Off we go then. Two silly boys, one niche film, eight days, north to south. Vroom-vroom.
12th July – Dundee
A successful first screening, a gentle afternoon one to get things started. Mark drives the four of us — our partners, Samara and Helen, join us for the Scottish leg — from Glasgow to Dundee where we’re met by David at the DCA. He treats us to coffee and sorts out our comps and our minimal tech. We’re soon joined by Phill who shares showbiz anecdotes over a scone.
Showtime and Phill goes for a stroll around the gallery having watched our screener last night. I introduce the film alone for no particular reason and this sets the tour standard of taking the intro in turns. 45 minutes into the film, we hear Phill laughing biggly from somewhere in the room and it fills us with glee. Phill is a lovely host for the Q&A. He generously praises the film as a good record of the times but also calls us “these young… I think the technical term is idiots” for putting so much effort into a film for no money, which is correct and I will always love him for it.
13th July – Glasgow
Yeah baby. We arrive at the famous GFT at 8pm with lovely Gabe already waiting for us in the lobby. Alan soon arrives and takes pictures of us all gathered around our poster. People start arriving and, naturally, I know most of them. I shake hands and hug people and thank them for coming. About 70 people turn up, which is too many get lovey with so we get on with it. Mark and I introduce the film together, me with the mic and he standing next to me like Silent Bob. It’s really funny but for some reason we still commit to taking it in turns from now on. As I witter on, I can see so many friendly faces in the audience: Johnston, Catherine, Louise, Alex, Dani. I remember my first stint at stand-up in 2004 where I snuck out of our flat on an excuse because I couldn’t risk my flatmate wanting to come along; today I love having friends in. It feels great. The audience laugh well, the biggest woofers probably going to Stew. It sounds great having so many people laughing along and I catch Mark’s eye the first time it happens. “Mission accomplished” is the message that passes between us. The Q&A goes well with lots of great and funny questions from Gabe and equally good ones from the audience. Because I know everyone, I feel compelled to introduce them to the rest of the room before they ask their question: “This is John. He makes sculptures from squashed irn bru cans and nitrous oxide cannisters.”
Selling books and Iceman posters in the lobby after the show, a girl brings her copy of You Are Nothing to be signed. I’ve never seen a copy quite so quite knackered. She explains that she carries it around in her pocket all the time. She shows me where Stewart Lee and Simon Munnery have already signed it and I add my scrawl. Not every show can be a lovely as this one. Can it?
14th July – A night off
Phew, about time we had a night off. This shit is merciless. Samara and I wake up in our own bed while Mark and Helen are in a hotel. When we join up again, we go to see Stewart Lee’s Man Wulf show at the King’s Theatre. I search out Gabe and his mum sitting up in the gods and when I finally spot them, they are gleefully waving. I wave back, making a spectacle of myself in this massive room. I’m also wearing an Hawaiian shirt. Stew comes on and we all marvel at his little plastic knob. Somewhere along the way, Mark buttonholes Stew and gets him to sign some special posters with his praise quote printed improbably large on it. Also somewhere along the way Mark gets shat on by a pigeon. Samara tells him it’s lucky. Mark isn’t so sure. We go home to clean the cack out of his only tour jacket.
15th July – Sheffield
Doom, doom doom. Only two tickets have sold for the Showroom Cinema, one of them being to John Robinson of OutsideLeft who we later ask to host the Q&A so it was really an audience of one. We meet John at a slightly rubbishy pub but one where we can see the venue from the window so there’s no chance of being late to our own funeral. In a desperate attempt to double our audience, we leave fliers on tables and talk to a few people about the film. Some goth girls say “wow!” when I tell them about the film and others make positive noises too, but my rogue salesmanship results in zero extra sales. “It’s the football, the heat and… just Sheffield,” says a team member apologetically. “Oh, don’t say that,” I say, “Sheffield is lovely,” but this is long before we see the inner-city carnage on the walk to the hotel. He wasn’t wrong though: only four people had come to see the Asian Film Festival screening in Screen 3 and absolutely nobody was in Screen 1 for Evil Dead Burn. So at least we knocked Evil Dead into a cocked hat.
After the screening, we take “the whole audience” to the pub. We go to the Rutland as recommended by Dan. It’s a nice pub with queer vibes, decorated with pop culture bits and bobbins. The ale is good and we drink loads of it, Mark choosing an IPA appropriately called Krush’d Dreams. Mark stays positive and keeps the mood up beautifully, though in the back of my mind I’m thinking “this was a dismal failure.” I fall asleep in the easyHotel as soon as my trousers are off. Through beery dreams, I sense Mark go out for a cigarette. He tells me later that there was a comatose man surrounded by police in the hotel entrance and another man trying to intimidate the receptionist. In the morning, we get breakfast at a Wetherspoons near the hotel. It is full of insane people making bestial asylum noises and day drinkers buying Strongbow at 10:30am. I overhear two snatches of conversation on my way to and from the toilet: “just tell the police officer when he gets here” and “I swear there’s a murder every week.” We leave the pub still chewing.
16th July – Liverpool
In the car, Mark lambasts me for not liking Sheffield, that I’m quick to judge. “Look at it,” he says, as we drive through some Sheffield suburbs, “it’s lovely.” It’s fine, I suppose. Better than “fine,” however, are some of the sights we see on our way to Liverpool. Derbyshire is breathtakingly beautiful. Pass several caverns open to tourists, we start quoting Mark Gatiss’ “Stump Hole” monologue at length. “Tongue out, black. Eyes protruding.” We shut our fool mouths when part of the drive takes through terrain that looks and feels like Jurassic Park, prehistoric rocks jutting out from moss-green mountains. It feels like something you’d normally need to hike tediously out to see, but here we are driving through it in our little JP jeep. We pass a cavern advertised prominently as “The Devil’s Arse,” which allows me to hit the Internet now to find out where on Earth we actually were. We switch off the Tanacious D album (the proper first one) we’d been singing along to at the top of our lungs for the second time to appreciate the vista like an owl might after you cut two holes for the eyes. Quoting niche comedy is our shared language and we do it all the way down the spine of Great Britain. If anyone else had been with us, we’d have driven them completely mad. At the end of a short a pit stop, Mark mangles a sentence and gives rise to the phrase “let’s make some hayway,” which would become a samephrase for the rest of the tour.
Our first stop in Liverpool was to Stand Alone Tattoo where Mark’s old schoolfriend Richard Gethin practices. The atmosphere there is lovely, one of camaraderie and a pleasant minimalist peace. Richard hands me a beer from the fridge and I watch as Mark is illuminated with an image of the Iceman’s duck. It’s the version originally illustrated for the film by animator Michael Eaton and it looks splendid-splendid-splendid.
Hot Water Comedy is inside a warehouse in an industrial estate. The place has been converted into a European-style food hall with a bar and multiple venues. It is air conditioned and kids run amok. It strikes us immediately as a fun place and soon we see our name in lights (the name of the film at least) on an old-fashioned cinema promo board above the door of the venue. After our technical set-up, the audience files in and we’ve sold more tickets than we’d thought. As they arrive, one by one, we feel happier and happier. A real boost after Sheffield. We’d arranged no host for the Q&A today so we did it together, stand-up style, taking it in turns to speak. We find a nice rhythm, batting the topics back and forth between us. Questions asked by audiences so far have been largely quite similar so we’re able to tighten and improve our answers as we travel south, making them funnier and generally better.
Signing books and posters after the show, a guy tells us he knows Anthony’s nephew, that the documentary has been talk of their town for a while and he can’t believe he got to see it. Another person says they work for a local authority and they want our help to find spesh acts for a festival. We go home as late as possible to our shitty digs (our hotel had cancelled last-minute and we’d to quickly booked a room in a flop that looked like the Spaced house on AirBnB).
17th July – Cardiff
A small audience at Chapter Arts, but we’re glad to be at the original home of Go Faster Stripe. We’re cheerfully grilled by GFS’s own Chris Evans (not that one) in the Q&A and we meet Steve Sullivan, director of Being Frank. He came to see our film and I can hardly believe it. We chat happily afterwards, supping expensive arts centre pints and exchanging Iceman and Sidebottom stories.
Chris, Mark and I hit The Fagg for karaoke and mercifully cheap Butty Bach. We talk for hours and I sing Wonderboy. Back to Chris’ house, the famous Go Faster Towers. He shows us the garage where he keeps his stock, including a big box of of You Are Nothing. The source! Chris gives us some of these to sell on the road and lets me scav a copy of Stew’s Pea Green Boat on vinyl. Mark takes a copy of The Gaffa Tapes. We sleep the sleep of the just.
18th July – Birmingham
A decent turnout at the MAC, which I think of as the alma-mater of my friend John Dowie who got some of his first performance experience there in the 1970s. This show sees a reunion with most of the Melt It! crew including Chris, Ange, Ben and Rob. A little homecoming. Some football is happening and we escape town as quickly as we can lest traffic devour us. We sleep at Mark’s (where I notice a Polaroid taken by the Iceman at the very first screening in Wolverhampton back in February), he in his own bed and I on the living room couch and anyone who says otherwise is lying.
19th July – St Leonards
We rise at 6am for a long, long drive to the south coast. After six hours and a third rendition of Tenacious D, we arrive in St. Leonards-on-Sea to find half the town dressed as pirates. We ask no questions. I could look it up now but I don’t want to know. Let’s just be content to think this is always the way in St. Leonard’s. We’re early, so we walk down to the seafront to stretch our legs, inhale some salty air, and… wait, who the hell is this coming out of the sunrise? The Iceman! We are literally in town for five minutes and here he is, the hero of the hour. He’s on his way to visit his former roadie who lives in Marine Court, the art deco building you can see me trying to lick in the photo above.
The venue — Kino Teatre — is absolutely smashing. In my intro, I explain to the decent-sized audience that we take it in turns to do these intros and that “I feel like a little boy who has won a competition” since I get to speak here on my own. The room has that lovely old theatre smell (the seats and the stage curtains salvaged from a closed theatre in Leicester Square, I’m told) and the stage is at floor level, which I love. The room is also very wide, so you can’t see the whole audience at one time, so you have to keep going back and forth, from left to right and back again, to include everyone. This is something else I like because it gives you something to do instead of merely speaking. “Stick around to the end,” I tell the audience, “for the Q&A where we’ll be joined by someone for a very special surprise… oh, you’ve already seen him? Yeah, it’s the Iceman,” as Anthony had been doing a lot of capering in the lobby. The audience were the best and most generous laughers we’d had on the tour, which was a nice way to end it. For the first time, at the request of the venue, there is an interval between the film and Q&A. I decide to sit with the merch stall in the lobby in case anyone leaving wanted to buy a book, but only four people left the auditorium and only to use the bathroom (“for a wee-wee” as I’d put it in my intro only to have it quoted back to me a lady on her way to do just that). The Q&A capably led by Ewan Marshall was another smasher, joined as we were towards the end by the Chilly One himself. My local friend Dickon turned up a bit late, missing my brilliant intro but would have many nice things to say after the show; I also photograph him with the Iceman in a moment of strange joined-up history – two niche performers, at last side by side.
Instead of staying over in St. L’s, we say a teary goodbye to Anthony, Ewan and Dickon in favour of hitting the road and making some hayway. Only a mile out of town, however, Mark makes an impressive u-ie when we see a sign pointing to the Long Man of Wilmington. We pull over and get out of the car for a look. I haven’t seen the Long Man in 35 years but he hasn’t changed. An older couple are ambling around, the eccentric-looking husband with his shirt completely unbuttoned. “Watch out for the big dog poo over here,” the woman calls to us, which seems a bit unnecessary as we are quite a long way from where she’s pointing. When we eventually see the poo, it is humongous, impossible to miss, and was obviously done by her husband. We leave the Long Man and the human tod behind, feeling faintly nauseous. Mark drives us back to Wolverhampton, our film’s spiritual home.
After a couple of days visiting my parents, I walk to Wolverhampton train station, passing the Lockworks Cinema where our February screening took place. It gave me one of those “full circle” feelings. I pop into a bookshop where I see a girl I went to sixth form with. She’s worked there for 25 years and the last time I saw her was at this very counter. Unlike with the Long Man of Wilmington, it was like she’d aged suddenly – BANG – by a quarter century. It fucked me up, man. I bought the first Red Dwarf novel published in thirty years for the train home to Glasgow. It was rubbish.
Now look here. There are three more opportunities to see Melt It! this year: at Edinburgh’s Cameo Picturehouse on August 8th, at London’s Bill Murray on August 23rd, and at Kendal’s Brewery Arts on September 19th. After that, you’ll be shit out of luck. Why not come and join the fun?
