Life and Laughing_ My Story - Michael McIntyre [113]
Nothing did. The gig was tough, but I did enough. The next day I was asked to come into the office for a meeting with Danny and Joe. They asked me what I wanted, and I told them I wanted to work every single night, play the Comedy Store and stop doing Jongleurs as soon as it was financially viable.
‘That’s easy. No problem, we book hundreds of gigs. You can headline them all,’ Danny said.
‘You’ll have too many, Michael, you’ll regret asking to work so much,’ Joe added.
‘I’ve got a lot of catching up to do,’ I said.
Danny explained to me how things worked at the agency. ‘I’ll look after you on a day-to-day basis. I’d be your agent. But if you get some television work, that’s when Addison will step in. He’s incredible at all that.’
Addison is the infamous Addison Cresswell, the cigar-smoking, fast-talking, most powerful agent in the business, who brokered Jonathan Ross’s mega-deal at the BBC. Everybody has a story about Addison Cresswell, he’s one of life’s characters and I knew he held the key to my future.
‘Is Addison going to come and see me?’ I asked.
‘Not for a while, mate, let’s get you up and running first,’ said Danny.
I left the meeting feeling reborn as a comedian. I couldn’t wait to get started. I also had something to aim for: impressing Addison Cresswell. Even though I had never met him, I had a feeling that if Addison got behind me, my debts would be history.
The transformation in my life was instant. Two days later, I had a tryout at the Comedy Store. It was the first time I had been back in six years. I had the gig that I had dreamed of having and was immediately booked in for weekends. Compared to a weekend at Jongleurs, a weekend at the Comedy Store is paradise. You have a gig on Thursday, then two on Friday and Saturday as there is an early show and a late show. Plus you get paid about a grand in cash. The club was such a pleasure to play that even with my debts, I would have done it for nothing.
Danny was true to his word, and I started gigging every night of the week, developing material and chipping away at my debt. It was like a whole new world. Rather than playing to pissed partygoers, I was performing in arts centres and small theatres to people who were there primarily for the comedy. I also started to gig abroad, going to Dubai, Tokyo and Hong Kong. I kept staring at my diary in disbelief. I was booked to appear on the Comedy Store TV series broadcast on the cable channel Paramount. The gig went so well they gave me a Comedy Store Special, a half-hour of my own. The turnaround was so satisfying. Gigging so much had exactly the effect I hoped it would; my material, inspired by my life, was getting sharper. I was getting better:
My baby was overdue. People kept telling us the best ways to induce labour. Apparently it’s to have sex and eat curry. There are no prizes for guessing who may have come up with that theory. Men are sitting in pubs saying, ‘I can’t believe we got away with that! I’ve had sex and curry all week, last night I had a curry on her back whilst we were having sex.’ Of course we tried it, until we were thrown out of the Raj King in Muswell Hill.
My mad drive to succeed took its toll on my young family. Home life was difficult, squashed into our one-bedroom flat. Kitty was totally exhausted as Lucas wasn’t sleeping, and I wasn’t there to help. It’s amazing how you create life, and then immediately hope it goes back to sleep. I had wasted so much time over the last few years that I had to seize this opportunity for our future. Although it was difficult, there were signs almost every day that things were moving in the right direction.
The plan, of course, was to go back to the Edinburgh Festival.
Off The Kerb booked me in for the Edinburgh Festival at an eighty-seater venue at the Pleasance. Kitty and Lucas went to France to stay with my mum, and I went to Edinburgh