Episode 3 Late 'n' Live Guide to Comedy

This programme contains strong language.

Edinburgh, a truly breathtaking destination.

And in August, when the festival hits town,

the city really puts on the charm...

..to deliver wholesome family fun.

But not at Late 'N' Live.

This late-night comedy club opens its doors at 1am,

so it might not have charm, but the drinks are cheap.

You might see some nakedness,

some very bad dancing.

Some unpleasantness.

You'll hear some of the most extraordinary heckles,

some of the foulest language.

So strap in. It's going to be fucking brilliant.

You'll see punching, fighting.

They might as well just have called it Late 'N' Pissed.

The audience always were and a lot of the acts were.

You've got an unconscious bloke down the front

and a woman vomiting into her bra.

It's that kind of, that's difficult to go,

"Hey, let me tell you a story about one of the little-known Argonauts."

Previously in this series,

we uncovered how stand-up comics have to

abandon their well-crafted acts to appease the Late 'N' Live audience.

In this episode, we ask, using previously unreleased footage,

how far can they actually go?

Uh!

So prepare yourself for the wild

and quite often very disgusting truth about live comedy.

Very often, the audience had been to see these comics

doing their shows and what they wanted was something more.

They wanted something more than just the comics doing their show.

And now this was a different environment,

almost like seeing them in a personal way.

They almost felt there was a kind of contract with them.

They'd say, "Come on, we like your stuff, we know what you do,

"but you have to give it a bit more."

You have to go off the script a bit, improvise. Just go a bit nuts.

And no-one on this stage was happier going a bit nuts

than Johnny Vegas.

At 2am, he found his natural home as the master of,

"Oh, man, what's he going to do next?"

COMPERES: Johnny Vegas!

Bear in mind, if people had never seen him before,

Johnny Vegas, you think it's going to be this

sort of super-lean, cabaret-type, you know,

almost like a Des O'Connor-type figure

that's going to come out and croon at you.

And then Johnny Vegas, and this thing, you know,

this shambolic, staggering, just thing.

You cannot insult me.

God got there first.

God put me on this earth with an intelligent mind

and the ability to appreciate women,

but not the outward ability to make things happen.

'You couldn't go out there with a set piece

'and think you would ever get through that material.'

If you're willing to ditch it

and go with whatever the gig throws up,

because the gig isn't really bothered

about some brilliant anecdote that you've written.

They just want to see how you react in the here and now.

And Johnny's gift for, shall we say, alcohol-fuelled improvisation

led to an unfortunate reputation for extreme overrunning.

WAILS HYSTERICALLY

'Time had no meaning whatsoever once I was up there.'

Cos once the madness was out, I wasn't in control any more.

I can turn this around.

LAUGHTER

I just need another two hours.

On this night in 2001, Johnny was running way over

the 20 minutes he was booked to do at the end of the show.

It's that thing of going, suddenly it has been 40 minutes

and folk are backstage and the sun's coming up.

So it fell on the three comperes Daniel Kitson, Adam Hills

and Ross Noble, to find a way of just trying to get him off.

I've got the map and it's in me head!

See, the problem there is the show needed to finish...

and Kitson's gone on and gone, "Let's drag him off."

But, of course, once the audience get behind someone...

They're all going, "Johnny! Johnny!"

-AUDIENCE:

-Johnny! Johnny! Johnny!

'There's nothing you could do then.'

We couldn't drag him off,

cos then the audience will go, "Tch! Oh!"

First, Daniel Kitson tried a...straightforward approach.

I'm...!

-AUDIENCE:

-Johnny! Johnny!

HE LAUGHS

I'd forgotten they'd wrestled us to the ground like this.

DANIEL: Right, we agreed a tight ten, Vegas.

A nice tight ten with maybe a little song.

'None of this would have been scripted before, and...

'if you looked at our material written down,

'it would just look really weak.'

But I think when you watch it...

-Even though it's me I'm talk...

-HE LAUGHS

-AUDIENCE:

-Johnny! Johnny! Johnny!

CHEERING

I'm not entirely sure why I kissed Johnny Vegas!

HE LAUGHS

Ross has just got stuck with the arse in the face.

HE GUFFAWS

ROSS LAUGHS

CHEERING

I always knew.

Somehow, I always knew.

The way you chat to me.

LAUGHTER

The way you seem interested in my conversations.

Fucking hell.

I just took it as you didn't have any other mates.

LAUGHTER

-AUDIENCE:

-Awww!

Why didn't you say something sooner?!

Why did you leave it for the last night?!

CHEERING

It just genuinely looks like someone having a breakdown, doesn't it?

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Come here. Come here!

Sit down. We can build a little fire.

LAUGHTER

It'll just be like me and you.

It'll be like the rest of them never existed.

CHEERING

-ADAM:

-'That was the joy of Johnny Vegas.'

It had nothing to do with jokes or an act.

It had to do with creating something an audience would only see that night.

-Take me to bed.

-Come on, mate.

-Take me to bed.

-Come with me, come on.

-Take me to bed.

-Jesus Christ!

Can someone build a bed nearby?

LAUGHTER

NOT YOU! NOT YOU!

And NOT YOU!

JUST HIM!

NOT YOU! YOU!

It's like somebody being taken out of an asylum!

COME ON! COME ON!

CHEERING So...

So, have we got anyone in from Scotland?

CHEERING AND LAUGHTER

Ohhh...

And so it continued until, finally,

Noble, Kitson and Hills stumbled on a plan.

DANIEL: 'Johnny, come to me. I am the drink you so desire.'

-ADAM:

-'Somehow, I got my hands on a bottle of Baileys,'

and I'm trying to entice him with Baileys.

Daniel Kitson is doing the voice of Baileys over the backstage mike.

DANIEL: 'Why don't you go backstage and have me quietly in a corner

-'and think about what's happened?'

-HA, HA, HA! I already drank it!

ADAM LAUGHS

And I'm watching myself going,

"Oh, shit, this guy's never going to get off stage."

Wow. The makers of a whiskey-based cream liqueur must be so pleased(!)

-AUDIENCE:

-Johnny! Johnny! Johnny!

DANIEL: # Trust in me

# Just in me... #

Ladies and gentlemen, Johnny Vegas!

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Rather pathetic, but a little bit beautiful at the same time.

So if the question is, "How far can you go?",

the answer is probably, "Pretty far."

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

'Oh.'

There's me. I don't remember pretending to have sex with Russell,

but that's clearly me doing that.

AUDIENCE JEERS AND APPLAUDS

'Look at my little white arse there.'

There we go. That typifies the sort of thing that goes on late night at Late 'N' Live.

You've got a kind of comedy nerd crowd there,

and they just appreciate seeing...

I don't want to talk us up, because we're not the Beatles and the Stones.

But it is like seeing, you know, somebody from a band that you like

jamming with somebody else from a band you also like.

RUSSELL LAUGHS

# There's a moose loose aboot this hoose... #

'Just to see them on stage, giving it a go and having a laugh -

'it's part of what you go to Late 'N' Live for.'

'That's what was exciting about it.'

It actually encouraged you to sort of let go a little bit,

like a bit of a sort of, you know, stepping off.

A bit of a bungee jump, a bit of like, "Whoooaa!"

In the mid '90s, Beergut 100 became the Late 'N' Live house band.

Made up of comedians jamming together,

they played a raucous set till 5am every morning.

The original idea?

A beer-fuelled brainwave of the magnificent Bill Bailey.

One night, I came to the show and I was looking around, thinking,

"You know what this kind of place actually needs?

"A bit more, sort of, anarchy."

'And I was thinking, "Come on, it's like 3am.'

"Everyone's had a few, you know, light ales.

"We need something a bit more... in your face."

Various other members of the band came along.

Phil Whelans, a comic and a writer, an improviser. He plays bass. He'd been in loads of bands.

Martin Trenaman, again, a comic, an actor, a stand-up.

He'd been in loads of bands, playing the drums.

Kevin Eldon sings in various blues bands and other bands,

and has been a singer for years.

He was the natural fit for the singer.

# Got no reason and it's all too much

# You'll always find us

# Out to lunch

# And we're out at lunch

# We're so pretty Oh so pretty

# V-vacant... #

This is actually the only surviving footage of Beergut 100.

Amazingly, using Bill's own camera, this was expertly filmed

with comedian Alan Davies behind the lens.

# And we don't care... #

It's always fascinating

when talented professionals show what else they can really do.

Look, what a rammy!

Mm-hm. See? You'll never hear that on Radio Scotland.

I'd no idea I was there.

# We're so pretty Oh so pretty... #

What?!

What was I doing?!

Ach, don't be embarrassed, Fred. You weren't the only one.

Look, here on this night from 1996, watch Dave Lamb -

voice of Come Dine With Me - serve himself up as...

a little buffet.

Ooh, I'll give that a nine out of ten.

# God save the Queen... #

It was riveting sometimes, and I was. You know, I was just...

I was playing the guitar a lot of the time,

watching all this stuff and thinking, "This is brilliant!

"This is as good a performance as you'll see anywhere, you know, in the festival."

"And it's just... Now it's three o'clock in the morning

"and everyone's a bit off their face."

but I'm glad some of it... we managed to capture some of it.

# Now there's no future

# In England's dreaming... #

No future.

Apparently.

# No future

# No future for you

# No future

# No future for you. #

I can still do it.

CHEERING

We would play till four, four thirty.

And then we'd all go to an all-night garage and get veggie haggis.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Round one!

It's very, very difficult to replace a comedy punk band,

so the new brand of comics...

Well, they've opted for something...

sillier.

Two bubbles popped, two bubbles popped.

The great thing about Late 'N' Live is that the comics

can do whatever they want. Experiment.

One year, I went down, and myself and Dave O'Doherty,

dressed in bubble wrap.

-We had a fight in bubble wrap.

-Pop, pop, pop.

And that's the kind of thing that drunk people want to see

at that stage, they don't have to think about the words,

so they're able to watch that and go, oh, that's right, that's right.

What the audience wanted was that randomness of it all.

Almost as if you had cheated by coming with material.

If you actually had jokes written, that was somehow not in the spirit.

And the spirit of things for David O'Doherty is to

dress in bubble wrap, and if you've no bubblewrap then bring your bike!

Even though he's pissed, he still wants to do tricks!

On the first day of the festival, I'd splash out, whatever,

70 or 80 quid on a bike, and if it kept going

until the last day of the festival, I would give it away.

Up you get.

Oh, it's like The Price Is Right, except with Stephen K Amos

and Russell Howard and David O'Doherty and a...bike.

We had a competition, I think,

to decide who was the most worthy winner of my bike.

And people came up with various reasons as to why they should have it.

Finally, why would you like your bike?

My parents died when I was young and I didn't have much money and...

And then I recall one man insisting that,

I think he had no mum and dad, that he was certainly an orphan boy.

This bike is your mother

and your father.

And this lucky punter didn't just walk away with the bike, no, no,

he crowd surfed over the audience on the bike.

-And the whole audience went for it.

-Look at that!

There's a genuine risk here he could fall off and break his neck as well.

-That's what I really like about this.

-Oh, that man is riding in air!

-Wonderful!

-This is quite moving.

He hasn't got a mum and dad! Cheer him!

This is almost like how I would like to go to heaven!

I would like to be taken up

and floated away with classical music playing and on a bike.

-CHEERING

-Keep the fucking light on him!

Now it's time for your next act.

Wow!

At Late 'N' Live, you don't have to bike surf to be magnificent.

You just have to be prepared to come off script,

as Kiwi comic Jarred Christmas showed us.

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

It's going to be like sex! Isn't it? Sex with me.

Start off strong and I end very fucking weak.

What do you have to do to keep that audience going?

What levels do you have to get to?

What levels do you have to sink to, to get that night rocking

and keep it going?

It's all about trying to create some sort of event,

because that's what the audience is there for.

And on this occasion, the audience are there to shout out

the names of different types of food.

OK. What else can we talk about?

I want to talk about something funny. Give me a suggestion, come on?

Cheese!

I was in a mood to play, and I kept sort of egging them on,

just going, you know, saying, come on, shout something out

and I'll try and do some material on it, or come up with something,

at least live in the moment.

Someone shouted out Pavlova. Hey, welcome back, I've missed you.

-Pavlova!

-Oh! Pavlova!

Now isn't that a delicious meringue-based dessert invented in,

oh, where was it invented?

All New Zealanders at some point in school

learn the history of Pavlova, because it's our...you need to know,

so if any unassuming Aussie swans in and just goes, yeah,

Pavlova is ours, we can lay it down with the facts,

that no, it was created by a New Zealand chef for a visiting ballerina.

-It's a New Zealand dish.

-Aussies made the Pavlova!

-Aussies did not make the fucking Pavlova.

Man, it's kicking off!

That's fighting talk.

-That shit needs to be dealt with.

-OK.

And at this point, Jarred is not onstage because, well,

it needs to be dealt with.

SHOUTING AND APPLAUSE

At this point, I think I'm on top of him.

CHEERING

We had a bit of a wrestle on the ground in the darkness.

But by the time the light got to us, we were both on our feet.

I'm struggling to get back on the stage at this point.

Because of eating too much Pavlova.

Fuck you, Australia. Yeah! I took you down, man! Pavlova is ours.

Yeah, we were fighting over Russell Crowe. He turned out to be a BLEEP.

You can have him.

It hasn't gone how I thought it would. I'll be honest with you.

I didn't I'd get into a fight with a man over Pavlova,

but, I don't know if you've ever seen two men fight over a dessert.

But, you have tonight! So lock that in the memory bank!

You see! Late 'N' Live does have culture!

You learn the history of the Pavlova and you can also learn that

you can find a dancing horse outside Andalucia.

Case in point, Greg Davies, We Are Klang.

# Here he comes now

# Look at him move

# Look at him glide!

He'll do robotics. He'll do robotics. He'll do robotics.

You know, each Late 'N' Live was always an event

when Late 'N' Live was at its best, I think.

You know, proper live comedy.

-You do the running man, you do the running man.

-Here we are in 2007.

That's Marek Larwood. Or it could be a horse.

-I don't know, I can't decide!

-We do the Charleston! We do the Charleston!

Marek really hated it under that horse's head,

because it was incredibly hot. It's a rubber horse's mask,

and he was never more than a heartbeat away from collapsing.

And we knew that. And so we just made it worse.

-He does a stage dive.

-He does a stage dive! On your feet!

I don't know whether we forced him to,

but we convinced Marek it was a good idea for him to stage dive into the crowd wearing a rubber horse's head.

Right to the back of the room!

He was just being tossed about, and the thing is,

I know Marek so well I could see that he was really frightened.

He was really frightened. Because his body was so stiff. HE LAUGHS

Please don't kill our horsey!

-Please don't kill our horsey.

-'He was furious.'

And after the gigs, he would come off and go,

"what the fuck are you playing at?!" Brilliant!

-CHEERING

-Apparently, Tonto had a potty mouth as well.

Sometimes at Late 'N' Live,

you don't even have to be on the bill to get roped into the mayhem,

as John Bishop found out when he dropped in on a night off.

Before long, he was up against compere Patrick Monahan

and a crowd surf race. At three o'clock in the morning!

CHEERING

When you crowd surf, people just put hands everywhere,

and they're grabbing bits, and they're pushing and it was hilarious.

And you just go, someone just grabbed me nuts,

what are they doing there?!

People are just grabbing like they're in a fruit shop.

And I'm just looking around, and I can just see his face.

You can see he is being touched all over, you can see him going...!

Who won the race?

Well, listen, John Bishop used to play for Liverpool football club,

he's an athlete, and I'm from Teesside!

So the natural winner was me. I murdered him!

I'm a professional at this.

We finish tonight's show, and you have been warned,

with a Late 'N' Live evening where it all goes a little off-piste.

Scott Capurro is a great comic and a genuinely lovely man.

And this is why I'll never lend him my jumper.

Wow, look at this. What the fuck's going on?

There's stripping and one-legged people, look at you all.

I'm from California, you know, shows end at 11:00, people go home,

they have kids. There's security guards to handle audiences like that.

I've never seen anything like it. It was really, it was horrifying to walk into.

It's nice to be here. It's very scary though, because my mother called me.

She's freaked out about my being in Britain.

"Honey, I'm so nervous". She lives in California.

"I'm so terrified. You're going to be killed by a terrorist in the U of K area".

The U of K area. What is it with Americans? They want to run the world,

but they're not quite sure where anything really is!

'My jokes are well thought out by me, at least, so I'm thinking,'

this is scripted material, I'll get through it, I'm sure it will be fine.

And it wasn't enough for them, they wanted a bit more.

And if an audience wants more at two o'clock in the morning,

that's kind of a time to start worrying.

Do you see that jumper, innocently lying on the stage?

That one.

Piss on that jumper!

-What?

-Piss on that jumper?! Is that your fetish?

Piss on the jumper.

Why? I'm going to tell a joke though.

There's a point, where it's like, how can I push this, what can I do?

It's Edinburgh after all, everyone is looking for a story. You know.

-Maybe this is it.

-What? On that jumper?

At this point, Russell Howard

and Adam Hills are backstage thinking, what?!

And then it's the moment of, I can't get his back.

There's nothing I can do now. I have to piss on the jumper.

You've called for it.

CHEERING

I can't believe I'm getting my cock out. What's wrong with me?

I'm fluffing it. I'm fluffing my penis.

I've got to get it up little bit. Hold on.

I've got to warm it before I piss on it. All right?

Did I piss on it? Oh, my God!

All right.

It's just the nonchalance. That's just it.

Yeah, watching him do it now. He looks over at us.

This is it. This is it! Look! Oh, that's the best!

It's just the little tilt of the head!

There it is! There's the look!

Yeah, I'm pissing on a jumper!

I'm really glad you asked because I totally had to go too! It's funny!

We're on the same wavelength, because I'm thinking,

I've really got to take a piss, and there you are!

The audience are now fully on his side. And they're all cheering!

There's that moment, as a comedian, where in amongst all that,

you go, it's brilliant, I don't even have to do my act!

CHEERING

It's really, really wet too, everybody!

Oh, oh!

Awww!

-He threw it into the crowd!

-Now, how do we top that?! OK!

Oh, yes, and he said what every comic would then think,

how do we top that? You don't. You get offstage.

Have a lovely evening, enjoy yourselves, thank you very much!

So, if you ask Scott how the gig went,

he'll say it was a piece of, you know!

Actually, this is disgusting, can we get the cleaner out to clean this piss off.

CHEERING

-Cheers, mate!

-Enter Jimmy Carr!

-That's good. Yeah.

It was weird, it was Jimmy's idea, that's what was great.

But it looks like I've kind of summoned him on,

but he said, I'll go and clean the piss.

I said, are you sure, and this is just as Jimmy became Mr TV,

and there he is, on stage, mopping up piss.

That's why he's a star!

Cos he ties things together and cleans them up.

I just leave open wounds gaping.

And 8 Out Of 10 Cats can use a mop!

Next time, we find out what stand-ups

from around the world really think of a Scottish audience.

Just like loads of mad, scaldy looking Scottish people

like they're in a boiling pot going, what the fuck is that?!

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd