HOWZAT

"What were you thinking of doing?" asked Kinnie. I explained that I had a few old imitations of public figures and that I was considering running them together in a kind of amalgam and thereby creating a "new man" formed of old parts. He nodded. I added that I could do Ted Heath speaking French, and that this sometimes went down quite well in restaurants. As I explained all this, I felt unusual things happening to my pulse, and a film of sweat forming on my inside leg. In 24 hours I would not be talking about my plans, or thinking about them, but enacting them in front of a live audience with murder in its heart. Even now, when I think about any of it, or all of it, I can almost hear my own stomach screaming up in shame and derision.

"Anything else?" said Kinnie.

"Not really, no."

He nodded again, much more in sympathy than contempt. "Do you do other people?"

I replied that I had occasionally tried to do people I worked with.

"Would I know any of these?" he asked.

"I don't think so."

There was a pause, and then he said with great conviction: "I think the really important thing is to grab them hard right from the start and let them know who's boss. There's nothing they hate more than someone who doesn't seem to be in control. The other thing is, they can smell fear just like that."

I heard his words, but there was only one piece of information staying in my head: 98 per cent death rate.

Anxiety neurosis (the expensive name for stage fright) is a terrible condition. It paralyses the very parts which the performer most needs in order to function, and it can strike the pianist on the platform, the actor on the stage, the golfer at the tee, the lover in the bedroom. What is worse, the stakes don't need to be high in order for you to suffer from it. That is to say: one can understand why Bernhard Langer should get a fit of the yips, as golfers call it, since his livelihood depends on the sinking of golf balls. But so what if I fail or rather when I fail to raise a titter and get booed off for trying?

Comedians say it is a commonplace, but still debilitating, menace of their game. Funny people as eminent as Mike Yarwood have been tormented by it. Even Laurence Olivier had it after 40 years on the stage. Psychiatrists say it has to do with a deep, undealt-with fear of exposure and inadequacy. They cite patients who in their nightmares are naked and deformed before their public. One of them recalls being a victim himself, while giving a paper at an international seminar. The subject of the paper happens to have been anxiety neurosis, but he does not seem to find this funny. Personally, I think that's a belter of a joke.

Sometimes it is treated by a clinical construction of the scenario you most dread, followed by a discussion of how it was for you. In other words: for some reason you can't stand the thought of having to sing Schubert lieder, in thermal underwear, in front of your (German) aunt, your grown-up children and your former husband's accountant. Very well then, we shall convene a group in which members assemble before you and enact these parts; and here is the sheet music of Erlkonig. Your Damart garments are laid out on the bed.

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