That's Showbiz
I had my first gig back after lockdown last week and I had really missed the stage. Like most intelligent people, I got into stand-up for the glamour. I mean proper feather boas, getting exciting news from a ringing phone next to the stage surrounded by a gaggle of chorus girls, tap dancing for mama to save the farm, murdering my gangster boyfriend and getting my daughter to take the wrap, glamour.
Sadly, stand up rarely lives up to the razzle dazzle fantasy. Instead of Backstage Johnnys, fur coats and my name swooshing up marquee signs in swirling montages, it’s rooms above pubs, lonely muffins on trains and hoping your phone doesn't die before you find your venue.
Yet glamour is what my heart still yearned for. I read Shane Richie’s autobiography where he described an iconic moment in his career; arriving at a party in Blackpool at Cannon and Ball’s house on the arm of a Nolan sister in his early nineties pomp and my bones ached for this lost Camelot. The most exciting thing you’ll find backstage at most comedy clubs is finding out that the green room has crisps.
You know him as Alfie Moon, I know him as The Guvnor.
Over lockdown, devoid of gigs, glitter, and a reason to wear deodorant most days; I tried to find excitement where I could. I started singing lessons over Zoom.
My aim was to sound like one of those hotties from 90s R&B videos, who wore trouser suits and sang soaring angelic riffs while shimmying next to Will Smith. As a compromise I would settle for belting out power ballads or early Mariah. After a bit of debate with my vocal coach, some tears and a few laptops slammed shut, we compromised, and I accepted my vocal range was more raspy throated male country singer who’d fought in the Indian Wars. It didn’t help that I never learnt any of my song lyrics, always forgot to practice my scales and treated the sessions more like hour-long karaoke sessions I was paying a poor woman in Bristol to witness.
I discovered, that instead of Aliyah, my sweet spot was Johnny Cash murder ballads. For some reason, his later songs, where he sounded like he might have died mid track and he was just a ghost haunting the recording studio, sat well in my vocal range.
Me, two weeks into my Zoom singing lessons.
Since we live in a two-room flat and my boyfriend is still working from home, he was forced to invent a child his colleagues didn't know about, to excuse the scales warbling through his video calls. I don't know what they found most disturbing, the sudden appearance of a mysterious love child, that she was singing about shooting a man in Reno, just to watch him die or that she sounded like she was the Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
Glamour costs though, so to make sure that when gigs started again I was looking my Judy Garland early drug addiction best, I signed up for a session with a personal trainer. Midway through a tummy crunch and tears, that she made me do even though I told her, they don’t work on me because I WAS LITERALLY BORN WITH NO TUMMY MUSCLES, I looked into her eyes and asked if she thought I would ever be fit. She smiled at me, shook her head laughing and said “Of course, you’re so close!”
What? My heart soared. A window opened in my soul. Maybe all this time I had been wrong thinking I was incapable of getting fit. In one session she had spotted my potential. Maybe this was my new life: Gráinne the gym bunny, Gráinne the athlete, Gráinne the iron woman. “In my first session she spotted my X-factor” I’d say in interviews after the Olympics, as we stood in matching tracksuits, my gold medals glinting in the flashing bulbs. “Never give up on your dreams!” I’d say winking at the cameras, my rock-hard abs glistening in the morning sun, “My old PE teacher can suck on it.”
“I mean you live very close to the gym, so you have no excuses, right?”
Oh.
The next day I went with my boyfriend on our national park walking holiday. Not a great idea after your first session with a personal trainer since I now could not walk. My legs were like walking on hot burning strings of cooked spaghetti. I could only hobble painfully like Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz who was being sporadically electrocuted. Older people saw me slowly stumbling in the distance and mistook me for a great grandfather who had finally returned from The Great War.
My boyfriend was giving me no sympathy. I always wondered what would make this gentle soul snap: singing through his work calls like a banshee in the next room? Pooing on his bedroom floor? It turned out that giving myself a physical disability the day before a walking holiday and all because none of my jeans fit, was what did it.
Walking up any kind of hill felt like someone poking hot rods in my thighs, which considering we were in the Peak District, he found slightly irritating. I gave up trying to cross roads before the green man turned back red. One particularly concerned elderly lady offered to help me across the road - she seemed so concerned. “Were you in an accident?” she asked. I panicked - what could I say? “Oh no, this is completely self-inflicted because I think warm downs are a myth?” I heard myself say “No. I had Covid earlier this year.” Now, this is technically true. Then Mehul glared and shook his head and I whispered under my breath “He’s a Covid denier.”
The only way I could make it across any road was to painfully slowly side shuffle like a geriatric crab in wide arches as if literally tracing OS map contour lines. This created the optical illusion where I seemed to be not just moving slowly, but backwards, all at the dreamlike speed of a prestige US drama.
After finally making across the road…
Thank god we had my showbiz Jerusalem to head to next. Goodbye boring mountains and lakes - Hello Blackpool!
We were in town to see the king of old school comedy showbiz himself: Bobby Davro. Barry from EastEnders was hosting. Yes please! The first act was a comedy acrobatic performance that was like something beamed in from the Soviet Union. Then Bobby walked on stage singing. The place erupted. He did an extended ten-minute routine imagining Ozzy Osbourne on The Weakest Link. He did impressions of “trendy young comedians you see on TV nowadays” that puzzlingly included Michael McIntyre and, of course, Robin Williams. He recited an emotional poem on the importance of laughter, before finishing on a rendition of “Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me” where he sang both the George Michael, and the Elton John parts. We were losing our goddam minds. This was entertainment. Maybe it was the painkillers I was on, maybe it was 14 months in lockdown or maybe we had just witnessed the greatest show of all time.
Reader I gave him a standing ovation - showbiz had cured my broken limbs.
So, at my first gig back, I knew what to do. Yes, it was a gig in Camden, not The Winter Gardens, and yes, there were twelve people in, and no, I don’t think the majority had English as a first language, but they were getting a SHOW tonight.
“Hi, my name is Grainne Maguire - are you ready for a great night of fun, excitement and comedy?”
“OK! Let's start clapping! Here’s a song that goes a little like this!”
“I hurt myself today,
To see if I still feel,
I focus on the pain,
The only thing that's real.”
Live comedy is BACK.