Opening night. Jupiter’s Casino Gold Coast.
We are far too relaxed. This is the opening night of a tour and we ought to have been a little more tense. It’s good to be a bit scared before you start, but we’re not. We haven’t yet played any Australian audiences and before the curtain goes up at Jupiter’s Casino they are strangely quiet. Usually in America they are rowdy with expectation. Not so here. You can hardly hear them from backstage and this concerns me. We do get them a bit at the opening but then we make the mistake of putting another little film in about cats being scared by cucumbers, funny enough in itself but after our highlight reel way too much of us not being on stage. We’ll fix this by Brisbane on Saturday of course. Also we run long, a definite mistake in comedy.

When we come on we usually start by both talking at the same time but tonight for some reason John doesn’t speak at all, which leaves me high and dry, and so we confuse them. Eventually I welcome us to the Old Coast, which John corrects me is the Gold Coast, and we pick it up quickly enough but we’ll have to fix the front of the show, and we will. One of the things I love most about working with John is we almost entirely agree on everything and in about five minutes at the end we have it sorted. Personally I blame an enormous picture of Michael Bolton outside my dressing room door. He has the look of a man who isn’t quite sure he should have cut off most of his hair.

The show warms up as we get into it, and particularly once we start performing sketches. And the film clips work. There is some good stuff in here. Then again it is The Gold Coast and we I won’t know what that means until we have played Not The Gold Coast. Are they old, are they sober? Are they drunk? Not drunk enough? Too hot? Too cold? Don’t get me wrong, the show goes very well, the Promoters are very happy, we get a standing ovation, and we do an encore, and as Simon reminds me it’s way better than Sarasota where we started our Florida Tour, but we’re supposed to know what we’re doing by now. Incidentally Sarasota had one of the funniest questions when someone asked from the audience what it felt like to be two of the youngest people in Sarasota. They weren’t kidding either..

As if to make up for the slow start we end strongly, and John is particularly funny in the Q and A section, going on a rant about hotels folding toilet paper into little triangles, which he wonders might be some kind of Masonic thing, which is very funny and then another rant abusing Australians for having far too many Prime Ministers one of which was taken by a shark. Personally I think more politicians should be eaten by sharks, usually it’s them that are the Sharks. I think John is at his best when he goes off on rants like this. From somewhere out of the dim recesses of my mind comes the name Ainsley Gotto, who was blamed for the politicans demise: “It moves, it’s shapely and it’s name is Ainsley Gotto…”

Right off the bat in the Q and A John asks me if I know any poems, which is good as I like being put on the spot and I do know The Owl and The Pussycat which I do a bit of. He does Ogden Nash and I mean to follow up with my Australian mother in law’s (Madge Ryan) Ogden Nash favourite:

Shake and shake the ketchup bottle

First’ll come a little, then a lot’ll…

But I get sidetracked and go off somewhere else. This part of the show is always different every night and is dependent to a certain extent on the questions, one of which asks John for consensual sex with a 19 year old, but doesn’t mention the sex.   At this age, I say, who cares….

It turns out to be George Harrison’s birthday so starting off with a clip of him appearing on my old show Rutland Weekend Television goes over well, and I follow with another story of him, but on the fly I shorten some of what I was going to do in my solo spot as it’s getting late. There are far too many rude songs so I lose one. Olivia Harrison said of George’s appearance on that RWT show that she thought it was the bravest thing he ever did. Sadly I’m missing her and Dhani at George Fest in LA, though Tania and Lily are there and text me that it is a fabulous evening: a film Dhani has made of other people singing George songs with him. Hope I can get to see it soon.

I spent most of the day by the pool at the hotel getting relaxed for the evening. They have two pools, one of which has sand, and sea water and real fishes in a reef. This Marriot is a nice hotel and I’m glad I’m not commuting from Brisbane. It even has a circular bathtub in a triple window, where I sit running over my lines. But I don’t shave my legs. Or my chin actually as now I have a beard, which brilliantly saves me from having to use make up on stage. It’ll have to go of course when the wife gets here. She can’t stand it.

One of my regular tweeters – a Jonathan Trevithik – turns up and is very pleasant. He is a total fan, having been to O2 in London three times, and he is very happy with the show but also interesting, and it’s good to get a take from the audience. One over-ardent fan does not show up however. Some young lady has been faking letters from the Promoter to the venue, trying to get herself onto a Guest List with four backstage passes, pretending to represent us and even claiming to be driving us to the gig. Luckily various inconsistencies were spotted between the Promoter, the Tour Manager and the Casino security, as she made one or two mistakes, but she created false email addresses and false phone numbers and wrote to the Promoter and the theatre and they were all more than a little pissed off and concerned enough to contact the Police, so I hope this ardent con gal has learned her lesson and keeps her head down. I’d hate the plod to be knocking down her door.

 So there we are, up and running, and tomorrow and Sunday we play Brisbane, at the same venue where we played Not The Messiah back in 2008. This time we won’t have an enormous orchestra and a full choir, so please do make some noise to make up for it….

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