My Comedy Life So Far (2007-2018)

Last week I had my last ever Early Risers, which is the comedy night I set up in January 2019. This week I handed over all the social media accounts to the new owner of Early Risers - Alex. It's a strange transitional time for me, but here's the story of my comedy life so far:

2007 (age 21) 

I had just got together with Dan and was trying to impress him. Dan liked comedy so I got us surprise tickets to see Ross Noble at the Empire Theatre. It was quite a lot of money to spend for a student and wasn't even for a special occasion. I thought it was unfortunate that I probably wouldn't enjoy it. How could anyone really enjoy watching just one man on a stage saying things. If I was going to go to a theatre I ideally wanted costumes and several people, songs and a set and a story line. Not just one man. But I was in that sickeningly in-love stage where I was trying to impress him. I also took a whole day off uni to make him a birthday cake that looked like a piano with keys made from white and dark chocolate. And he hired a car from Southport and drove it all the way down to Heathrow just so he could pick me up from the airport. Disgusting. Ross Noble turned out to be better than my very low expectations.

2011 (age 25)

I was going to a poetry night with a bunch of friends from my church. My church had recently split into groups depending on interests and we were part of "studio" the group of creative people. Every month we went to see a creative thing, we went to exhibitions and stuff. Once we went to see something that described itself as "a piece of magical live art theatre" which turned out to be a naked woman just wearing a pair of red heels and a horses head. Anyway the poetry thing we were going to got cancelled and so we quickly had to find an alternative. It just so happened that a comedy night was running at the same time and almost in the same place. It was not a polished night of high class entertainment, it was a sketch troupe of 3 comedians Rob, Lee and Oli doing their alternative comedy sketches and a few stand ups and the occasional comedy puppet show where you were asked to donate £1. It was amazing and often very clever and very funny, apart from some times when it was awful. But thats what made it amazing because you never knew when a drunk open spot was about to do too long on stage and have to be forced off. It was in a semi-abandoned building with terrible loos and no heating and I once took my own hot water bottle. 

I didn't realise then this was not a normal comedy night. This was my first experience of comedy so I had nothing to compare it to, but if I could go back in time to that night now I would. I carried on going to it as much as I could until it stopped about 5 years later.

2012 (age 26)

After a year of going to this night I thought I'd like to try comedy. I was show off as a kid, always putting on performances for the grown ups with my younger sisters and cousins, but I hadn't really performed anything for 10 years. I was quite into drama all through secondary school but around the time I was doing my GCSEs I stopped being a show off. I didn't want people to look at me, I quit my after school drama group and pretty much stopped liking myself. I had originally wanted to do drama for A-level but it didn't work on the timetable with the other subjects I wanted to do. Me approaching that situation now would be like, "ok what's the solution maybe I could go to a different college" but me as a 16 year old just went, "ok well I'll probably be rubbish at it anyway, so why don't I just pick a random subject that I don't care at all about and do that half heartedly?"

I stayed away from showing off for a long time. I loved art but I hated having to talk about my work. I gradually got better at that stuff and started liking myself again. Doing art exhibitions in second year helped me because it was sort of like putting on a show, but a show where you do all the work beforehand and you can't mess up some lines: you only put on the wall what your happy with. By age 26 I was ready to be a show off again. The standards were varied so you didn't have to be great to be not the worst person on, you just had to be fairly sober and have done a bit of prep.

I started this blog in 2009 so I had been writing funny observations for a while. So when it came to writing a 5 minute set I just sort said some things I said on my blog. I used a flip chart too with pre drawn out cartoons, because drawing was something safe to me. Dan also did 5 mins on the same night. 

I cringe at some of the set now but I went home with the biggest buzz I've ever had. I imagine it's like drugs, you can never get a hit like that first hit again, even it you sell out Wembley arena. Rob and Lee still refer to me as their comedy godchild, because I was "born" at their night. Aww. you can watch a set from that night here.

2016 (age 30)

I carried on for years doing comedy at this one comedy night, but I did a few other nights too if people asked me to. There was a night set up in the back room of a pizza place and a night in a little tiny theatre that I used to do too. They were all in Liverpool city centre. I did consider then wether I should try other nights in Manchester and stuff, and whether I should try and get paid for it, but at the time I was quite new to doing art projects in schools and I loved it. It was easier to keep that the thing I did for money and comedy the thing I did for fun and not try and mix them up. I traveled to Manchester enough for work already, I didn't want to be traveling there in the evenings too. I enjoyed doing comedy when I was pregnant with Percy. 

If you fancy watching my heavily pregnant comedy from 2014 click here

I went to the Edinburgh fringe (just to watch) when I was heavily pregnant and Percy came with me to the comedy night when he was 6 weeks old. Then there was about a year when I didn't go, and it was never quite the same after, partly because Dan couldn't go with me and I was out of the scene a bit. I really wanted to go to Edinburgh and do a hour long show but I knew it would be impossible with a baby, so a friend suggested doing Liverpool comedy festival. One show in Liverpool is a lot easier that 3 shows a day for a month in Edinburgh. So I wrote my first show in 2016. It was called "Best days of you life" and it was about going to school in the 90's and 00s. It was fun! 

Lots of people came, I was proud of it at the time and I'm relatively proud of it still, unfortunately the camera switched itself off, so there is no record of it. Which is a shame because Dan even had a small part as the Suez canal in a surreal dream sequence. 

2018 (age 32)

This was the year I decided to go for it properly. In 2017 I had another baby and moved house, there was no time for fun in 2017, it was just a survival year. I knew the real fun wouldn't start till 2019. You just can't do stuff you want to do when your kid is under 2, in my opinion. The art job was hard to get back to, childcare is expensive and you can't just do it whenever you have the work. I wanted to do something with my life that was not parenting. I had time for one hobby and that was it, and I decided to go back to comedy. I thought "I'll write another hour long show." I realise now that this is not the normal way people go about doing comedy. It's much more normal to write 10 minutes and perform it everywhere straight away than to spend 6 years writing 2 hour long shows before ever performing outside your own city, but no one told me this. It's not one of those careers that are mapped out for you by a careers advisor

The nights I used to go to had all stopped. All the venues we used to create fun in were had been made into student flats. I had to find a new night and go out without Dan, who was home with both kids, and I had to get back in time to breastfeed in the night, because baby Eric would never ever take a bottle! So I started going to this night at the Unity theatre. It was a monthly night I could test material at. I didn't know many people and it felt like a weird thing to do, to just go out by myself and try jokes, but I tried some new stuff, I got to know some new people and I stated putting together my new comedy show about parenting "job done".

The show was coming together and the theatre was booked when I found out I had cancer (read my hiarious account of this here). So it was a strange time. I did my show, which I was really proud of and I still am really proud of. It sold out, so I added an extra night. Over 100 people came in the end and it was just lovely. It felt like a proper achievement and I didn't want it to end there. Unfortunately it had to end there, because the next week I had the cancer removal operation followed by a month in bed. 

Watch a little 6 minute best bits from this show here

I'm bad at resting, so I spent that whole time booking myself into as many comedy nights as I could. I decided I was going to spend a year taking every opportunity, going to everywhere that would have me. Two people encouraged me to go for it at this stage, the sound guy from The Everyman, who I can't even remember his name. He said this is exactly the kind of thing The Everyman should be putting on and encouraged me to start my own night. The other was one of MCs from Hot Water Comedy Club, Freddy, who told me to enter competitions and get practise in all different kinds of audience. He even said my breastfeeding stuff was good, because it was different. and I never would have considered doing that stuff in a hot water audience but it did actually go really well.

So I set myself a target, to do comedy as much as I could for a year and see if I could make money from it by the end of the year. And to start my own monthly night. 

I'm going to write all this in another blog because I've already written loads. Part 2 will cover the highs and lows of actually trying in comedy, and how my comedy night evolved, and what happened to comedy in the pandemic.

The Recce to France

What a weird stupid word "recce" is. I've only seen it written down recently and I really think it should be spelt "recky" like Becky.

If you can get over that, you might be able to tolerate this blog. Over half term we spent 6 days in France visiting 3 locations in the hope that we would "get a feeling" for one and decide to move there. It felt pretty extravagant to go away for half term, given that lots of people haven't been abroad since before the pandemic and we went to Greece at the end of August, but I made myself feel better by telling myself this wasn't a holiday, this was a recce. We were going to go to a bank and an estate agent, not just sit around all day eating pain au chocolat. Although we did a lot more eating pain au chocolat than visiting banks. We flew to Carcassonne and as were were going through the baggage check they asked us if we had any ipads or electronics in the kids bags. We we said "no they don't even own an iPad." Then Dan started saying about how we're pretty old school and they just have books and card games and stuff, and they guy seemed surprised and maybe a bit impressed. Then Dan went to far and said we just have chisels and stone and I had to reassure the man that we did not have a bunch of chisels in our hand luggage.

The places we visited were all quite close together in the middle south, which is the more affordable bit of the south coast. We basically just wandered around looking at the town centre and then a bit at the outskirts, trying out public transport, and places to eat and parks and then judged them all against each other like a game of top trumps. Why don't you play the game yourself? I'll give you a paragraph of description and 3 photos for each place and then you tell me which one you would choose...

1) Carcassonne.

The furthest away from the sea (an hour by car) and the smallest population, but the cheapest place to live. There's an airport so you can fly directly there from Manchester. There were lovely old city walls on a hill with nice touristy shops and cafes inside.  It had a river and a canal, it had a nice square with loads of restaurants and a fountain. The streets were very narrow. Only one car can fit down at a time so a lot of the roads were one way.

2) Narbonne.

Slightly bigger population than Carcassonne. Only a few miles from a lovely sandy beach, so you can get there on the number 8 bus from the city centre. No airport, so you would have to fly in from Carcassone or Beziers. Big square in the centre by the river with restaurants all round it. There was a permanent indoor food market and an (I'm guessing weekly) outdoor market.

3) Montpellier.

A much bigger place than the other two. A city with a tram network so that you can easily get all over the city, just like you would get a tube in London. City bikes that anyone can hire, (you get two hours for free) a lot of students, a very young aged population on average. Not far from the beach but you can't get directly there from the centre on public transport. You'd have to get a tram and then a bus. Lots more things to do just because it's bigger. Not many houses with outdoor space though, the majority of people live in apartments and it's more expensive to live there than the other two places. There is an airport but they don't fly to the north of England, so you would have to go to Beziers to fly to Manchester.

So which one would you choose?

I'll tell you our thoughts later, but in the mean time here's some of my general observations about the differences between the French and the English that I spotted on this trip:

The French are much more likely to have very round Harry Potter style glasses, especially children.

Red trousers are more common in France especially among men. You don't have to be a hipster to wear them, or maybe all French people are hipsters?

Smoking seems to still be cool in France. There seemed to be a lot more people doing it publicly in parks and stuff.

Gingers are pretty rare in France, although people did still assume I was french before I spoke, so I don't stick out as much as I have done when I was in the Middle East.

The places we went in general all seemed a bit more multi-cultural than Liverpool.

Public transport was really good value, but we got 3 trains and all of them were delayed. 

Food in supermarkets was generally more expensive than in the UK. A french homeless person asked me to buy him cheese... I don't think that would happen here.

Restaurants don't open till 7 at the earliest. So if you want to go out to eat at 5 or 6 you have to eat from a lunch place, so you could get a sandwich or a crepe, but not a proper hot meal. 

Loads of shops shut for a hour or two around lunch time!

The french were a lot more stick about covid, we had to wear masks everywhere and show that we've had a vaccine in order to eat out.

Deciding where to live

Before we left we had emailed a few international churches, because it is important for us to find a good church there. We got responses from all of them and they were all happy to have us and very helpful and welcoming, but the one in Montpellier seemed to have a better mix of people, i.e. not just old people, some families and stuff. So I went into the trip thinking "I hope Montpellier wins and that we can afford to live there."

We liked Carcassonne, and then we liked Narbonne even more, but all the time I was hoping Montpellier would be amazing. We weren't the on a Sunday unfortunately to go to the church, but I did go to a ladies thing at the church, which was food, chatting, a bit of Bible study led by a really nice American lady. I met women from all over the world, a lot from French speaking Africa, some American, some other Europeans and one other Brit. There was a good age range and they were all really lovely and welcoming. So I would really love to be part of that community, but there are two major things in the way:

1) It is quite expensive to live there. The problem with Liverpool being so cheap is that everywhere else seems expensive. So we could probably only afford a 2 bed apartment, or that kind of thing.

2) I don't love the city that much. It was fine, there were lots of nice things about it (like I love the trams). There was nothing wrong with it, but I just got a better feeling about Narbonne. 

It's really hard not to be influenced by the weather though, it was 19 degrees and sunny in Narbonne and I swam in the sea! Whereas in Montpellier it was grey and rainy.

So our next steps are to look into the towns near by Montpellier. Is there somewhere we could live quite near the city, that is more affordable? Then maybe we can get a bit of outdoor space and still be a part of Montpellier international church. That's the next thing we will research. Nothing's decided, we might completely go back to the drawing board and look at another city that we previously discounted for being a bit far north, for example, but that's where we're up to. Thanks for reading.