Why I Gave Up Stand Up Comedy - And Why I Miss It: A Lament, Part 1.

So I had a bit of a falling out with my agent a few months ago, and it seemed as good a moment as any to draw the line under my reasonably-successful-but-never-quite-took-off stand up career. With a little bit of distance from that decision, I thought I'd write some blogs about how and why I got into stand up, the peaks and troughs, the triumphs and disasters.

Here's how I started. I was a businessman and former lawyer who was looking for new experiences to spice things up. This was pre-children when I didn't know any better. So, thinking I was every bit as funny as the comedians I trudged up to watch every year at the Edinburgh Festival, I decided to give it a shot. There was no career plan, no intention of pursuing it; it was just something to tell the grandchildren. 'Yeah, granddad did stand up once. Impressed? Kids? I say, granddad, did...kids? Come on, turn that off...' So I put together 15 minutes of cripplingly unfunny material, turned up at the King's Head in Crouch End in December 1992 and was told to do 5 minutes (along with the other 21 open mic hopefuls). Imagine. A bloke with only one barmitzvah and one wedding speech under his belt suddenly having to edit on the fly. Fuck.

Naturally, I did my best joke first: 'As this is my first ever stand up performance, I thought I'd tell you something about myself. I started life (comic pause) as a sperm...' Tumbleweed. And on I ploughed, hoping a hole would open up and suck me all the way to Hades. In desperation and with no dignity left to lose, I threw a couple of impressions in (the only two I could do) - Sean Connery and Frank Bruno - and got a titter. An impressionist! Ah, that's what I am. Who knew? Well actually I was mimic, the kid who did the teachers at school, a bloke who could do a voice or two, some accents, that sort of thing.

I couldn't let it end on such a sour note, and if I could do two, surely I could do ten. So off I went to learn some more voices. Three months later, Comedy Cafe Open Mic night - only won, didn't I? Beat some bloke called Tim Vine into second place. The prize? A paid gig the following night. I had no material, but I could do Chris Eubank. I got some laughs. Suddenly, I was inspired. My sixth gig was the heat for the Hackney Empire New Act of the Year competition, my ninth, the final alongside Ronni Ancona (who won), Ben Miller and Tim Vine (him again). It was the key to the door, long before I was ready to go through it. Bookers booked me, Jongleurs fast-tracked me, national radio slots followed, I was on TV by August 1993; and I started making inroads into commercial and documentary voiceovers, cartoons, video games.

Bonkers. All because I could sound a bit like other people. I had no jokes to speak of, but people loved the voices and eventually my script caught up. I was soon playing at great venues and shitholes alike. One weekend The Comedy Store, the next, the Flatulent Pig in Stow-on-the-Wold. Corporate gigs followed, as did presenting gigs, bits of TV, voiceovers. It was all fun then. I didn't do it for the money, mainly because - corporates and voiceovers aside - there wasn't much to speak of; it was for the joy of doing it, making people laugh, the power...ahahahahahaha! Meanwhile I was still running my business, having kids, paying my mortgage, the whole schmeer, so I could only gig at weekends and I turned down God knows how many opportunities because of work commitments, including a TV series that helped make someone else famous. Drove my agent mad. Even so, I somehow managed to squeeze in a few solo shows at Edinburgh, plus a sketch show which became a Radio 4 series; I was a Radio 5 Live regular, with my own Christmas show and a gig as lead impressionist on another; I gigged alongside many of today's household names; I did bits of TV (100 Greatest All-Sorts-Of-Shit, The Stand Up Show, Celebri...cough, ahem, sorry...Celebrity Squares...there, now you know). I wrote all sorts of stuff for radio, had various sitcom scripts and pitches seriously considered by the BBC, got invited to a BBC residential scriptwriters' week, the works. I was nearly - nearly - in.

But I never quite committed. It was never my career. I didn't need to be on stage. It wasn't my drug. I had other things to think about - my business interests in recruitment and property, my family, my desire to write books (a whole other story). I retired from stand up a few times, went through various agents (nearly all shit), made comebacks...the truth was, though, that I didn't need it badly enough; I'd already built a life and a steady income before I started in showbiz and without the burning passion, the hunger or, indeed, the time, I was never going to crack it, never gain the necessary momentum.

In part 2, I'll lift the lid on my fellow stand ups, describe some of the shit gigs, maybe some other stuff. Are you listening...anyone?..anyone? Kids?

On Being Deaf

Confession. I'm not actually deaf. I can function like most people, hear what I need to hear and rarely get caught out. If I had to put a figure on it, I'd say I'm about 70% deaf. My right ear is completely useless; that's 50% right there. If I bash it with a saucepan or stick the radio on it at full volume, it can pick up some sounds, but I'm essentially reliant on my left ear - the remaining 30%, if my maths isn't awry - which was failing long before my right packed in.

I'd had a problem with tinnitus about 10 years ago. This condition, as most people know, is characterised by an incessant variety of blips, cracks and ringing sounds which can deprive beleaguered victims of sleep and sanity. The causes are disputed, but my specialist told me that when your hearing starts to fail, your body starts 'reaching' for sound - something to do with an atavistic self-preservation instinct; we need to hear if we're being chased/stalked/about to be attacked, an essential skill if you insist on going to Arsenal wearing a Spurs shirt, for example - and instead starts picking up the many and various electrical sounds your body makes which we normally screen out. The solutions include listening to other sounds, especially at night, so that the body focuses on them rather than the tinnitus, and improving your hearing by using hearing aids. I tried everything, but couldn't get on with hearing aids - frankly, I wasn't prepared to accept that I needed them at my relatively young age - and eventually learned to screen the maddening noises out by sheer force of will.

Then, about 6 years ago, my right ear - my better ear at that time - closed for business. One minute I could hear, the next I was deaf. Sudden deafness, it's called, and nobody knows what causes it. Theories range from bangs on the head to viruses. My GP thought it was an ear infection and gave me some drops. Panicked when the hearing didn't improve, I went to see another GP at the practice who prescribed different drops. Valuable time was being lost but I didn't know it. The condition can be ameliorated - partially or fully - provided you act fast. Nearly a week after the hearing failed, I saw a specialist who put me on steroids and, thankfully, my hearing returned. It wasn't as clear or mellow as before, but I'd have settled for it. But, after two years of the hearing coming and going, it finally went, leaving me to stumble on with only a dodgy left ear.

The problem for those with unilateral hearing loss is that you can't tell where sound is coming from. As far as I'm concerned, it's all coming from my left, which can be a problem when I'm crossing the road or trying to deal with a heckler in a comedy club (I'm a stand-up, in case you didn't know). On one occasion in a God-forsaken club in Preston, I lashed out at a woman who was utterly blameless. Poor love. Sorry again, by the way.

But deafness is no joke. I suppose I will have next to no hearing by the time I'm 70 and that's a scary prospect. At the moment, hearing aids help a bit (I use a CROS system which means noise on my right side is transferred to my left hearing aid). They help me hear films and the telly, and I can use them in social situations albeit, with all the noise clattering into one ear, it can be difficult to pick up conversation. This can be a blessing, of course, enabling me to screen crashing bores out if I need to. There are other advantages. Cocking a deaf'n becomes easier to justify. My wife yelling something from three floors up can be safely ignored; my kids asking where my wallet is, likewise. Well I can't bloody hear, can I? But it's a bastard most of the time. As mentioned, doing stand-up as a partially deaf man can be hazardous; trying to pick up people speaking in hushed tones - as they often do in the studios where I do voice overs - leaving me craning and guessing how to respond; in shops when they ask me for ten pounds and I hand them a fiver (nothing to do with the deafness, that). Many's the time I've nodded when I should have shaken my head, or gone off at some irrelevant tangent, leaving my inquisitors utterly baffled. I find myself concentrating intently on people's lips, which helps make sense of some of the sounds I'm missing, but probably makes them think I'm being a bit weird.

Most of the time I don't wear my aids. Luckily, I work alone in coffee bars during the day - most of the time - and don't need them. Yet, miraculously, I can still hear American teenage girls talking, like, shit? five tables away as if they're bellowing in my ear. And I can always hear annoying three year olds running wild while their parents assume everyone finds their offspring as charming as they do. That kind of shit is audible. It's the finer points of hearing I miss out on. The sharply delivered quip, the whispered response, the tones and shades of good music. Hopeless.

The only thing I can hear in my right ear is that Jumbo jet taking off 24 hours a day. Yes, deaf as a doornail, but lumbered with deafening tinnitus. Great, eh? There are innovations in the pipeline, and a cochlear implant might restore some of what I've lost, but I don't hold out much hope. Learning to live with it is probably the way forward.

http://amzn.to/xaosKp
@SimonLipson

On Writing My Book

I’d feel a bit pretentious if I declared that writing is in my blood or that it’s my consuming passion; I don’t have to write to live. I can survive on chocolate, if it comes to it. But it’s a marvellous means of expression, a wonderfully creative and fluid medium for the ideas that rattle around my head. Being a comedian and comedy writer (and ex-solicitor, but we don’t talk about that), I can express myself on stage or in a script, but both forms are necessarily limited by what audiences – who offer a very instant response - or terrified-for-their-jobs TV/radio producers demand. Novels, though, unfurl slowly; they allow you room to breathe, to lay things out, to establish rhythms, to colour every character in, right from the opening sentence. I suppose the people who read my book will tell me whether I’m doing it right but, so far at least, they seem to approve. 

I’m an avid reader – contemporary fiction with a humorous bent being my favourite genre – and I always felt I could ‘do’ a Nick Hornby or David Nicholls if I put my mind to it. Surely it couldn’t be that hard? Well, as I discovered, it is that hard. In the way that comedy is hard. I was always the quite amusing guy amongst my friends, the guy with the quick ripostes and funny voices, but I was a million miles from being a guy who could make a roomful of strangers laugh rather than throw something heavy at me. It took me a while – and the odd bruise - to bridge the gap between the two.

The dialogue in Song In The Wrong Key came fairly easily to me, but structure, story-lining, pacing, knowing when to cut out the distracting quips, avoiding the self-indulgence, were elements of the writing process I had to learn mostly through trial and error. Every time I thought I’d completed the definitive draft, another ‘quick’ read-through convinced me there was still work to do, cuts to make, bits to shift, commas to add. In truth, you can refine a draft ad infinitum, but at some point you have to say ‘that’s the one’ – it’s never an easy task to let go, like watching your child go off to university.

Song In The Wrong Key is my second book. My first, Losing It, was a psychological thriller based, loosely, on something that happened to me as a young man. I started it about 18 years ago, left the first 50 pages in a drawer for 10 years, then started again. At the time I’d been reading a lot of grim, gory thrillers and felt I had it in me to emulate the genre. It was a difficult process for me because the tone of the book is fairly po-faced...and I’m not! Even so, J K Rowling’s then agents took a shine to it and offered to represent me, provided I made some changes. Which I did, but not entirely to their liking. Stupidly, I refused to make more changes and nothing came of it. In a fit of pique, I published through Matador, sold 400 copies and forgot about writing for a few years.

It was about 4 years ago when I decided to write something more in keeping with my natural comedic bent. I’ve always been drawn to stories about nobodies suddenly rising to prominence and, having been a wannabe pop star myself, Song almost wrote itself. The first draft flowed – I’d say it took a couple of months to finish - and I took great joy in writing a story with which I connected personally and was predominantly a comedy. Needless to say, the first draft was over-written, lumpy, occasionally illogical and chronologically confusing. Writing – good writing - as I’ve already suggested, is bloody hard work. But it was something to work with and I think the ‘stream of consciousness’ approach brought out the best in me from a comedic perspective. Structure, character and story-sharpening came later. I particularly enjoyed getting my teeth into the breakdown of the protagonist’s family and the central love story, both of which, hopefully, will tug at the heart strings (I get a bit misty-eyed watching Love Actually, so you know where I’m coming from). Some readers have already owned up to shedding a few tears which, as someone whose principal aim is to make them laugh, is a huge compliment.

Like most writers, I drew from experience. As the father of two girls, Millie and Katia were easy to write (mine are called Molly and Katie – that’s imagination for you!). And there’s something of my own life story in the protagonist, Mike’s, obsession with the former love of his life (I’m over her now, darling). And it’s through Mike’s voice that I was able to express many of my own attitudes and ideas. Friends who have read the book tell me it’s like listening to me prattle on, grumble, grouch and attempt to amuse. Mike is a heightened version of me, as is the protagonist of my follow-up novel, Standing Up – about a solicitor who becomes a stand-up (where do I get my ideas?).

My aim is to stick with edgy romantic comedies for the foreseeable future. But I shan’t put the cart before the horse. If no-one buys Song In The Wrong Key, though, I can always revert to gory thrillers.  

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Song-The-Wrong-Key-ebook/dp/B00492CQ2K

William Boyd? Surely not.

I recently finished reading William Boyd's latest novel, Ordinary Thunderstorms. It took me forever because I kept abandoning it then picking it up again. I mean, surely it couldn't be that shit all the way through to the final page. Could it? Well, no. Somehow, it actually got shittier before disappearing up its own anus with a grim squelch. I had to check that this was the same William Boyd who wrote Restless and Armadillo. Tragically, it was.

I'm not Boyd's biggest fan, but have generally found him to be fairly readable, in a can't-find-anything-else-in-Luton-Airport-Smiths-and-the-plane's-about-to-leave kind of way. He can handle whimsy and more serious themes reasonably well, and there's a level of intelligence that marks him out as a reliable if not exactly must-read author. So what the fuck happened?

Ordinary Thunderstorms starts off with a ridiculous (and seen-it-all-before) premise - innocent man witnesses murder when he goes somewhere no sensible (or even stupid) human being would even think of venturing. He then - surprise, surprise - pulls the knife out of the victim (the only person in the western world who's never watched CSI or a million other police procedurals) and dithers about informing the police for reasons so inane I can no longer recall them. He then goes into hiding - in a tent on a grassy bank alongside the Thames, mind - and becomes feral, vicious and cunning. The guy's a respected meteorologist or something. Doesn't he have any better ideas than that? The casual murder he carries out is as incongruous and silly as the fey, dopey, facile affair he conducts with an investigating policewoman.

Sorry if I've ruined it for you but, trust me, I've saved you eight quid and days of ploughing through dung wondering whether it can possibly get any stinkier. Trust me, it does. Pathetic, implausible, lazy, idiotic, cretinous, moronic...and I haven't even opened my thesaurus yet.

And, once again, I mutter and curse at the injustice of it all. Maybe Boyd's track record enables (entitles?) him to get away with this travesty of literature, but how comes I can't get a publisher when crap like this (and by people like Erica Spindler - an illiterate - James Patterson (or any one of his minions), Tony Parsons - don't start me off - and thousands of others) gets onto our shelves? I wouldn't mind, but several agents and publishers have told me my stuff is 'great' and 'hilarious' and 'commercial' - but I'm still sitting here, baby.

Spleen vented. Feeling a bit better now. Should last at least 10 minutes.

Shit, now I've got to write something...

Seemed like a good idea, this blogging mullarky, but only in the abstract. Now I'm here, I'm not so sure. I've quite enjoyed setting up my account, entering all the info, picking the template et al, but I'm already straining for anything useful to say. Maybe a bit of background will do the trick.

Ex-solicitor, occasional businessman, stand-up comedian/impressionist, writer - aah, yes, that's why I'm here. Ok, in addition to material for my live work, I've written comedy for TV and radio for 12 years, mostly for shows in which I've also appeared. I've been in all sorts stuff - Dead Ringers, Week Ending, Loose Ends, Fordham & Lipson (yes, my own series on Radio 4 - went out at 11am - no-one noticed) and a host of pointless and long-forgotten TV shows (FIFA's 100 Greatest World Cup Goals (ITV4) anyone? Ok, what about Celebrity Squares?...now you're impressed).

I've also written a couple of novels and have my own literary agent (I mean, I share him, obviously, but you get the idea) albeit the only book of mine to hit the shelves so far (my bookcase at home is bending under the strain) was a self-published affair which bore testimony only to utter frustration with the publishing industry and a sudden bout of vanity. Before signing with my agent, another huge agency - they act for a rather successful female writer - was interested in this book but I rather stupidly got on my high horse when I should have revised my manuscript in complete accordance with their suggestions. They know what sells; I don't. Never mind artistic integrity. Lesson learned.

So now I'm plugging away at screenwriting. BBC Films are interested in a screenplay I submitted to them last year. It is taking forever, but I remain hopeful that they'll want to develop it. I'm now writing a sitcom (pilot and episode outlines) which I hope to submit in a few weeks' time. Not sure to whom yet.

There we are. Five paragraphs of nonsense which I'm sure no-one will ever read. But at least I feel virtuous.