A leftwing audience, a rightwing audience, and a gig I didn't know about

St Albans - lovely show, redoing my Edinburgh from last year, Back To The Futon. Due to an administrative error, I don't know I was booked in to do this till that afternoon (I'd planned a nice evening in the pub with Mr Kronenbourg and Ms Artois), so it's handy I checked my email and suddenly received directions of how to get to St Albans' Maltings Theatre, because when I got there, they've got it all printed up nice in their seasonal booklet. Normally you can be replaced at gigs last minute, but when a paying audience are expecting an hour show about Back To The Future that's been in their local theatre programme since Christmas, it's difficult to find a comedian last minute to wax lyrical for 60 minutes about such a specific time-travel comedy caper.

Peterborough - two odd gigs. A small hotel in the market town of Oundle had us do half an hour of basically corporate comedy (at standard non-corporate circuit rates - well done, Mr Promoter) to 50-something golf club members. This audience didn't want to be told anything new or be taken on flights of fancy, but were delighted to hear anything they'd read in Daily Mail reinforced a bit more.

The second Peterborough gig I didn't actually do, but I offered to help out my mate Tony Vino, who was running a Fair Trade gig in some organic ethnic hippie left-wing spliff-passing cafe... basically everything that the audience at the first Peterborough gig would have loved to use as targets now they couldn't fox-hunt any more. I didn't make it on stage at the hippie gig, because they had a band on who over-ran, delivering what they called 'experimental music', but which we all recognised as 'feedback'. On stage they were twiddling a sound machine to make these hideous noises, and the whole scene looked like someone fiddling with a car battery trying to make it work, but in the process somehow finding the noise of the devil. One of the sound effects they happed upon really just sounded like a curry coming out in a bad bad way.