From The Times, Saturday May 28, 1994

THE THINGS I DO for this paper. I have been made to walk over the Alps with Ian Botham, sent for a holiday in the Falkland Islands, and dispatched, entirely alone, for tea with Barbara Cartland. And I have had many of the routine traumas that we all share: I have been born, lost my virginity, witnessed birth, and so on. But I have never, repeat never, experienced a terror so cold, complete and disabling as the one that claimed me when I embarked on my career as a stand-up comic. The fear looks set to last a lifetime, which does seem a little hard as the career itself lasted just five minutes.

I can explain everything, but you will have to be patient as I am in shock. Perhaps I can take questions at the end, if you are still here. It was all a matter of writing something about the Comedy Store as it moved to a new home in Piccadilly Circus after a decade of hosting the cream, and curdled milk, of the alternative circuit.

Certainly I could have spared all of us, including you, the embarrassment of this article by describing the travails of the famous: the difficult early days of French and Saunders, the rise of Ben Elton and Rik Mayall, the returns to the public guest spot, week after week, by Jack Dee. Except that you have probably read all that, just as I have probably written it. No, there had to be another, more interactive, way of approaching the subject, and this other way, it turned out, was to be me. The Americans, in their yucky eloquence, say you have to walk the walk before you can talk the talk. Point taken.

The Comedy Store has these "Open Mike" spots every Thursday. Two of them in the course of the evening, each one lasting five minutes, which is a remarkably short time if you are going down well, and a remarkably long one if you are not. If you die on stage, it is, of course, an eternity. And since the fatality rate is shockingly high, there is an awful lot of eternity about. It is the club's savage boast that only 2 per cent of open-mikers clear the hurdle of audience approval, a figure which makes the tail-gunner's job span look as secure as an undertaker's. Now, while it is true that some well-known comics have taken off from this spot, an infinite roll of unknowns have pranged while still taxiing.

Why me? Funny you should ask that, because I was wondering the same thing as I offered myself up for the ordeal. I blame two things in equal measure: the self-destructive urge and peer-group pressure. The first means that you are oddly drawn to a session of public humiliation; the second means that even if you think better of the idea, you have not a hope of getting out of it.

The open spot is strewn with the corpses of fifth-rate pub raconteurs and office clowns who are told by their supporters that they could "knock spots off that fat git on the box". Oh, and what ghastly deaths they die, long and visible deaths like flies on a spider's web or failed escapers on the razor wire, when they twig that the funny voice which so slayed Terry from marketing on Friday night in the Cross Keys is now causing nothing but an embarrassed silence from the punters.

The only thing I can say in my defence is that I have never had any wish to be a stand-up comic, and this is even truer now than when I accepted the invitation to have a go. I believe that people who are good at it are in their own way as skilled as diplomats, poets, concert oboists or transplant surgeons. Almost any performance artist, however experienced, will blench at the mere thought of what it entails. I have seen actors turn white and make Scottish Play horror-faces at the suggestion that they could "turn their hand" to stand-up.

Once, in a northern club, I saw a terrifically buoyant young man on stage, making what he thought was an effortless career move from repping in hair-care products to being a comic. I saw his dreams falling, almost physically, like tinsel from a tree, his entire future being murdered in its infancy as a ten-minute description of going to the lavatory failed to generate interest and the grave of silence yawned at his feet. You can only marvel that there are so many eager volunteers to play the quarry in what is often a barely disguised bloodsport. You slay them or you die. The violence of it.

SO ANYWAY, THERE I WAS, at this house in Finsbury Park, the day before I was due to do my five minutes at the Store. I was there to meet a delightful man called Kim Kinnie, who runs the club. He seemed genuinely keen that I should succeed and he wanted to know, quite reasonably, what my act was going to consist of. As you must know, everyone writes their own stuff these days, and I was to be no exception. Except that I didn't have any material. Well, not as such.

The trouble was and here we are approaching the nature of the terror that the more I tried to think what I was going to do and say when I got on stage, the more the task ran away from me. I would say it was like the pursuit of soap in the bath, except that I actively wanted it to elude me; addressing the question of the act's content was the next worse thing to be doing the act itself. So I put it off and put it off. Besides, if your best work is done under the pressure of time, well then why not create a really stiff deadline? You can sometimes do this with newspaper articles like this one, which are a kind of performance even though the performer and his audience are spared the business of personal contact. It seemed reasonable to transfer a skill from a familiar trade to a strange one.

And I prayed. That is to say, I asked very hard, in the direction of the sky, for something to come to me. With a couple of days to go, my sleeping and eating had started to go funny. I tried to focus on the day after the ordeal, rather than this diminishing patch of time before it. This was all very well, but it didn't solve the material problem.

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