I live in a village called Calverton in Nottinghamshire. Occasionally, I write completely made-up things about it.
THE CALVERTON VILLAGE BOBBY has been found safe and well and will return to duty next week.
The bobby, whose name ironically is Bobby, was discovered in the beer cellar at The Gleaners where he’d been tied up since August 1953 following a darts match.
It’s been a combination of beer from a leaky barrel, left-overs flung down from Sunday dinners and a proper old-fashioned Blighty spirit that’s kept him ticking over.
‘I look forward to serving the people of Calverton again,’ says Bobby.
Bobby’s former widow, Gladys, is not his widow anymore and is his wife. However, these days she is also the wife of someone called Derek, which is expected to cause some confusion at bedtimes.
Before my script came along, and I really had no idea about this when I wrote it, and I’m not sure my script even counts as ‘official,’ the last traceable Nottinghamshire Robin Hood mummers script appears to have been recorded by a chap called Dean S. Reynolds Hole in 1901. And Mr Hole’s just recording it, in a book called Then And Now, which suggests the script was probably written before 1901.
The script is here if you want to have a butcher’s. I must admit, my script includes a lot more winky jokes.
So have I really, and entirely inadvertently, written the first Nottinghamshire Robin Hood mummers script in at least 122 years? Surely I can’t claim this. Surely there must have been another one, maybe written in 1972, scribbled in a notebook by some fella called Brian or Big Ken, performed only once at Bobbers Mill, or Long Clawson, or on the bus, by the Papplewick Obby Orse Players (POOPS) to an audience of nine men and three ducks.
Surely someone remembers something Robin Hoody and mummery taking place between 1901 and 2023 in Nottinghamshire. Not just at Long Clawson. Is there a Short Clawson? Must remember to check. Surely this can’t be a massive piece of history we’re creating in Sherwood next week.
And … if I claim that my script is the first official Nottinghamshire mummers play about Robin Hood to be a) written and b) performed in this county in more than a century, will I be in trouble with the mummers mafia?
Is there a mummers mafia? Surely there can’t be a mummers mafia. Will they come out to arrest me for making lofty claims? Will I ever be seen again if they do?
Anyway. We’re on next week (Sunday 15 October) performing the Calverton Robin Hood Play. Free performances take place at 1.00 pm and 3.00 pm.
All of us here at CRAPPPS shall make no lofty claims about our script unless we are (far too easily) persuaded to drink too much and let such lofty claims blurt out, at which point the law enforcement wing of the mummers mafia will surely come out to decry us and demand we cease and desist. I imagine this law enforcement wing will be called The Cidermen.
Either way, it’s been really good knowing you, and you haven’t seen me. Right?
I WAS A STAND-UP COMIC in the 1990s. I started out in Manchester, where I was a drama degree student for three years (1993-1996), and then moved to London where I avoided starving for four years (1997-2000) by temping in offices for not much money in the daytime and telling jokes for even less money at night-time.
There were highlights and lowlights. In Manchester, after months of doing open spots, I did a great show at the Frog and Bucket with Johnny Vegas compering. On the back of that show, Johnny got the management to book me as a billed support act in my own right. This meant some proper cash and (gasp!) my name on the poster, which made me think I’d arrived.
I became a regular at the now demolished Hardy’s Well pub in Fallowfield / Rusholme, which was Manchester’s main student area. At the time it was a regular haunt of Caroline Aherne and Dave Gorman, both already established comedy names, and a then virtually unknown Lucy Porter, who I gigged with many times. Some of the best gigs of my life took place there, which made me think I’d arrived.
Down in London, my first open spot at The Comedy Store in Leicester Square went splendidly, as did my first open spot at Jongleurs in Battersea. This was back in the days before those godawful gong show style gigs became the entry level offering at the big clubs for newcomer comics like me. I did some of those gong shows. They were hideous.
But I did get the odd decent booking. I got to be on a bill with Jo Brand and Harry Hill (somewhere in Clapham, if memory serves) and a before-he-was-famous Jimmy Carr at a club in Aldgate which was called the Arts Café when I was resident compere there, and Fur Coat No Knickers when I wasn’t resident compere there anymore.
I also ran a club with my pal Steve Keyworth at Kentish Town’s Lion and Unicorn pub, which attracted headliners like Al Murray, Ross Noble and Noel Fielding, with Steve and I sharing the compering.
But London, I have to say, was mostly hell on toast for me as a comic, and the bad gigs outnumbered the good ones. I often received abuse at some awful Firkin pub in God knows where (I forget the name of the pub and which bit of the city, but let’s just call it the Frick Off and Firkin in London’s Arse End) for the dubious prospect of £30 cash in hand a week to compere. They made us do the comedy in the main pub, interrupting people who were eating. We had to shout at people all night because the radio mic never worked properly. This was very bad, and because I was the compere, I had to keep coming on to introduce other acts who’d run away and leave me to suffer alone when they’d done their time. There was very little solidarity among comics at Firkin gigs back then.
I did the Edinburgh Fringe twice. The first time was 1996, when I reached the live heats of Channel 4’s So You Think You’re Funny stand-up competition at The Gilded Balloon, having previously won the Manchester qualifier at a club run by a fella called Cuddly Dudley (true story).
Edinburgh’s Gilded Balloon clearly didn’t think I was funny after I bounded onto the stage during my heat, yanked the mic out of its stand and watched it fall apart in my hands. It was awful. I couldn’t recover from this mishap and stumbled through my act, just wanting to go home because I knew I’d blown my big chance. I had to stay in the city for two more weeks to do other shows. People would point at me (other acts mainly, which was cruel) and ask: ‘Isn’t that Broken Mic Guy?’
By 1998, when I appeared at the Edinburgh Fringe for the second time, my confidence had been shot from bombing in front of London audiences. By then, I’d discovered I was much better at writing plays and scripts for radio, so it was starting to dawn on me how much easier it would be for me to do those things instead.
The swansong gig might have been at Club Fandango in Plymouth. There’s no point asking me. Most of that period in my life I’ve deleted from my brain. But I remember that the fire alarm went off in the hotel next door to the club while I was sat in the bath, and they made me troop out into the street naked save for a towel. I had to stay in Plymouth one more night to do my show. People would point at me (other acts mainly, which was cruel) and ask: ‘Isn’t that Soggy Towel Guy?’
So, it may have been in the car home from Plymouth that I quit stand-up comedy, with no evidence to record my having been entirely inconsistent at it, with social media and YouTube not invented at the time for me to check back on now. A lucky reprieve, I think.
So that was the 1990s. In the current millennium, I have come out of retirement only once for a gig at a big club (Comedy Store in Leeds – counselling has since helped) and a few compere slots locally in Nottingham to support my mate Ash who organises comedy and cabaret events. I’ve never fully explained to Ash why I’ve tried to avoid doing actual stand-up at his comedy nights, and why I get twitchy around microphones. If he reads this he’ll finally understand, and not put me in charge of any more technical rehearsals.
I’ve never fully committed any of the above genuine traumas to writing, until now.
And I’ve pretty much avoided stand-up ever since.
Until now.
I guess there’s always been a part of me that’s wanted to lay some personal demons to rest. I’m proud of what I’ve achieved as a writer and performer since the bad old days as an occasionally adequate stand-up comic. I’ve written and performed in some critically acclaimed stuff, picked up an award or two, and had one of my plays (PHYS ED) go down a storm at Edinburgh. Queuing up to watch my actor mate Nick Osmond perform this show to a sell-out crowd at the Assembly Rooms was one especially proud moment.
But I can’t help myself. I’ve always fancied another pop at stand-up, on my terms, for old time’s sake.
There’s eight weeks of training with a professional stand-up comic, which is sweet. Boot camp with other L-plate comedians (*1) starts mid-September, with a proper gig at the end of it at Nottingham’s Pryzm venue on Sunday 12 November.
This gig will be around a week after my 50th birthday and something like 28 years since my first ever gig as the spotty student comedian in Manchester you see pictured above. I’ve just remembered my first gig was at a pub called The Thirsty Scholar. I’ve googled the pub, and it doesn’t look like it’s been demolished yet.
This article was written for This Week at St Mary’s – Sunday 18 June 2023.
ON EARTH as it is in heaven. Me, a scruffy infant school pupil, speaking those words for the first time. It was Mrs Barnden, or maybe Mrs Moses (I can’t remember), who taught us the Lord’s Prayer. The words of the entire prayer are burned indelibly into my brain now, some forty-four years and several thousand recitals later.
I’d always thought the line in the prayer made it our job to make earth be like heaven now. While we were still alive. Others think this line is not a now thing, more a future thing, foreseeing a time when every tear is wiped from our eyes, when there is no more death or mourning or crying or pain, when the old order of things has passed away.
I have a Christian faith. But the concept of there being a time when all earth is restored, a time where humanity will see paradise again, is one too enormous for my tiny brain to assimilate right now. The resurrection is mind blowing enough.
A promise of any such spectacular future doesn’t make living in the now easier. It doesn’t make the task of processing devastation and tragedy on our doorstep any simpler, or trying to be any kind of hope and gospel-bearer to people impacted by that devastation feel any less impossible, when the raw evidence of their eyes, ears, and senses may well lead them to say: ‘Where is God? And how can he be a loving God when there is this?’
This is Nottingham. June 13th 2023. I have no answers and words feel puny. Something happened at the heart of our city today, and it hurts so much. How glorious, how magnificent, this beautiful city is. How much stronger it is than what happened to it today, though it won’t remember it for a time.
The future doesn’t seem to matter today. Not to me. But I know in my gut that we should never stop fighting to make earth like heaven now, while real heaven waits in the wings.
Simon Carter 
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