham. Big week for the Irish.’
I’m not exaggerating, he almost started a fight with me over this. He just refused to accept the idea of an Irishman in London who didn’t care about horse-racing. I tried offering evidence, other than myself, by phoning other Irish people who testify to no love of the turf. I even tried logic.
Homer is a man, I said. All men are mortal. Therefore, cabbie, Homer is mortal.
But, Cheltenham is full of horse-racing fans. Cheltenham is also full of Irish people. I accept this. That does not add up, however, to All Irish people are horse-racing fans.
It does add up, in my book anyway, to All Irish people who are horse-racing fans are IN Cheltenham, leaving the other 3.9 million, who couldn’t give a shite about horse-racing, well alone. So, shut up and drive or I’ll get another cab.
That logic seemed to work.
Anyway, my Cheltenham gig didn’t fall during the National Hunt festival and so I wasn’t getting pissed with the Irish, I was getting pissed with the English. And, as much as in Ireland, drinking has a central place in English society.
The nature of English drinking has always been a subject of debate in the country, with a certain aspirational tendency to presume that, with just the right tweak in the licensing laws, a sudden eruption of cafés will occur and it’ll be just a couple of glasses of Chardonnay before the match. With the perfect piece of legislation, you’ll all go Mediterranean.
This is never going to happen. Your drinking is more about binges and serious drunkenness, which is more in keeping with the Germanic and Nordic (and Irish) attitude to alcohol. This might be further evidence that those Mediterranean Romans did little to civilize British society, and that the Angles, Saxons and Vikings were a bad influence on the growing nation during its troubled adolescence.
Or it might just be that you’re a northern country and this is the way northern countries drink. People don’t drink as heavily in warmer climates because it’s hotter there, and hot and drunk don’t mix. And they drink wine in hotter climates because that’s where grapes grow; in northern climates we grow grain.
It’s become the norm for English people to think that they are drinking at unprecedentedly high levels. This is partly because the Daily Mail keeps telling them that they are or, at least, that feral, out-of-control young people are, and partly because they are indeed drinking considerably more than their parents or grandparents did. But, in reality, as Peter Haydon, author of An Inebriated History of Britain, has pointed out, modern Britons ‘are rather poor drinkers compared with our ancestors’. (He also notes that Elizabeth I could drink stronger ale than any of the men at her court, which was seen as an entirely admirable trait in a queen. It’s difficult to see Elizabeth II pulling the same stunt.)
The fact is that England has a long and distinguished history of heavy drinking.
Before there was a plentiful supply of clean water, beer and ale were staple, healthy parts of the English diet for hundreds of years. Monks in the Middle Ages, for example, had an allocation of around ten pints of ‘small beer’ – a weaker beer made with leftover mash – every day. In the sixteenth century, it’s estimated that average beer consumption in England was around 850 pints of beer per person per year. Although drunkenness became a crime under Elizabeth I, heavy alcohol consumption remained the norm. At its peak in the eighteenth century, the Royal Navy’s grog ration was half a pint of 50 per cent proof rum mixed with 4 pints of water, served twice a day – more than enough to keep the sailors quietly buzzed all day long. Like many heavy drinkers, it wasn’t until Britain switched over to shorts that the trouble started. Gin, in particular, swept through British society – it was said that you could get ‘drunk for a penny and dead drunk for two’. By the last years of the seventeenth century, it was estimated that consumption stood at twenty-four pints of gin a year for every man, woman and child in England. In eighteenth-century London, where two pints of ‘mother’s ruin’ were consumed per person per week, gin was cheaper than milk.
I’m not sure which part of that last sentence is more striking. Is it ‘two pints, per person, per week’? Or ‘gin was cheaper than milk’?
To you, this whole gin-epidemic episode might be old news. But, as I’ve mentioned before, we aren’t taught a lot of English history in Irish schools. So you can understand my glee at discovering the gin epidemic. We get a lot of grief, the Irish, about being heavy drinkers, but You… had a Gin Epidemic. Oh sure, we like a pint now and again but… You had an Epidemic… of Gin.
This is like finding out that your disciplinarian stepfather actually has a teenage police record for possession of marijuana.
And it wasn’t a passing thing either. It wasn’t ‘That Summer we all went a Bit Mad on the G&Ts.’ You remember that year? It was just one barbecue after another.
No, it was a thirty-year bender, from 1720 to 1751, at best estimates. An
entire generation, clinking glasses, because the previous monopoly on distillation had been broken in an effort to reduce imports of French brandy, the French being out of favour, and replace it with the Dutch drink made popular since the arrival of your first Dutch king, William of Orange. Over the next thirty years, the price of gin plummeted as the supply increased. Mass drunkenness followed. New laws were introduced in 1729 and 1736 to curb the trade, which only succeeded in creating prohibition and the sale of gin under ‘medicinal guise’. It was sold in bottles with the instructions ‘Take 2–3 spoonfuls of this 4–5 times a day or as often as the fit takes you.’ When traders were taken to court, they actually submitted the defence that their business was legal as the unpopular 1736 law had given the people colic.
It wasn’t until the Tippling Act of 1751, which attempted to license the trade and draw it into respectability, that the consumption of gin began to fall, although it helped that you entered the (almost completely impossible to explain) Seven Years War in 1756 and all the drinkers had to go and fight.
It was as part of the campaign for the 1751 act that Hogarth produced his famous illustration ‘Gin Lane’ which chronicled the many social ills of the foreign drink. It was accompanied by a sister print, ‘Beer Street’, which demonstrated the hearty, healthy drunkenness of the patriotic beer-drinker by contrast. John Bull himself held a tankard of ale, after all. And it was cheaper, industrially produced beer and stout that took gin’s place.