Finding the comedy when your audience walks out on you...
After a successful debut tour, comic John Tothill is back on the road with This Must Be Heaven, a show in which he finds the comedy in the tale of a cruise ship tour which absolutely bombed and also in the time he nearly died.
The tour takes in Brighton Komedia on Wednesday, February 25.
“The cruise ship was worse than you could possibly imagine,” John says. “I signed with a new agent that I love and they asked what would I like to do. I said all I wanted to do was to do comedy full time. I told them to book me for anything and in fairness that's what they did. They signed me up for an aged cruise ship to the Norwegian fjords.
“There was a big group of people and it was a full theatre every night and it was almost a full walkout every night.
“I think to walk out of a show is everyone's right. I think it's rude if you do it ostentatiously but the fact is that 300 people can't leave the theatre subtly! But I think the thing with cruise ships is that nobody has made an effort to see you. You're almost part of the buffet. You're almost an amenity.
“And they have already paid too much to go on the cruise and now they are discovering that they have to pay for so many extras as well, and suddenly you've got this whole group of very, very aggrieved men and women who have grown up in some of the greatest luxury that anyone has ever known and who are now the grumpiest people that you could ever meet!
“But it came to the point where so many people walked out of my show that I could see there was almost an honesty there. I looked at them and they looked at me, and we realised that this was someone else’s fault.”
It was hardly the perfect match: “It was all down to whoever actually booked me!”
Also featuring in the show will be John's exploding appendix: “When I was performing last year’s show I got this awful stomach ache but I refused to go to the hospital. I thought I was just being a drama queen which I know I am. Also I was worried about losing shows and losing money. So I kept going but after about seven days I left the stage and got straight in an Uber and went to Edinburgh Infirmary and said I needed to speak to somebody about this. They looked at me and you could see that look of concern and then a slight smile because they had something unusual in front of them. They were slightly delighted to be presented with something was not just a ruptured appendix but in their words an appendix that had been completely obliterated. They told me that my appendix had completely fallen apart and that I was just probably days away from dying.
“When I came out of it all I was a bit like Scrooge on Christmas Day but that only lasted six or seven weeks before you get back to your usual life.”
As for that debut tour: “It was great. It was a lot of fun. The debut show is a funny thing to reflect on. I realised that touring around the UK is not particularly glamorous. From so many places you can go back to your own place each night.
“But it was great. I found it genuinely affirming that there are still people in this country that just want to come out to things. You feel like audiences are an endangered species because it's so easy to sit at home and watch Netflix and because things are so expensive these days but it was so fantastic to go out there and see audiences there that had come to see me, a small-scale act. I was mostly playing the comedy clubs in the studio spaces and it means that you really get to meet people and it was just lovely. There's nothing I enjoy more than turning up in a new town and doing a show.”