Nick and I had an evening out. In fact, it was a just the two of us kind of day, with a romantic morning that had me feeling contented all day, a slow domestic afternoon (with an anxious wobble when Nina's train was late so that we couldn't set off on time), a meal out, and a Dave Gorman stand-up show.
The show was in High Wycombe. I've taken to being willing to drive for an hour or two to gigs. I find it makes it something of an occasion, and there's a sense of control in not waiting for the unlikely event of the world making a visit to Coventry. In many ways, going to High Wycombe (a straight run down the motorway if 1 hour 30mins, car park £1.50 next to the theatre) is easier than going to Birmingham (20 miles of urban traffic, hard to find car-park, feeling of threat on leaving squalid venue). Nick and I had a good talk on the way down, about work stuff and potential college stuff. Mundane, maybe, but important and somehow too easily avoided in day to day life. We had hoped to get there early enough to have a nice meal out, but having set off late ended up at McDonalds. We are nothing if not predictable. High Wycombe is a surprisingly pretty down to earth market town with a picturesque parish church at centre. Seemingly it is populated in the early evening by teenagers laughing and shoving each-other good naturedly, playing football. Their voices echo up and down the paved main street and around the narrowing network of back-streets.
We got to the Wycombe Swan to find the crowd that had gathered for a Queen tribute show (it may have been the Ben Elton We Will Rock You show, I'm not sure). It was a crowd of women with permed hair and men in sports coats. The youth of the 1970's are in later middle age and look incongruously conservative considering they were about to celebrate the work of a flamboyant tights-wearing, gay, parsis Indian with perfect coloratura. Hmm, you may need to Wiki that. It was a bit of a wobble for us, but closer examination of the tickets showed we needed to be at the Town Hall around the corner. I will remark that it is quite something that a tribute act was attracting a crowd over three times the size than the one for Dave Gorman, but also say that Dave is in his ascendancy, and next year, if he wants, he may be playing the big, big venues.
One of the joys of the gig was that it was the kind of crowd where people were talking to each-other. We talked to a couple of men about the Queen gig they had ended up at too, and at the bar I had a lot of fun. I was served by a slightly terse bar manager. She handed me my two Bulmers. "You'll have to top your glass or finish the bottles here.", she said "You can't take the bottles with you." The man next to me grinned, teasing. "shame" he said. Yup. I swigged the two gluggs from each bottle. We laughed.
I'm not sure how much to say about Dave Gorman's set. It was a very enjoyable evening, made more so because he caught my eye at the end of the first joke, I was hooked, so shallow am I. The first half was warm, sweet conventional stand-up with some unusual topics. I felt that some gags were very much in the linguistic style of Frank Skinner. No rude stuff though, I could happily have taken a kid of twelve. There's a delightful playfulness to him (although for me, the laughing at your own jokes in order to make the audience laugh was a bit overplayed). The second half utilised Gorman's well practiced stage methodology. He was incredibly slick, it seemed to me that it was a tough thing to do, and he made it look easy. At the end of it all, I think that Dave Gorman is a storyteller who can turn a commonplace happening into lightness and warmth. He's also strangely attractive on stage, and I understand better the reasons for his having a devoted following. Nina's the real fan in the family, and she would have loved it. By way of compensation, I've booked for her to see him at Warwick in March. That's the way I roll.
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