Episode 1 Late 'n' Live Guide to Comedy

This programme contains strong language.

Edinburgh, Scotland's ancient capital,

home to the world's largest arts festival.

A month-long celebration of high culture, fine art,

books and general loveliness.

None of which is found at Late 'n' Live.

The Festival is a beautiful experience, just that one thing.

At 1am, when decent, clean living folk are tucked up in bed,

this late night comedy club is just opening its doors.

And the cream of stand-up comedy come face to face

with one of the world's most unpredictable crowds.

No, I will not go. No, I won't.

The audience had the power. It wasn't about the performer really.

You kind of offered yourself up as a sacrificial goat

and they just did what they wanted with you.

It was what I can only describe as a "bear pit".

It was gladiatorial.

It was them and us.

And I saw these comics that

I held in high esteem and luminaries of the comedy world,

being crushed by a baying audience going, "You're not funny!

"Make us laugh, you bastard!"

Every night at the Fringe,

this unique club offers three acts followed by a rock and comedy band.

All held together by regular comperes,

who, like fearless lion tamers, face pretty drunk and scary lions.

"Welcome to Late 'n' Live!" Hurrah!

Shit, I would kick the wall.

I would literally be doing this before I went on,

kicking the shit out of the wall, and then I'd hear, "Here's your host, Adam Hills."

You'd go, "Oh, shit!"

It was the most invigorating, like, thrilling, it was like,

it was like bungee jumping, it was like, you know, sky diving,

it was like all of those, it was extreme comedy.

For 25 years, what happened in Late 'n' Live

stayed in Late 'n' Live.

Till now.

Throughout this series, we'll show previously unseen footage.

Brilliant.

And for the first time, the comics who performed there

will get to see themselves too.

Oh, my God, there I am!

Fuckin' hell.

Tonight, we uncover the truth behind a performance of legend.

No-one has actually been killed at Late 'n' Live.

Woo-hoo!

But people wanted to fight.

But first, what makes this comedy club like no other?

Well, for one thing, its, shall we say, unique audience!

I've no doubt I will.

The whole culture of heckling

is really disappearing,

but not at Late 'n' Live.

At Late 'n' Live, what you get is an instant rush

as you walk out on the stage - "Fuck off, you're shit!"

There was no polite ignoring of the act.

I mean, it was full-on, "Fuck off!" "Get off!" "Fuck off!" "Get off!"

Bastards! Bastards!

How are you supposed to gig with that?

So, when dying on your arse is merely an occupational hazard,

the most experienced comics adopt their own style of handling it.

Here, with a lesson in class, Dan Antopolski.

You can never really be exactly sure

what's going on inside someone's head, can you?

You see a young man with headphones on, going...

Probably, he's just enjoying a tasty rare groove,

or maybe he's agreeing

with the garbled rhetoric of a twisted fascist.

'When I did it a lot,'

I was doing very, er,

wibbly-wobbly sort of, what I thought of as surreal material,

which was pretty much calculated to wind up a late night drunk audience.

So I went to see that new Spanish film "All About My Mother".

What is that all about?

And sometimes, I would wrong-foot them and it would go really well,

I had some amazing gigs that went really well,

and I think I used to have a sort of running score against the gig.

I used to do three Late 'n' Lives every festival,

and some years, the gig would win two and I would win one,

and some years, I would win two.

And on this occasion,

he definitely seemed to be winning, and then...

trouble started brewing.

The worst thing is, is the moment before the heckling happens

when there's just a feeling of disquiet amongst the audience

and you just know in that second, you've lost them.

It is funny, trust me.

No, I think you'll find...

Yeah, with that audience,

they're not so much up for a gig as they are for an argument.

I'll teach it to you.

'The deaths were always great,'

cos you had to do your time to get your money, like in any stand-up gig, and so...

if the gig just went off and became unmanageable,

I used to very much enjoy staying on stage and just present them with the fact

that I was obliged to stay there and just see what we could do with that fact.

Any questions? I know everything.

Have long have I got to go?

Excellent question. One minute, wow!

All right.

OK, all right, I will, this is

going to absolutely kill you.

I don't like to boast, but...

No. I think... No.

Surely you know

how this works by now!

I'm not going to... No, no!

No, I will not go!

No, I won't. No, I won't.

Yep, that's how I remember it, pretty much.

Listen, you're going to be... You're going to thank me, because this joke...

People get so angry when they don't like a comic,

it never fails to intrigue me. It's only comedy!

It's only trying to entertain you.

No. No way. No...

It was like a sort of a powerful shower, you know, people just yelling at you.

It's like being a teenager again and your parents are bollocking you

and you're saying, "No, not going to."

Fuck off.

Ah, fair play, Dan Antopolski. And d'you know what?

As a compere, that's what you want an act to do.

Have a great month.

'If you're going to go down, leave some energy in the room.

'The worst thing you can do is just be mediocre,

'because it means then I have to walk out as compere to a room

'that's a bit flat, and there's no energy in it.'

Ladies and gentlemen, Dan Antopolski!

Only at Late 'n' Live would someone heckle you with,

"You've got one minute to set us on fire."

In terms of dying on stage, the general rule is

you should acknowledge it.

It's not hard and fast, but if you're dying,

they know it, you know it and if you're an observational comedian,

you should observe that you're dying.

There's always a bit of my mind that I think, you could just pretend to faint,

just keel over, just keel over. Just go down, hit the deck.

And I've never quite had the balls to do that.

Sometimes, I have overstayed my welcome

and that moment when the disquiet comes,

instead of just finishing off very quickly and getting off,

I've tried to ride it out and win them back

and I think they can smell you trying, they can smell your fear,

especially if you've shat yourself.

Erm, and it can... you can dig yourself deeper and deeper into a heckle hole.

The worst thing you can do is stick with the act.

That is probably the worst thing you can do, and you know,

Late 'n' Live was a brutal, was a brutal training on that.

So when it all looks like it's going pear shaped, don't stick to the act.

But as Andy Zaltzman shows, some audiences don't even let you start.

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the brilliant Andy Zaltzman!

Always important to get a high energy start.

Hello, hello.

Jesus Christ? Is that your reaction?

I do get heckled about my appearance a fair amount, that clearly happened

even before I'd reached the microphone on this occasion.

Sorry?

Side Show Bob? I guess, to be honest,

that is closer than Jesus Christ,

so we're seeing the evolution of the heckle here,

this is a very exciting

moment for comedy.

Sorry? Mick Hucknall

with a perm? Very good.

I think even the audience felt

the pressure of expectation for them to misbehave.

So there was almost a performance from both sides,

whatever the comic was doing, and the audience going,

"Right, sorry about this, mate, but it's sort of,

"it's part of my duty as part of this audience to destroy you."

What? Art Garfunkel,

yeah, very good, very good.

They had professional hecklers.

Basically, pro black belt hecklers that went in and sat in

and went, "Right, you've only got 20 seconds to win us over,

"or we're going to start bombarding you with stuff."

Willy Wonka, very good, OK, very good.

This is all very good.

Sorry? A rather scary clown?

You've gone back now to Side Show Bob,

which was about five heckles ago.

I'm starting to feel that I might have spent my evening

in a more productive manner than this gig.

Twat? Right, now we're getting more

into traditional heckling territory,

just the outright insults, rather than merely saying who I look like.

Can we get it even more developed than just "twat"?

Curly ginger twat. OK, this is...

We're starting to move in the right direction now.

By this stage, the gig is essentially over for me.

There's absolutely nothing I can do to go from this

into any material I may have wanted to do.

I was, I was now just... essentially, I might as well

have been dressed up like a giant dart board.

Albert Einstein in colour?

That is good.

I feel I'm slightly redundant now, but...

Elizabeth I, excellent.

Mr Weetos?

'Seven and a half minutes

'before I could even attempt to begin the gig,'

and as I recall, the rest of the gig struggled

to live up to those seven and a half minutes.

But he rode out the storm

and he won in the end.

I did a gig in Liverpool and a guy shouted out, "Is that a wig?"

I had to point out that were I to choose to wear a wig,

I would probably choose one without a receding hairline, I think.

So, without an audience,

stand-up comedy is just talking weirdly to yourself

in an empty room. But how much interaction

do performers really enjoy?

There is a mistaken perception among the public

that heckling is in and of itself welcomed by comedians.

Generally, it's not, we quite like to do our job.

You can articulate a wonderful discourse as a result of heckling,

but often, I think of it as audible graffiti, just like nuisance.

Because there was no security

and there was no sort of way of policing it,

sometimes, there were shows that would have been good,

that were kind of ruined by drunken arseholes

who just weren't heckling well, weren't heckling in a funny way,

just were persistent in their desire to interrupt the show,

and the audience were too polite

to punch them in their fucking heads, like they deserved.

OK, say you're a heckler.

How do you know whether you're creating a wonderful discourse,

or if the person next to you

secretly wants to punch you in the head?

Enter flawed genius Simon Munnery.

So, is anyone here from anywhere?

Anyone ever noticed anything ever?

Life, don't it drag on?

Here we are in 2007,

a prospective heckler decided this was going to be his moment.

What's that? Tick, tick?

Are you trying to imply I...

You were going to try and

explain a joke to me?

Which joke is that?

Who's got a minute?

He's got a minute?

Has he got a minute?

Is that how the show works? Each heckler gets a minute?

Good bloody luck, I think you'd have trouble filling 30 seconds, mate.

Go on, then. What were you trying to say, mate?

That's not a great heckle, "You're a dick." Oh...

Are you trying to say I'm a dick?

'Although it is a good technique'

if someone heckles you,

to say back what they've said.

You think I'm a dick?

Pretty much?

It gives you time, so if someone shouts, "Fuck off, you wanker!",

you go, "Did you say fuck off, you wanker?" And we all know he said that, right?

And it gives you a little beat as time there,

"Oh, fuck off, you wanker, yourself.

"Wank the fuck off."

Em, just combine some swearwords in a new way

and they'll call you Oscar Wilde.

Technically, I should have...

What's that?

Testicle?

A syphilitic testicle.

That is a good... You are, sir, a syphilitic testicle.

APPLAUSE

There's a lot of stupid people in the world - you're all of them.

People like you should be bound and gagged

and thrown back into the sea so you can evolve a little more,

at least serve as a warning to any fish nurturing ambitions.

APPLAUSE

Yeah, he was definitely a punch in the head heckler.

And just in case he thought about getting up again...

Is that the same heckler?

Now, there is a saying in comedy...

I can so handle this!

The idea of heckling is to make the person on stage

-look like a

-BLEEP!

LAUGHTER

APPLAUSE

You kind of think that an audience who paid good money would

want to kind of meet you half way and enjoy themselves.

But no, not at one in the morning when they're drunk

and they're angry and the whole purpose for you being there

is to win them over.

That doesn't normally work, it's ridiculous!

There was an outlaw nature to it, as well, which is

"I'm gun slinging in the toughest room in the world and I'll fire some jokes!"

Little did they know where the gun slinging thing went,

cos it is, like, this tough room

and I go in there and go, "Some observations."

"Bang, bang, bang, here's some...whimsy!"

But how can a comic possibly prepare to deal

with this kind of late night battle?

Yes! Late 'n' Live!

How fuckin' brilliant is this?

It's do or die, you know, so you're foot is fully on the accelerator.

You up your FPMs, your fucks per minute.

So strap in, it's going to be fucking brilliant.

You're chucking a "C" bomb,

even though you probably don't use the "C" bomb.

-You

-BLEEP!

It screws with your timing. Your timing's out the window.

If you've got something that requires a bit of a pause,

you'd better shorten that pause down

because even if you're rocking that gig, there'll be some drunk prick

who'll just hear a bit of silence and their mouth will open

and everything you've worked on for the last five minutes is destroyed.

Get in to them quick.

There was no slow build of the, "Hey, how are you doing?",

and then exploding. You had to come on at 100mph.

I would more or less break out into a sprint from the wings

to the microphone because I thought that if I didn't get that microphone

within 0.3 seconds, they would start.

If you give them a gap, they can shout.

But if you keep talking like this all the time...

-SPEAKS FAST

-"..Fucking bastard... Americans..."

"Irish"... Then you go, "Thank you, goodnight,"

and they go, "Shit, didn't get it in, you could have got it in."

You just go, "No gap, no gap, no gap."

Even if you don't have anything to say, just go, "Oo-oo-oo-oo!"

Unfortunately, in comedy, one has to breathe now and again,

and, um...that would be when they would start,

when you made the mistake of breathing.

Can you imagine if you were an actor and you were doing a play

and all you can hear is the audience going,

"Shite, bastards, fuck off, you prick paddy Irish shit head"?

You know, you'd just go, "I don't think that play's working out."

But we have to go out!

Some acts, though, seem to really thrive

when a gig has a threatening or unpredictable atmosphere.

Case in point, Johnny Vegas.

When Johnny walks on stage,

it's time for the audience

to wonder "Oh, crap,

"what's going to happen now?"

HE LAUGHS

Thank you, mate.

Fuck off! >

I've no doubt I will.

At some point, I will fuck off, but the major difference is,

I'll do it when I decide to.

Which means your insult will fall on stony ground.

As an audience, it was collectively trying

to get the better of the comic.

It wasn't ONE person in the room shouting and you handling them,

it was the whole room going, "Right, we're taking you on."

I look at women.

'My strategy was one, try and be drunker than them.'

I'm a pervert, love.

'Which was no mean feat.'

I'm a pervert and I'm a drunk.

I'm a social misfit.

I stink of piss.

I talk too loud...

..and I alienate any woman who ever tries to love me.

But unlike you, you fucker, I'm making a living from it.

LAUGHTER

And two, yeah, just show no fear.

If you want to come up and fight us...

full contact...

..it'd be a fucking giggle. LAUGHTER

Late 'n' Live was basically made for Johnny

because nine times out of ten,

if you imagine an audience of Johnny Vegas's, that's...

you know, it was almost like he was trying to out-drink them.

You can't shit on me.

No, you can't shit on me.

Because I have no recollection of why I'm already havin' a go at you.

LAUGHTER

That's the beauty of being me.

APPLAUSE

He was either terrifyingly drunk,

the sort of drunkenness that you will never emerge from,

or he'd just reached the stage where he's always like that,

because he's drunk so much that he can't ever be sober. I couldn't tell which.

Or I couldn't tell if it was a brilliant drunk act.

Even now, if you meet Johnny Vegas, you're not quite sure.

Anyway, he got on stage and got people to chuck coins at him.

In this gig, where the drunk audience aim to take control,

the question is, "Who's in control now?"

Now, you all must have some loose change.

This is a little song I'd like to sing

while you try and maim us with coins.

# All of me

# Why not take all of me? #

I was just watching coins pinging off a fat man's exposed torso,

thinking, "It's not exactly comedy, I don't know what it is really,

"It's more like a sort of medieval rite, or something."

We'll be fuckin' rich at this rate, with a sweet, sweet, sweet.

Missed me, didn't ya?

I'd been to a working man's club in the North East

and they got, like, the three biggest alcys up to sing

and as they sing, the audience would just hurl money at them.

The whole room. And it'd be bouncing off them,

and the organist put his jacket up, playing like that.

It was just the most surreal thing.

And then, at the end, they gave them a brush and they got to brush up

and keep whatever was thrown at them during the performance.

And I remember just thinking...

it was the saddest thing, one of the saddest things I'd ever witnessed.

That'd be great for Johnny.

# All of me

# Why not take all of me?

# With a song in my heart... #

Under pretty much any other circumstance,

that's the behaviour of a tramp.

It's not...it's not funny.

It's not even, you know, watchable, but in the right circumstance,

if the environment's been fostered correctly,

you can be raised to high art.

You cannot possibly follow that. Well, actually, yes, we can.

We finish tonight with a performance

that has gone down

as Late 'n' Live legend.

Now, like all legends, it involves

a bit of blood, a bit of gore

and it happened

many, many years ago.

Ladies and gentlemen,

please let me introduce a brand-new fledgling comic, Russell Brand.

I've never seen this guy, I've heard a lot about him.

A big round of applause for Russell Brand.

'I had an inkling it would not be a productive or helpful'

or spiritually enriching experience,

but like most of the things I was doing at that time,

I thought, it will be

some kind of buzz, it will be a feeling,

so I did it for that. I thought, "Yes, this'll be, like, visceral."

To tell you truth, right, I ain't written no jokes or nothing,

so I thought what I'd do is I'd come on and be sweetly endearing

like the old Andrex puppy, look.

No-one can resist the old Andrex puppy,

"Oh, what will I get up to next?"

'I was early on my journey as a comedian and probably done'

20 or 30 gigs or something, but, like, I was up for it.

The reason that I did this was cos I thought, like,

"Oh, Late 'n' Live, that's the pit of hostility and hatred."

Fuck off! >

Hello! Now we're talking.

OK, so no material, but surely nobody would really turn up

at Late 'n' Live completely unprepared?

What I remember is, I think I'd seen the film Man In The Moon

and thought, "Situationism, that's what I'm going to do.

"Yet another way of avoiding writing material

"is I'll be like a situationist."

What?

Situationist comedy, now...

Isn't that when you deliberately provoke the audience

with sometimes kind of dangerous stunts?

Obviously, I haven't done a good impression of a psychopath for you.

Oh, ah-ha, it is.

Let's give you people psychopath, yeah?

Let's have psychopath.

Had sort of like bags of blood taped around my body

and I thought, this is going to be like a hostile thing.

There's nothing you can do. Face it, head on.

Woo-hoo! Woo-hoo!

OK. You've punctuated the mediocrity.

I've been Russell Brand. Thank you.

BOOING

Yep, that's them provoked, all right.

What I remember is then going back out

and in amongst all the boos, one voice just went, "More!"

AUDIENCE: More!

Would you like a bit more of Russell Brand?

And fair play, I remember looking backstage at Russell and going...

And fair play to him, he went, "Yeah, all right."

He went along with the joke.

BOOING

Oh, man, can that audience even be any more provoked?

Hmm. Looks like they can.

As a comedian, what do you want? You want people to laugh and to love you.

To knowingly walk into a situation where that's highly unlikely,

that was an incredibly self-destructive thing to do.

-AUDIENCE MEMBER:

-Fuck off and die!

I will eventually. The decades will pass, but when I die,

it won't be in poverty, and I'll have people eating at my cock.

I don't think anyone has actually been killed at Late 'n' Live, but people wanted to fight.

At that point, the stage was here facing the audience.

On the right hand side, there was a corridor that went back stage

and I was sitting in that corridor with Fiona O'Loughlin,

who's from Alice Springs, who was the next comedian on.

So we could hear all this.

I mean, I'm nervous anyway before a gig, before any gig,

but this was beyond nerves.

This was a like a blind, total...

catatonic fear.

BOOING

As Russell ducked a shower of abuse and various missiles,

lovely Aussie comic Fiona O'Loughlin waited backstage,

unaware that Russell's first performance

was about to make her own debut pretty unforgettable too.

Stop it, Russell! Rewind, rewind!

And then this glass was thrown.

Yeah, Late 'n' Live! Woo-hoo!

Oh! That was it.

But it just happened to cross the stage and go down the corridor

and smashed into the wall opposite us.

A friggin' glass smashes

and somehow, a shard of it finds its way up a stairwell and into my leg.

I'm quite capable of certainly... "Please, God, that's over."

..WAS capable of creating that dynamic

in relatively friendly pub gigs in Kent.

Where people are just, "Oh, hello, young man, thanks for coming down."

Some of us have to leave those places with a police escort,

so, like, for me, it was just making external the chaos

that I was creating everywhere.

So whilst I'm not trying to diminish Late 'n' Live

as this phenomena that's incredibly sort of intense and unique,

that's what my life was like pretty much every day!

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr Adam Hills!

Woo-hoo! Perrier nominee.

JEERING

Do you know what I feel? I feel like someone's mum coming home

after a party going, "What have you kids been doing?!"

And as Adam Hills was introducing me,

I was literally pulling a chunk of glass out of my leg.

I literally did have blood pouring down my leg as I went on.

-SHE LAUGHS

-Thank you. Gees, this is scary.

'They'd just had a kill.'

So scary!

You know, they'd got blood.

They've had their taste of blood, you know,

'and I was afforded just a bit of silence.'

And I'm a poor person and these pants cost me money.

It was only the next day, I was walking down the Royal Mile

and this guy comes up to me

and goes, "Were you the girl that was stabbed at Late 'n' Live?"

-SHE LAUGHS

-I say, "Yeah, that's me.

"I was stabbed at Late 'n' Live."

But you know what makes the best kind of legends?

They always have a proper happy ending.

If anything, it probably expediated my journey

to not taking drugs any more.

Probably expediated my journey to write material.

Take this a bit more seriously.

Next time, see what happened to stand-up comedy greats

when they performed at Late 'n' Live for the very first time.

They're going, "Oh, what's all this?"

and I went to say "Hello" and they went, "Fuck off!"

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