I’ve been moaning a lot recently about being away from the family and getting older and my career and how to get my kids into good secondary schools and then I come to Cyprus and play gigs to young soldiers returning from Afghanistan, who’ve just been shot at and blown up and seen friends killed and maimed. I’m such a twat sometimes.
I don’t play these forces gigs that often and, while it can be hard to entertain a group of rowdy blokes who haven’t had a drink for months, it’s pretty rewarding when it goes well. Soldiers take abuse from a comic better than any group of people I’ve ever come across. You can call them fat, ugly, stupid, pre-pubescent etc..and they just lap it up. Last night we had to play to a crowd that we’d already entertained the night before and the blokes that I’d made fun of for being tubby (like me) or a bit camp (like me) sat in almost exactly the same places so I could easily find them for further abuse. Loved those guys!
Cyprus is getting rather hot which is nice. At the moment we’re not sure how long we’re going to be stuck here due to Iceland not being able to control their volcanoes (just like their banks really). I’m hoping to still make it back next week in time for my gigs but it may just be that I’m stuck out here for a while. The tan will be lovely but, if I do forces gigs for two weeks, I may come back a much tougher act so don’t mess with me! See it’s started already.
I’m out here with Ian Stone and lovely Australian musicians Andy Walton and Sam Hetherington . If you’re one of those people who think that alternative comedians don’t do good ‘jokes’ any more, then you’ve obviously not seen Ian. He’s presenting a show on Five Live this summer with Alan Davies. It’s going to be about the 2010 World Cup. It’ll be far more entertaining than the football.
I’m so upset to be missing the election debates. I caught about ten minutes of highlights on the Guardian site and it looked as stilted and bland as I expected it to be. Whatever format they choose, politicians are going to annoy us because they are trying to appeal to everyone – which in entertainment terms is a recipe for disaster. We love people who say something contraversial or left-field because it surprises us. It’s why politicians are so much more engaging once they’ve left front line politics because they’re free to express a point of view that was impossible when in a position of power. We can’t blame them for this. Democracy means that you’re trying to not offend anyone which leads to boring politics. Dictatorship or Oligarchy is far more exciting but a much more difficult environment in which to be a comedian. So I’ll stick with what we’ve got.
It is still infuriating that politicians don’t ever have the guts to turn on the British public. Everything is always about how wonderful the British people are, how down to earth and sensible they can be. It would be so refreshing to hear David Cameron witter on about Britain needing a new start and how great the Tories would be at saving us from the mess that Labour’s made of the economy – then it switches to Brown who looks down the camera and says, ‘If you’re buying this crap, you’re bigger dickheads than I thought.’ That’s the debate I’d like to see.
