Huddersfield's Got Talent

Jimmy Carr - Laughter Therapy Tour - Huddersfield Town Hall, 2 June 2011

Jimmy Carr’s been in the business for over a decade, now, touring almost constantly. For the last five or six years, he’s performed about 250 shows per year in venues which hold between one and three thousand people. Where his peergroup (many of whom are unfit to recycle his cast-offs) have “graduated” to performing a handful of shows in horribly impersonal arenas, Jimmy has remained true to his craft and continues to deliver his material in an intimate setting on a near-nightly basis.

But, today, he might be regretting it because, this morning, Jimmy Carr woke up, gazed at his hotel ceiling, and remembered the night he was upstaged by a clockmaker, a pharmacist and a woman from the social security.

The Laughter Therapy tour rolled into town and proved to be a far more interactive affair than previous shows. For sure, Jimmy delivers the six-jokes-a-minute repartee that keeps us going back year after year, but both halves of this year’s show are built around his new experiments in audience participation; an interview with someone with an interesting job (enter Andy the clockmaker, a ball of alcohol-, adrenaline- and pure nervous energy-fuelled neuroses, to tell us about the £26k special limited edition he’s been making for Wills and Kate) and a contest to turn a punter into a comedian (Susie, the woman from the social would have won on any other night, but she had Benal (or Ben-Al, or maybe Bin Al – apparently his dad couldn’t spell it, either) to deal with.

As seen in The Huddersfield Examiner!

Benal’s a locum pharmacist who missed his vocation because a sizeable chunk of last night’s sold-out audience would pay good money to see him again.

Jimmy? He was Jimmy. If you read the HateMail or the Express, you think he’s the anti-Christ. Those of us who are already wondering when next year’s show will reach us just know he’s a contender for funniest -- and unquestionably the most consistent -- comedian of this golden age of stand-up.

Sound and fury, signifying nothing.

I got home from work on Friday, pottered about a bit then turned on the computer and pulled up Firefox.

My home page had changed.

Instead of the familiar red, black and white page which has greeted me every time I've gone online for over a decade, I was faced with multicoloured text and a message my brain couldn't process.

I read it again. And again. I looked for some handle on the joke. Then I realised there wasn't a handle because it wasn't a joke.

Then I swore. Lots.

No, I wasn't infected by a virus; my browser had not been hijacked.

The BASTARDS had closed us down.

The FUCKING BASTARDS had FUCKING closed us FUCKING down.

No FUCKING warning, nothing. Just FUCKING switched FUCKING off.

Guardian Talk, GUT, simultaneously the most interesting, stimulating, intellectual, trivial, infuriating and utterly insane website on the entire English-speaking web. No FUCKING more.

Our affair began in the same year I met my wife; millennium year. Internet access was a new thing at work and I was reading a story about the government's NHS plans on The Guardian's website when I found a link inviting me to "Talk About It Here!"

The Brave NewLabour World was young and what lay behind that simple order was a brand new soapbox where unrepentant, unreconstructed lefties like me could shout and scream to our hearts' content about and at liberals and conservatives, with and without capitals.

After lurking for a while, my first post was to answer a question about the Reynolds Girls on one of the quiz threads. "Tommy" was taken so I appended my favourite wrestling reference to create the user name I've used all over ever since. EvilWillow was the first poster to "talk" to me. One of my earliest posts was to ask what "Googling" meant (Alta Vista being the only search engine I knew).

Over the years I crossed metaphorical swords with worthy opponents (Hyuey of the ridiculous spelling; I never could remember what combination of "u"s, "y"s and "e"s to search under), utter wankers (PatLogan; an opinion on everything and knowledge of nothing), eccentric geniuses (Coshipi; who created an alternative persona which fooled everyone and then wrote a book about it - The Reminiscences of Penny Lane by Clive Semmens), thoroughly decent coves (JohnKnoxLives; churchman, Caley Thistle fan and pie aficionado), bizarre fantasists (BYFSeagulls; football casual or bored schoolboy, you decide), soulmates (uberpedant, with a gig attendance history to die for) and dozens upon dozens of good eggs (Kerebus, DirtyOrigamist, Tolstoy, BoogieBabe, Snazz, Moog & Princess, Policywatcher, Myrtletree, Jani, Culder, the late SueGeeGee and too many more to mention).

TommyDGNR8 was banned after an ill-advised comment about the reason for Sir Alex Ferguson's red nose but a "new" poster called SizeOfAnElephant mysteriously appeared and carried on discussions in his place. That is until mods' pet Rory grassed him up . A similar fate awaited CareCaseInAPaperHat, but TheScotsman (the diarist at that paper stole many of his stories from the football thread over the years) lasted until the (very) bitter end.

Our little community saw births, marriages and deaths; a genuine microcosm of the real world. The planet changed; 9/11 brought an influx of mad American republicans; the NewLabour dream turned sour; every twist, every turn was reflected in and filtered through GUT.

X-Factor was more fun when dissected online; Albion Rovers talk was as welcome if not moreso than Manchester United drivel; the regulars in the IT folder could solve just about any computer problem; there was always some trivia or nonsense to while away a dull half hour.

People suffering from depression, teetering on the edge of nervous breakdown, struggling with drink or drugs problems or coming to terms with bereavement; all were there, all were helped.

And at 5.30pm on Friday the 25th of February 2011, they turned it off.

Within hours, the Wikipedia entry for Guardian Unlimited carried a memorial;

In February 2011 The Guardian closed down their talkboards which had been online for over a decade. This was viewed as worse than a thousand Hitlers and widely regarded as being the internet equivalent of what Thatcher did to mining communities in the eighties.

It was also the view of most that The Guardian, in closing down the talkboard without warning or consultation, were a bunch of gritpypes.

That sums up the GUT spirit better than I ever could.

Within days, it had been removed, which probably says more about The Guardian.

Their paper's fucking rotten, too.

Death Is Just A Heartbeat Away

Robert William Gary Moore (4 April 1952 – 6 February 2011)

"Can you imagine having a Gary Moore poster on your wall? You might as well have a picture of a welder's bench."

It's easy to forget that the shambling wreck known as Ozzy Osbourne was, many years ago, entitled to say such things; a good looking lad in his day was young Ozzy.

I've never been a huge Ozzy fan, but I did have a Gary Moore poster. It was the promotional poster (you remember those big 6ft x 3ft ones they used to stick on any available surface?) for his We Want Moore! album, part of which was recorded on a freezing cold Valentine's night at the Glasgow Apollo.

Jim Robertson had just bought the Victims of the Future album after I'd played him the flop single Hold On To Love. We tossed a coin to decide whether to see Moore or Saxon. Biff and co remain one of the few bands I've never seen.

Much of Gary's career up until that point - and, consequently, a fair bit of that gig - had passed me by. I knew his Lizzy stuff and Parisienne Walkways but I left the Apollo that night knowing I had a new back catalogue to explore.

I was considerably more au fait with Gary's solo work by the time he returned to Glasgow, but the Apollo was history. The Run For Cover tour played the Barrowland and, in stark contrast to the previous one, was probably the sweatiest, bounciest, most memorable gig I've ever been to.

He was the reason I picked up a guitar. Knowing I couldn't do it like him was the reason I put it down again.

Another couple of hard rocking albums followed before Gary grew weary of the genre and drifted off into his first love, the blues.

In his later years, he distanced himself from the frenetic fretboard gymnastics I loved him for, but I harboured the hope that he might come back to us some day.

He won't.

Gary Moore died in his sleep while on holiday with his girlfriend. It's a rock'n'roll way to go, but he did it far too young.

Clearing the Backlog

I've been sitting on a pile of half-hearted notes for weeks now.

I tried to clear my backlog at the start of the month, but my enthusiasm evaporated with the devastating news of Gary Moore's death and, for the first time in my life, I've been wrestling with writers' block ever since.

This weekend, though, this weekend I'm furious and it's helped blow off the cobwebs. Let's get you up to date.

We went to Rochdale (October 29th) to see the Jaggies at the Bar Mystique. When we got there, we found DB and the sound crew installing the PA in the pub downstairs, The Flying Horse. Turns out the staircase was too narrow to get the rig up so it was downstairs or nothing.

The pub wasn't a classic rock pub, the audience being more eight-pints-of-Stella-and-wotchoofookinlookinat? than we're accustomed to. The layout wasn't really live-act friendly, either; the guys being tucked away around a corner such that we could only actually see DB; not one we'd rush back to.







The following weekend saw us in the familiar and much more amenable surroundings of the Ashfield (November 6th); a good gig on the eve of my photoshoot with the band at Owen Towers where Alan's old workshop made an excellent setting for some new promo photos.







2010 was brought to a close with an appearance at Golcar's Junction One (December 5th), another rather-too-intimate venue which would be better suited to an acoustic set should the guys ever feel that way inclined.


Into the new year and Mark Steel (January 26th) started his 47-date "In Town" tour at the LBT. Two hours of solid laughs in which the 20 minutes or so of bespoke material more than made up for the stuff already familiar from his books. Great stuff.



A couple of decent Jaggie gigs to get the new year off to a good start, too.

Ings Lane (January 29th) is a thank-god-for-Streetview venue; I'd never have found it if I hadn't recce'd with Google's stalker-cam beforehand! Good venue, too, if a bit too keen on bingo.



The Rock Cafe (February 3rd)? Well, it's the Rock Cafe, isn't it? Drunken women. I got dragged up to dance. It wasn't by Linda. We'll say no more.

Then the Moore news came through.

(Posted 27 February)