In some ways, a comedy tour resembles a giant pub crawl masquerading as a job. When I was deciding how to pay the bills in my early twenties, there was something very appealing about a job that allowed you to get up whenever you liked, turn up to a club in the evening to do 20 minutes’ work and then be offered free drinks afterwards. And in many ways, that’s still what I do, it’s just that the 20 minutes has become two hours, and the clubs have become theatres and the free drinks are usually still available but only for half an hour after the show ends, at which point you’re politely asked to leave the dressing room as they are closing the building.
A lot of the theatres I play round the country were built in Victorian times and there is always a little pub round the corner where it’s possible to meet friends either before or after the show. After 20 years of touring round Britain, it’s been fun discovering the most atmospheric alehouses in the country – which are full of surprises.
One of my favourite venues on tour is the Apex in Bury St Edmunds as the crowd always seem to be bang up for it – and just round the corner is the holder of the Guinness World Record for Britain’s smallest pub, The Nutshell, which is just 15ft by 7ft. But this presented obvious problems with social distancing restrictions during Covid, as you would only have been able get a couple of people inside and one of those would have had to serve the drink.
