Life and Laughing_ My Story - Michael McIntyre [103]
‘On the nineteenth? I don’t think so, they’re seeing Gina.’
‘No, on another date,’ I suggested, losing any remaining hope that she could do her job.
‘Great idea, I’ll see what I can do.’
The Festival was leaving me behind. All the other shows seemed to have photocopies of reviews pasted on top of their posters that were all around the city. ‘5 Star, The Times. 4 Star, the Guardian’. My posters only featured my hopeful smiling face.
I started doing impressions of how bad my PR girl was in my show. I would pretend to call her and she would pick up the phone shouting, ‘Four star!’
‘Really? I got a review?’ I would excitedly respond.
‘Oh, no, sorry,’ she would say, ‘I’m in the petrol station. Who’s calling?’
I would pretend to call her another time. ‘Three star!’ she would say, picking up the phone.
‘That’s not so bad. At least I got a review,’ I would reply.
‘What? Sorry, love, I’m just booking a B&B. Who is this?’
And I would end the joke with her picking up the phone saying, ‘One star!’
‘Hello, it’s Michael calling.’
‘I know, love, you got a review today in The Times.’
This may have been funny, but making jokes about how badly my Festival was going to about ten people in an attic was not ideal. Then things took a turn for the worse. I had a show where I sold the grand total of zero tickets, nil, zilch, none whatsoever. It was as if I wasn’t at the Edinburgh Festival at all. Other shows had queues of people snaking all around the Pleasance Courtyard, and not one person wanted to see my show. I headed down to my venue in the hope that somebody might show up, but nobody did. I had never felt like more of a loser. I hung out with the technicians who worked at my tiny venue and tried to make light of the situation, but they seemed genuinely sorry for me. I went back to the flat despondent, deflated and defeated.
Peter Kay’s stand-up show was on Channel 4 that night, and I lay on the sofa watching it while my flatmate Paul was performing his show to a packed crowd. Peter Kay was incredible, so funny, his huge loving audience wiping away tears of laughter. Peter Kay had entered ‘So You Think You’re Funny?’ in 1997 and won the whole competition with one of his first gigs. The following year, he had gone to the Edinburgh Festival and been nominated for the Perrier Award. I didn’t get anywhere near winning ‘So You Think You’re Funny?’ and here I was in Edinburgh with no audience. Our lives were worlds apart. I thought I was wasting my time, I didn’t stand a chance.
I could find comedy in most things, but this wasn’t funny. Paul tried to make me feel better but I could tell he hadn’t expected me to struggle so much to get an audience. He had been to the Festival several times before and had never heard of anyone not selling a single ticket.
Kitty came up to see me the next day, and I sat with her in Starbucks and burst into tears. I had reached rock bottom. We were sitting by the window facing the pedestrianized Royal Mile that was packed with people handing out fliers for their shows. Not just comedians but magicians, dancers, singers and theatre groups all dressed up in their stage costumes. As I sobbed into my latte, I said, ‘It can’t get any worse.’
To which Kitty replied, ‘There’s always someone worse off.’
‘Who?’ I questioned.
‘Him,’ she said, pointing out of the window at a man wearing only a nappy, handing out leaflets for his show with his head sticking out of a toilet seat. She was right. It’s a jungle in Edinburgh, everybody’s trying to make it, to get noticed. I had two weeks left. It was Saturday night, the busiest night of the week, and that night I had sold about forty tickets, enough to put on a show.
I had nothing more to lose. I bought a double Jack Daniels before the show and looked out of the window in the tiny room adjacent to my Attic venue that I used as a dressing room. I could see Arthur’s Seat glowing in the last light of the day. I hadn’t thought about my history with the city thus far, I had been so consumed with the pressure of my show.