“Got a knock at the door, 20 to 6 in the morning, so I pad down the stairs in my dressing gown with an erection and it’s John, my next-door neighbour at the door. And it’s bloody freezing.
“‘Peter, will you give us a push?’
“‘John, it’s 20 to 6 in the morning for God’s sake.’
“‘I know, Peter, but I really need a push.’
“So I’m like, oh John, go on then. Give me a minute. So I head upstairs, get dressed, come back down and I can’t see him anywhere.
“I’m shouting ‘John, John, where are you’ – and then I look over his fence and he’s there on the swing…”
Comedians don’t become awesome overnight. In a world of heckling it’s more important than ever to hone your craft, time your delivery to a tee, refine every gag and generally get your act slicker than Lewis Hamilton’s tyres on a bone-dry circuit.
“Me nan’s got Sky Plus. I showed her how to use it – how you can do things like fast forward live telly.
“I told her she could pause TV when she went off to make a brew. ‘But what’s everyone else going to do?’ she said.
“Me nan thinks Bob in Bermondsey’s going to be hanging around waiting for Holby City to start again while she’s rummaging in the back of the cupboard for the Rich Tea.”
He’s been on the comedy scene for 15 years or more, but Peter Kay‘s still mastering the arcane art of jokemongery. Being the perfectionist he is, he’s doing a four-night warm-up tour at the low-key Bury Met theatre. We were there after getting lucky by hitting the internet at precisely the second Big Ben bonged 9am one wintry morning some weeks ago.
Kay’s trademark is his down-home humour. He tells stories we all share. Dad on his first foreign holiday (in Spain: garlic – bread? GARLIC BREAD? I don’t want any of that foreign muck; you’re coming down the Red Lion with me, son. Let’s get some steak and kidney pie and chips, watch some Corrie…), dental disasters, (the drill sounds like you’ve got an episode of Junior Kickstart going off in your mouth) running to the chip shop in your nightwear (How the f**k can you run so fast in your slippers?) and modern television (You Are What You Eat. I’m a Twix…).
On tour he drills deep into the hearts of the nation because his routine has gone under the microscope. It’s almost scientific. We talked to the director of the Met tonight: he’s been to every performance on the teaser tour, and told us every show has been totally different. Which tells me that the voice recorder Kay carries on to stage, combined with microphones doubtless installed in the audience, tell him exactly which jokes are going to get him the biggest laughs in the country’s most expansive (and expensive) arenas.
We won’t go into the fact that he uses a teleprompter throughout the show, because it’s doubtless there only while he’s testing out his minddump, a maelstrom of quick-fire observations which, for us, peaked when he started picking out lyrics of classic hits that sound like ‘cock’ and ‘bone me’ and suchforth.
He also used the taster tour as a chance to raise cash for charity. Proceeds to the Haiti recovery were promised, and in return he got priceless feedback to propel him to even greater levels of adulation throughout the next 15 months packing houses and travelling thousands of miles to ‘buy my mum some patio furniture’.
The key to Kay’s success – and the key to anyone who wants to be a success – is checking and crowdsourcing.
You’ve got products and services that always need improving. Your customers need ever-more refined attention. Wouldn’t it be dynamite if you had a way to develop your products to address the ever-increasing customer need?
As a business owner you have a captive audience of dozens, potentially hundreds of people who – for their benefit, particularly – want you to excel. Your customers are virtual board members. Treat them well, flatter them often, and they’re obedient disciples of your brand and purveyors of your future success.
Test everything with them, reinforcing that your efforts are on their behalf.
- If you have new stuff not yet ready to market, host a special customer evening. Clothe the ‘exclusive event’ in intrigue, send out email invitations stressing their VIP status. Badge invites individually with ticket numbers, no more than two digits wide, to enhance the value and show them how much you care.
- If you have existing product you need to enhance, offer discounts and invite clients to become members of a test panel. Kay charged £15 a punter to see him in warm-up mode. In an intimate setting, despite the act itself only being an hour long, we all felt honoured for a glimpse at close quarters of the man who, weeks later, would be visible only on huge screens beyond great seas of fans at auditoriums the size of towns.
Test, test, and test again. And like Kay, you’ll soon be laughing all the way to the bank…
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