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town need not
detain you. I’m sure the people of Bedford are mighty impressed by that.
    My
favourite night at Bedford involved the sound and lighting man being quite
pissed and falling over onto his desk, cutting the sound and lights at the same
time. It was a real Carrie moment and I was expecting a bucket of blood
on my head at any second. As well as this, a woman in the audience asked me to
sign one of her bosoms: something that has never happened before or indeed
since. She informed me that she wanted to show it to her husband.
    ‘Where’s
he tonight then?’ I asked.
    ‘In the
nick,’ came her reply.
     
    Birmingham
    Birmingham is always a joy
People are friendly welcoming and happy to see you. It’s always lovely to get a
really big cheer when you come on, with no holds barred. Many towns and cities
withhold their initial reaction until they’ve had a look at the goods.
    Birmingham
is also under the jurisdiction of King Jasper Carrott who, every year, does a
huge show at the NEC (12,000 seats — ooer!) There is normally a cavalcade of
interesting stars and I worked with Jack Dee, Dame Edna, Manfred Mann and some
sweeties off The X Factor. Someone attempted a rather over-intimate
massage to relax me before the show (he was actually a professional masseur),
and I left the massage area as soon as was humanly possible.
     
    Brighton
    Vibrant, cool and good
fun. The Dome in Brighton is the only time a rather disturbed punter found
their way back stage and demanded to be put on the show to do five minutes.
Typically, John the tour manager was right over the other side of the building,
but I managed to phone someone called Joe from Off the Kerb and leave a
message. Atypically, Joe called me back just at a critical moment when this
bloke’s face was about an inch away from mine. Not only that, he’d obviously
not realised quite how disturbed this guy was and was laughing uproariously at
the end of the phone, saying, ‘Shall we give him five minutes? Do you think
he’s any good?’ I was terrified that the intruder would hear what he was saying
and deck me, but thankfully, at that moment John appeared behind me and our
friend was ‘escorted from the premises’, as the euphemism goes.
    A
slightly more pleasant experience involved Sir Ian McKellen, with whom I took
part in a benefit at the Dome. I was sitting at the mirror in the dressing room
back-combing my hair to produce The Bride of Frankenstein look, which I loved
in the eighties, and Sir Ian went past. Spotting me doing my hair, he said,
‘Ooh, can I do that?’
    And he
did — the one and only time I’ve ever had an acting legend sort my hair out for
me.
     
    Bristol
    I love Bristol. One of my
first big gigs was in a venue called the Bierkeller, which was obviously a
music venue. The dressing room contained one of those wrecked, scuzzy settees I
have already mentioned, and the stage was carpeted and looked well manky. It
was. When I stepped on it my feet stuck to it as if they had been glued and
each step towards the mic was accompanied by a tearing sound as I tried to lift
my foot off the carpet. The audience was enthusiastic and drunk.
    You can
tell how long ago it was because I had some material about the Chippendales,
the delightful male dancers/strippers who were flavour of the month back in the
early nineties. As I progressed through my little five-minute routine on the Chippendales,
a voice heckled from the back in a perfect West Country accent:
    ‘They’re
all queer, they are.’ Well, there were still a few steadfast pockets of
homophobia round the country.
    ‘How do
you know that?’ I asked.
    The
reply came, again in that gorgeous accent. ‘I ‘eard it down the Colston ‘All.’
    The
Colston Hall was a venue a little distance away that was bigger and I hadn’t
quite progressed to it by that point. But I was interested in the fact that it
seemed to be the fount of all knowledge on sexuality Years later, I actually
made it to the Colston