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Three minutes and counting. Backstage at the Assembly Rooms I could smell a rancid stench of fear, sense the nerves that are hurtling, uncontrollably, towards breaking point, feel the heart thumping so furiously that my chest begins to hurt. Those who had nurtured me up to this point - the top comedian, his manager, his publicist, the theatre's artistic director, the other, been there, seen-it-all stand-ups performing that night - have stopped talking, and just stare at me as I pace, up and down, left and right, backwards and forwards.
Their mood betrays the truth of the occasion. For all their reassuring points and encouraging words, it has got to them, too. Simon Evans is the night's compere and it is abundantly clear that he is winding up his link and about to introduce the next act. The next act, incidentally, is me.
This is Edinburgh. This is the Fringe's most prestigious venue. This is an absolute sell-out crowd of 650 people sitting right in my face. And this, late night and alcohol-stoked on the last Saturday of the whole festival, is not just the best of the fest show. This is the "Very Best of the Fest." It really gets no bigger than this.
My God. Regular readers will understand that I am not exactly a stranger to these rather daunting situations. People remark that I must have balls like water melons. It's got to the stage where I have to keep this illusion going. Hey, nothing gets to me, you know. Well, that's not strictly true. As hard as I attempted to disguise my gut-wrenching state backstage, I knew my mood was evident to everyone. I felt pretty bad. Those moments before stepping into the ring to fight Roy Jones jr, the world light heavyweight boxing champion, were not the best last year. Neither, come to think about it, were those seconds listening to Dick the Bruiser's threatening grunts before we faced each other in the wrestling ring. I've played football for Everton in front of 15,000 people, for goodness sake! But comedy, on a night and at a venue that most stand ups would kill for? This, I can assure you, was right up there with anything I have ever done in the pants-wetting department.
"He's come up from London," Simon Evans announced cheerfully on stage. Earlier even he, an experienced and highly-respected comedian, had admitted his anxiety to me on the night when he would be compering for the first time. "He's going to do a short set for us tonight," Simon explained to a now hushed audience. My head is spinning and I'm feeling sick as I loiter behind a black curtain. "So here he is. Ian Stafford."
Two months' earlier I was the on flip-side of the coin, in the audience at the Comedy Cafe in London watching a confident Ed Byrne rattle off a polished half hour of genuinely funny, observational comedy. He was trying out some new stuff, such as a dig at those London black cabbies who refuse to take you home. This, like everything else he commented on, was received with laughter. Byrne, with his thick, "Oirish" brogue and an endearing charm that allows him to escape with virtually anything, is now on the fast train to stunning success. It was just four years' ago that he debuted in Edinburgh at a 50-seater venue. This summer he performed in front of 3,000 each night for five shows at the Edinburgh Playhouse. A string of rave reviews on both sides of the Atlantic and an increasing number of television appearances, including the BBC's "Head on Comedy," have followed. If you are still not familiar with his name, you soon will be.
Ed and I have arranged to talk backstage afterwards. I am curious to meet him, and he is curious to meet me. After all, this is his living. What's my excuse for the pain and the stress, and quite possibly the abject humiliation coming my way? "If you believe that you might be a good comedian, and then you die on stage, it makes you feel as if you're nothing," Ed explained as we sat on a dishevelled sofa in the dressing-room. "My first major death took place on my eighth gig, two months into starting out. It was a tough, demanding audience, and I wasn't very good, but it was still soul-destroying for me. It's funny how we use such destructive language. If it goes really well then we've just killed an audience. If you bomb, then you die. Maybe it shows how desperate we can be."
Desperation is a common theme in stand-up comedy, as it is in most walks of a non-structured, uncertain, highly competitive career. For every Ed Byrne, assured a sell-out now wherever he plays, you will find a hundred, maybe a thousand wannabes, collecting their fivers and tenners for fifteen-minute spots upstairs at the Royal Oak or the Queen's Head. It could be a Wednesday night in London, a Friday in Leeds. They are exactly the same as the ambitious pub band, or even the wrestlers I came to know a few months back. One day, they dream, their big break will come. It is a happy story for those who can crack it. It is often a bitter tale for the many more who don't.
A few weeks before meeting up with Ed I had contacted the Assembly Rooms and suggested the idea of the Player performing stand-up at the Fringe. I thought Mary Shields, the venue's Artistic Director, would explain politely that this was completely and utterly out of the question. Now that would have been just fine. It would have got me out of a nice hole and prevented future heart trouble. Mary, though, is quite clearly insane. She leapt at the thought of the challenge and, a couple of days' later, confirmed that she had found me a spot. "You'll be one of four acts in a show," she promised.
"What, a pretty low key show then, is it?" I asked, expecting three minutes at dawn in the upstairs men's toilets.
"Erm, not exactly," Mary replied. "It's the "Very Best of the Fest" in the music hall, our biggest venue."
Oh!
Ed suggested I go off and start writing my script. "Anything that grabs you," he said. "If you think there's something amusing in it, write it down and then work on it." And so I did, to the point where it began to dominate my life. I'd be in a pub having a drink when I would see something, and start scribbling down words on a beer mat. I'd be in the car on a dual carriageway when a thought would hit me suddenly and, quite often, apropos to nothing. Afraid that I would later forget this comedic contender for my act, I would slow down, hunt for a pen and a scrap of paper, and jot down my thoughts, while impatient drivers behind would honk their horns and wonder why the car in front had slowed down to 20 mph in the outside lane. I'd be drifting into a deep and satisfying sleep when a strand of an idea would invade my happy thoughts and, although I'd be determined to remain in the warmth of my bed and my state of semi-consciousness, I'd find myself up at 3.00 a.m making notes.
Although Ed and I emailed each other from time to time, both of us were busy, he preparing for his own, hour and a half long Edinburgh show, tours of Scotland, appearances elsewhere, and television pilot films, and I enjoying a holiday before tossing cabers at the Highland Games. As you do.
Suddenly, and quite horribly, there was less than a fortnight to go. Ed recommended that I get up to Edinburgh fast. "You've got twelve days to go, and I've got to see you do some stand-up before the big night," he explained. The plan was to throw me into one of those many comedy cellar bars that spring up around Edinburgh during the Fringe season, but when I met Ed outside the Forth FM radio station, where he had been broadcasting a programme, he informed me that the only venue his manager, Vivienne Smith, could find was the hundred-seater theatre at The Gilded Balloon. Not exactly small, then, nor low profile.
Over the course of the next couple of hours, and various pints of Guinness, I ran through the jokes and the observations I wanted to make, and Ed agreed or disagreed, improving the order and changing the wording of the crucial climax. If Ed were ever to appear on "Mastermind," his specialist subject would be: "All gags from 1980 to the present day." I'd suggest a string of self-deprecating jokes at the expense of my red hair. Ed would then deliver half a dozen redhead jokes off the top of his head. If I mentioned a squashed hedgehog in Leighton Buzzard he would have, no doubt, a gag in readiness.
I'd begin with a couple of viagra-related gags, then discuss the true story of how I had been flown back from my American holiday by a pilot called Captain Kirk. This then went on to explore Star Trek's Kirk, a man seemingly able to pull any female alien, no matter how they looked or from where they came from. I would throw in a few questions, such as: "Why has the word lisp got an "s" in it?" Ed suggested: "Why is dyslexia so bloody hard to spell?" We agreed we'd try out his taxi driving routine as well, before discussing how grown-ups prevent kids from telling lies by lying to them, and then ending with a moan about how men always fail to understand the opposite sex.
It this appears a mite rushed - and that was my initial fear - then it turned out to be exactly the right thing to do, for I had such little time to prepare the act that it left me with no time to worry about it. I delivered eight minutes at the Gilded Balloon in front of a late night audience of forty-odd people, and although it was hardly the comedic sensation of the Fringe, people laughed. "You weren't too bad at all," Ed told me afterwards. "Obviously your delivery could have been better, but you had some presence and appeared at ease." The point of the exercise was to see whether I stood any chance of avoiding the most painful and damaging of deaths at the Assembly Rooms. "I reckon you can do it," Ed confirmed. "But it was bloody weird seeing you do some of my stuff."
In the ensuing week I worked on a few extra items to lengthen my act in time for the "Very Best of the Fest." I considered the notion that people like to sing along to their tapes and CD's when they drive, and came up with a TV programme proposal called "Stars in their Cars." At first I planned to say: "Tonight, Matthew, I will be Robbie Williams .... in a Ford Focus." Then I changed the car to a Vauxhall Cavalier.
"That's grand," Ed confirmed, when we met for a drink in a west end pub two days before my Assembly Rooms gig. "Grand" is one of his favoured expressions. "Even though the point is the same, by changing it from Ford Focus to Vauxhall Cavalier you've made it funnier." He was smiling now, and looking quite pleased. "See, you're even beginning to think like a comedian now."
I asked him why he did this for a living. "Do you know the best part of it all?" he said, as he sipped his drink. "It gives you the chance to really get things off your chest. I stood up in front of nearly three thousand people in Edinburgh the other night and said some of the things I've always wanted to say in my life. It's very therapeutic, you know. If it works, and they laugh, then it's also an affirmation that you're probably right in what you're saying."
And do the good times make up for all the bad days? "Oh yes," he answered, nodding his head with conviction and staring at and beyond his glass, to the darker and more desperate days of the past. It makes you feel quite proud of yourself when you realise that you've come through."
I flew up to Edinburgh the next day, and drank that evening in the Assembly Rooms members bar. Mary Shields seemed happy and confident. "You're not going to ditch us now, are you?" she asked, possibly in hope. "No, no," I told her, as the first stirrings of a young butterfly began to flutter in my gut. "I'm ready, and I'll be there."
After a predictably sleepless night I endured the longest day. The Very Best of the Fest was not due to begin until midnight, after the likes of Steven Berkoff and Bill Bailey had played earlier in the day and night. Impressed with those names? Well, how about French and Saunders, Rik Mayall, Ben Elton, Clive Anderson, Angus Deayton, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Lenny Henry, Jack Dee, Lee Evans, Alan Davies? They've all played here, some launching their careers and establishing their reputations. Now it would be the turn of that well-known and hysterically funny stand-up comedian, Ian Stafford.
I wouldn't wish the day on anyone. I went for a run. I had a work-out in the hotel gym. I had a shower. I tried an afternoon nap, but failed miserably. I watched the football results on the box. I had a bath, going over and over my twelve minutes. I went for a walk, muttering to myself and gesticulating to emphasise the points in my act. People sitting outside at a nearby brasserie were quite openly staring at me by now. I had been transformed from an admittedly unstable person into a raving lunatic, all in a matter of weeks. I had another shower, before nibbling a salad at a wasted dinner.
After three bottles of beer designed to relax, I arrived at the Assembly Rooms at just after eleven o'clock. Ed had phoned to say he was on his way up from appearing in Leeds and would be backstage by midnight. Flyers advertising the night were evident everywhere: "V. best of the fest," they read. "Four comedians - one show." Underneath they stated the line-ups for the four shows the Assembly Rooms had or were putting on. The likes of Boothby Graffoe, Stewart Lee and Marcus Brigstocke had already played the same show the night before. Under "Sat, 26th" the flyer read: "Simon Evans (host), Terry Alderton, Hattie Hayridge, Adam Bloom & Ian Stafford." Bloody hell. They were even advertising my act.
With half an hour to go Mary revealed that another comedian, Gregory Leake, had been added to the line-up, and the rest of us had to reduce our acts. Mine would be chopped from twelve minutes to seven. This initiated a mini-crisis for me. I had learnt my twelve minutes off pat, and my running order was logged rigidly into my brain. Now I had to slash my own act, and decide on a new order. Out went the kids and a dog joke I was going to deliver at the end.
Ed was there in the dressing room when I arrived, my mind now furiously convincing itself of the new act. "You know you can do this," Ed told me, as he mock-massaged my shoulders in his new guise as chief coach. "It's a big audience, and that means more people will laugh." Mary and the other acts, wished me well, but they knew, just as I knew, that I would be out on my own. There was nothing much anyone could really say.
I heard the words "Ian Stafford" and I found myself propelled on to the stage, and towards the microphone, while my dressing-room well-wishers poured out to watch from the side. Later, when it was all over, they described the scene that revealed their true state of minds. Ed: "I just stared at the floor and hoped." Mary: "I've been terrified about this for the past week, for you, of course, but mainly for me, because it's my show. When you went on I had to hold people's hands."
I took the microphone and placed the stand at the side of the stage, thanking the audience for the healthy applause I had just received, and collected my thoughts. My first viagra joke didn't seem to work as well as it did at the Gilded Balloon. This is hardly surprising because, as Ed explained to me afterwards, I had cocked up the crucial word in the joke. Instead of relating to my STIFF (italics) neck, because a viagra tablet had got stuck in my throat, I used the word BAD (in italics). My second viagra joke - about it preventing old men in people's homes from rolling out of their beds at night - went down a great deal better, though. In fact, most people in the audience laughed. "I can't tell you how relieved I felt when I heard them laugh," Ed admitted afterwards. "I thought: "He's got a chance.""
My play on words - lisp, dyslexia, and one asking what atheists cry out when they come - were met with a decent audience response as well, but then another crisis hit me. I leapt straight into my Captain Kirk slot, which should have been close to the end. I was a couple of minutes into the act, and I had reached already my penultimate observation. Everyone told me later that my stage demeanour was surprisingly relaxed, but as I delivered the Kirk segment, I was reminding myself furiously that I had to return to Ed's taxi and "Stars in their Cars."
Linking Kirk with taxis by virtue of talking about travelling did the trick, although my version of the taxi segment did not go down half as well as when I saw Ed perform it at the Comedy Cafe. Strange, that! Kirk worked to a degree, and so did Stars in their Cars, even if I stated before correcting myself: "Cars in their Stars."
There was one part left of the act, the observations about men having to do things often that their partners want, rather than what men want. I had been informed that a red light would beam from the stage floor when I had a minute remaining of my timed slot. As I attempted to move seamlessly into the frustrations of men, I not only caught sight of the light, but also the discreet and fence-sitting message scrawled across the red light's glass: "Fuck off," it read. The audience, to my undying gratitude, had held back. It was only the stage itself that was telling me where to go.
I thanked the audience, said goodnight, and walked briskly off the stage, pausing only to replace the microphone back on its stand. Behind the curtain I listened as they clapped, my head thumping and my guts now churning like a tumble dryer. It wasn't the loudest I had ever heard, but then again I hadn't been that good. In fact, I hadn't been good at all. But it was, nevertheless, the sound of healthy applause. Simon Evans then said something on stage I had not been prepared for. "Ian is not a professional comedian, but a writer and author," he said. "He's done a lot of crazy things in his guise as a participatory writer, and that was his first ever stand up performance," he said. Actually, it was my second, but who's counting? "I'm sure, now that you know this, you will want to show him your appreciation."
I was still behind the curtain when they started to cheer. Bloody hell. They actually started to cheer. So what if it was only through sympathy? It meant that I had not been the disaster I feared. I may well have contracted an illness out there on the Assembly Rooms stage, but I had not suffered a painful death.
"You got away with it," Ed said, as he shook my hand and patted my back. "You definitely got away with it."
A relieved Mary Shields hugged me in the knowledge that her job was still hers. "You were a million times better than I thought you'd be," she admitted. Just how bad she expected my act to be is beyond imagination.
In the bar, as the beer and the champagne flowed, I felt very peculiar. I was in a state of shock that would last for a couple of hours. Sometimes I felt deliriously happy, other times I was quite close to crying. I was bursting with energy, then depressed. I was delighted in how I managed to pull off my act, then dejected about the fluffed lines. A deep tiredness would hit me, then a vibrant insomnia would follow immediately afterwards.
Ed summed up his feelings as the first shafts of dawn light hit the Edinburgh streets. "I've surprised myself, because I didn't think I'd get in to this as much as I've done," he admitted. "I felt nervous for you, but now I feel very satisfied that I've played a part in you being able to stand up at the Assembly Rooms. You're not going to win the Perrier award, at least not for a year or so, but you were a very long way off from dying, too."
Never mind the Perrier award, I've just heard that I failed to make the short list for the Sainsbury's economy still water award. But you know what? I might just try a little more stand up comedy down in London. I really might. Just to get those fluffed lines right, add the script that had to be slashed in Edinburgh, and maybe include a few more observations and gags.
Now, how crazy is that?
