Can't Stand Up for Sitting Down by Jo Brand Read Free Book Online

Hall and related this event to the audience, asking
them, ‘How do you know?’
    A voice
floated back across the crowd, ‘We just do.’
     
    Bromsgrove
    Bromsgrove is a little
town lying just outside Birmingham. I came out of the dressing room to stand
outside on the pavement just as three police cars, sirens blaring, swept up. I
immediately, of course, thought they were after me. They weren’t. One of the
theatre staff had laid into a female relative outside the stage door. A very
surreal night indeed.
     
    Cambridge
    Oooh, posh as you like in
Cambridge, comrades. Tried to get the audience to guess what my ‘wife leader’
was. (It’s a woven stick with an elasticated end to attach to your wife’s
finger and lead her round by, used in the Caribbean 300 years ago.) Fantastic
woman in front row threw out the suggestion, ‘Is it a cassava juice extractor?’
Blimey, what sort of kitchen shops do you have in Cambridge?
     
    Cheltenham
    Cheltenham is dead posh,
no doubt about that. Performing at the Town Hall is like being in a museum,
surrounded as you are by marble busts of various luminaries, giving the whole
thing a bit of an historical feel. This doesn’t mean that the audience are
staid and stuffy, even though they look it a bit, and any trawl I have done
through the local papers there has always been good fun, obsessed as they seem
to be with parking and dog poo. Oh, the great British sensibilities — you can’t
beat ‘em!
     
    Derby
    Derby seems to me like a
bit of a scary old town. The gigs I have done there have always been good,
apart from having a bomb-scare at one all-women’s gig from a disgruntled male
punter. However, there is a street in Derby which is full of pubs and clubs,
all the doors fiercely guarded by bloody massive bouncers in dicky bows and
evening jackets. (Always seems so weird to me that they are dressed up posh yet
ready to punch your lights out.) After a show one night we went down this
particular street to have a Chinese, and just walking down it terrified the
life out of me. I take my hat off to anyone who is brave enough to actually go
and have a whole night out there.
     
    Hastings
    My home town, where I grew
up as a teenager. Always a pleasure to be there, despite receiving a letter in
the dressing room once, saying:
     
    Dear Miss Brand,
    Please do not come back to Hastings again.
    Yours faithfully etc etc.
     
    I
recently did a benefit for my nephew’s football changing hut which had been
burned down, and took the piss out of a bloke’s hair in the second row, without
realising it was my brother’s mother-in-law’s bloke.
    Note to
self: wear glasses on stage.
     
    Ipswich and Norwich
    I have put these two
cities together, not because they are particularly similar but because they
suffer the misfortune of being in an area of the country which, for comedy
reasons, is full of interbred people and very flat, and therefore the
inhabitants doubtless are regaled endlessly with jokes about cousins marrying,
fingers in dykes and being able to see your friends standing fifty miles away
Consequently, I steered well clear of this when I was up there. They didn’t
seem particularly grateful though.
     
    Leicester
    By the time we hit the
brand new pristine council venue in Leicester, the smoking ban had kicked in
big time and there were signs everywhere demanding No Smoking throughout
the venue. It was in Leicester that we experimented with the idea of putting a
condom over the smoke alarm. Worked a treat.
     
    Maidstone
    Maidstone, sorry, you had
the worst toilets of any theatre 1 have ever been to, and the dressing room
wasn’t much better. It seemed rather fitting then that I forgot my smart shoes
and had to wear flip-flops on stage instead.
     
    Manchester
    I’ve performed in
Manchester loads of times. The audiences there tend to be cynical, clever and
discerning. I made a huge faux pas at the Free Trade Hall once, which
interestingly was the scene of Bob Dylan’s metamorphosis