A nice chat with Diane Spencer: Edinburgh Fringe interviews

 

I was at Latitude and it was appalling. Lovely festival, don't get me wrong, but someone who has never seen my act wanted to give me a shot and booked me to MC the literary tent. I was basically the human tornado: I wasn't allowed to stand on the stage, I had to be in front of it because they were moving the scenery. So I walked on, the entire crowd got up because they'd finished watching the thing that was on, and I was just stood there talking to myself into a microphone. Plus I didn't want to do my material because it was on Sunday between 12 and 4 and I just didn't want to put the wrong vibe into the families that might have been there. 

 

Well, I think it would be better to just have a screen, or an announcer like with trains. A disembodied voice should just go 'And the next programme will start in 15 minutes'. It's too soul-destroying, to be honest.

 

I don't think I'm in a position to suggest anything to the literary tent people. I know my place and it is not to suggest things.

 

I love it, because it's a step forward technically but a step into a more concise way of being myself. Plus, it has a narrative. I watch a lot of films and saw Spanish horror film Rec 1 and 2, and the two films overlap in terms of time. When you see Rec 2, a new group of people walk into the building and see blood on the stairs, and if you've seen the first one it's like, oh God, I know why that's there, don't go up the stairs! And I thought that was brilliant, because in the first film there were noises that were unexplained. In the second film those noises are explained. It was just great.

So what I've done is take a leaf out of that book. With any art form it's wise and useful to look at other art forms and see how they construct what they do. So this all-pervading madness follows on directly in narrative terms from the show in 2010, Lost In The Mouth Specific, although you don't have to have seen it to get it. But if you have, a get an extra warm feeling.

 

Yeah, you should try flyering with that title. Actually it was quite good because there were people going, 'what?' and I could lean in and I'd have them for an extra couple of seconds. Anyway, In Lost In The Mouth Specific I had part one where I wanted to be an astronaut and I didn't succeed, and in part two I wanted to do clean comedy for children and I didn't succeed. 

 

That's fine.

 

You have sometimes got to learn that there are some things you're naturally good at and some that you're not. It all depends on where personal motivation lies. 

 

It's the journey home from the gig, and I go off at tangents as I did on the journey home from a gig where I've got blood down my front and I'd just done a gig in front of a group of war veterans. The blood was there for innocent reasons: I'd been constipated and I did such a massive shit that I had to strain really hard, and strained so hard that I burst a blood vessel in my nose and blood just splattered down my front. So that's where Lost In The Mouth Specific finished, just after that gig, because that was my try-out gig to do clean comedy for the kids, and I failed. So that's where that show ended. This show starts with me walking out of that gig in the same circumstances: I've been flying for 28 hours and am exhausted, I've got blood down my front, I've torn myself a new one, and I need to get home. It's about that journey.

 

Yes, it is. That muscle does not retract as quickly as you would like it, not in those circumstances.

 

No, it's like when you pull any muscle. I was wearing little knickers that day. If you had seen me naked you would have thought, ooh, guitar with only one string.

 

I have given away so much already...there's madness in everything that happens on the way home. Really, it's like I travel through the twilight zone to get home. It's all to do with the people I meet and what memories they spark of, and because of the memories they spark off in me, what my reaction is to them. Which then seems like I'm the mad one and it's an all-pervading madness, because they appear mad to me and they spark off these mad memories, and I try to retaliate in ways I think are appropriate, and then they think I'm mad. 

 

Madness is a spectrum. There's the outright crazy shit, and then there's the stuff normal people wouldn't do...for example, some people would say it was madness to leave my job, friends and England to move to New Zealand to be with the man I'd been dating for six months. So some people might say that's madness. 

I've had moments where when I was in Melbourne in 2010, I had to go into hospital because I had a throat abscess, and I had to hold my own throat open as the doctor cut open my throat. He poked around inside it and I knew no-one else there. After he finished and said you can go and have a coffee now, I thought, I'm not even going to bother getting dressed. And I just grabbed my drip, with my backless hospital gown, and walked to the cafeteria. And I thought, I'm a lady with a drip and just pushed to the front of the queue and went, 'I need a coffee', and it came out all wrong because of the drugs I was on and I'd just had my throat cut. Some people might say that's madness.

You know what, Edinburgh people aren't as mad as they think they are. I know they think, i'm really crazy and mad and they do lots of partying. It's not. Real madness, I've been out with some scary people and done some scary things, and those things border on genuine madness. And to be honest there's quite a few dark places of my soul that don't need to be shared. The madness I'm talking about...I think Edinburgh's cute because it's got these people who are predominantly middle class who have had supportive parents who said, you can be artistic and follow this, and there isn't a massive pressure to earn money. I used to be a secondary school teacher so I've seen the pressure some people put on to their children to get an income into their family where any kind of aspiration has been pushed out of them. It is a deeply sad thing. But it does mean that Edinburgh are full of a certain kind of people, people who have never truly looked into the abyss, contemplated that jump from the ninth floor of a building. Equally, I'm a comedian, I'm out to make people smile, and laugh, and just have a really nice story.

There are some things with genuine madness you don't want to know about. Fuck genuine madness, it's genuinely scary. My madness is the limit of what most people have experienced, just above their limit. I don't think proper madness is something that will make people laugh. The middle class who say they do random madness, come up to you and say, do you want to swap a flyer, swapsies! I want to punch them in their fucking little faces. I have never felt so violent as I have done on the Royal Mile and it's nothing to do with the normal people, it's everything to do with some cocky little shithead who comes up to me in their burlesque outfit, which is inappropriate considering their teacher has probably put them in it, and go, swapsies! And I go, okay, I'm actually trying to make money from what I'm doing because I know what it feels like to be borderline homeless and have no money because I'm in a country where I don't know anybody. So you know what, fuck off. So I'm very grumpy on the Mile. I usually make lots of enemies with the public school children which doesn't bother me. 

 

Oh, I love it. I love it because it's the closest thing I get to having my job as a regular kind of job in the way that...I'm at that point in my career where I'm travelling all over the country to do gigs. Sometimes I get regular gigs that I can go to, do my set, come away, make notes, and so on, and that's actually quite nice when you've got two or three gigs in the same place over a weekend. I have a really good routine – get up, do emails, flyer, do my show, then sit down think about it and adjust it, have a cup of tea at 8pm and then go home. I will go out drinking maybe three times max, because there's such a good combination of people and it's really good fun. I don't understand why people do decide to just get trollied. If you've got something to celebrate go for it; but it goes back to the madness question. I've drunk so much in my life that I got regular blackouts and I know that I don't need to do that and I'm quite happy being cautious. I love being cautious.

 

You know what, that's exactly it, it's the routine. And it's a brilliant time. The people I don't get on with are the people who have a very different agenda to me. They're the people who might be seen to be there, and go I'm doing the Fringe festival, and they play chorus person number six, they haven't bothered to learn half their lines, and they're just trying to get as drunk as they can when the teacher's not looking.

 

The way I see it is everything I talk about has happened. There's a very clear, raw connection between my experience and my discussion with the audience. 

I'll look at what I'm doing and think, maybe that's too much. The first time I did an hour, in New Zealand in 2009, one of the reviewers said there was shock laughter, shock value, cringe laughter in challenging comedy. And I was like, really? It really surprised me because I just talk about what I think is funny. If I feel happy to say it, I think people will generally be happy and okay to listen to it. I don't do much material where I mention celebrities: maybe one bit on Cheryl Cole and that's it, and that's only because she genuinely managed to annoy me enough that I feel completely at ease saying the jokes out loud.

 

I went into Boots and she was endorsing no less than seven different products. 

 

I want to go see Tony Law, Jim Smallman, and I want to go see old favourites – whatever Simon Munnery's doing if he's there, the new Boy With Tape show, I love it. I always make my mind up at the last minute.

 

The plan is to just keep writing awesome funny stuff, keep finding different mediums that it works in, because it's that simple. I'm working on a science fiction thing that even if it gets commissioned won't appear for another two years. Just continuing the stream of making people laugh, and being happy. 

 

Because it's funny, and because they will laugh a lot and it's something that will make them laugh and potentially scream, and potentially recoil in horror. It's a storied show and we all go through it together and come out of it better people.