Life and Laughing_ My Story - Michael McIntyre [107]
My agent, Paul Duddridge, still believed in me. He was bankrolling the Edinburgh Festival, so it was to him that I would be in debt. He continued to try to motivate me. Every time we spoke I would feel uplifted afterwards, but it didn’t seem to ever make me funnier. He again booked me into the Pleasance Attic, reflecting how my career had gone nowhere over the past year. The good news was that the Perrier panel was to be chaired by Bruce Dessau, the Evening Standard critic who had championed me the previous year. Bruce was my biggest fan, my only fan of influence. He’ll make sure the panel come to see my show; he’ll support me. It’s up to me now.
I was a man on a mission. I was again living with Paul Tonkinson, who had become my comedy corner man. We would talk endlessly about how to get the best out of me. My plan was to play with the audience every night. I would use my mediocre material as fall-back if my riffing and improvising didn’t work. If I could have gigs every night like the one that Bruce Dessau witnessed the year before, I was convinced I would be nominated. I had to be.
I hit the ground running. On my first gig there was a man with long hair and a long beard sitting in the front row. ‘You’ve been waiting long,’ I said, and I was off. For the first week all my shows were different, dictated by who was in the audience. I was on good form. The problem was that as the Festival went on, I started to feel the pressure. I began to worry about whether there were Perrier judges or critics in the audience. I started to become inhibited. The Festival is long and gruelling, performing twenty-five shows back-to-back without a night off. My anxiety heightened on a daily basis as I knew these were the most important gigs of my life. I started to worry myself sick.
In addition to the usual stress-related illnesses like headaches and sore throats, my body started to fail me in ways it never had before. I came out in a rash all over my body, I had blurred vision and got pins and needles in my face. In my face? Has that ever happened to anyone before, ever? I woke up one morning and couldn’t hear out of my ear. Christine Hamilton (from I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!) and her husband Neil (shamed politician) were doing a daytime chat show called ‘Lunch with the Hamiltons’ at the Festival. I was booked to appear on it to help publicize my show to the audience of about 300. I rushed to the doctor’s surgery in Edinburgh and said, ‘You’ve got to help me, I can’t hear out of one ear and I’ve got lunch with the Hamiltons in an hour.’
To which the doctor said, ‘Would you like me to block the other ear?’
I, of course, took that story and put it straight into my show. I expected it to get a bigger laugh before remembering my hearing was down 50 per cent. I was falling apart. Halfway through the Festival, Kitty came up to be with me for the remainder. She took control and stuffed me with vitamins and emotional support. It’s just such a strange life, every day there was one hour that was vitally important to me. The rest of the day, I was preparing for that one hour. As soon as the show was over, I would go to sleep, wake up and have to do it all over again. It was like Groundhog Day.
Despite not coping very well physically with the pressure, my shows weren’t suffering too much. I felt I was on track, improvising more than doing material. I got a review in the Independent that read:
Michael McIntyre generates most of his material by chatting to members of the audience. As confident as he is quick-witted, McIntyre is a boyish, likeable chap who improvises as effortlessly as Eddie Izzard and Ross Noble except with an additional knack for characters and accents. No comedian makes his job look easier.
This was exactly the reaction I wanted. Most comedians at the Festival had structured