I ended up doing quite a bit of stand-up comedy the other year. A couple of my mates started doing it first, and I joined in. It’s fun to have go at stuff, and I like to keep myself busy.

My act basically involved getting really drunk and seeing what what happened; imagine Johnny Vegas if he was a well-spoken southerner with half the mass, floppy hair, long limbs, and a pair of glasses. Sometimes I’d plan a couple jokes in advance, but audiences seemed to prefer the improvised chaos of an unpredictable college librarian downing beers and shouting into a microphone. 

Things went surprisingly well. Pope Lonergan and Michael Wheeler invited me to get involved with their comedy night PINTS, and I quickly found myself appearing alongside circuit professionals and next-big-name types.

The trouble started when I stopped getting drunk. Entertaining people is really hard work. For as long as you’re on the stage, the quality of everyone’s evening depends on what you choose to say or do. That responsibility didn’t really phase me after 8 pints, but I’d started to do too many gigs for that to be a healthy act to continue. Once a month would have been fine, but at one point PINTS made the questionable decision of organising about 25 comedy nights over 30 days. There just wasn’t the demand for it our audience dissipated. 

Standing sober in front of a microphone, performing to an audience that you’d hoped would be about 50, but turned out to be 6 people, is a difficult experience to put yourself through. I had an excruciating gig once. I was supposed to get paid £50 for doing 10 minutes, but I was too embarrassed to ask for the money at the end.

I’d tried to write a Bud Lite version of my drunken act. It came in the form of an ambling monologue on the subject of Rolf Harris. I’d invented a childhood friend called Dan Sport, who was very short and came from Cameroon. I nicknamed him Tiny Cameroon Dan Sport. Which I thought was funny because it sounds a bit like the Rolf Harris Song, Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport.

The audience didn’t find that funny at all. The audience consisted of my two sisters, two couples on a night out, and a couple of other comedians. The story climaxed with me strangling Tiny Cameroon Dan Sport with a pair of three-legged trousers because I resented him for introducing me to a former hero who turned out to be a Yewtree.

Nobody found that funny either. Then I sang Millennium Prayer by Cliff Richard. I might have pulled that off with a bit of cider in me, but I lacked the Dutch courage to do the song any justice. 

Fortunately I’d brought along a water melon. An absolute monster of a fruit. It weighed more than the average toddler. I’d bought it a couple of days before on a drunken night out because I was impressed by the size of it. It cost me £15. I took it to the gig because I thought that people might find it interesting. They did. We cut it up and shared to out at the end. Everyone went home with doggy bags. They might not have got their money’s worth in laughter, but they got it in water melon.