It Is Time To Stop All Of Your Sobbing About Comedy Competitions

In my day there wasn’t wall to wall comedy beamed at us 24/7. The BBC couldn’t give a tinker’s cuss about what was happening anywhere outside of under their noses.

There were no million selling betamax tapes of Colin Crompton live at the Wheel Tappers and Shunters; Derek and Clive Live, Billy Connolly and Monty Python elpees were the holy grail of comedy reproduction, unless you taped Open All Hours on your Phillips cassette player.

In the beginning there wasn’t a competition anywhere in sight. No one gave a fuck.

Actually, that’s a lie, The Big Fun Club, our comedy double act won the Barclays Bank Buskers Award in 1989 – and we didn’t even know we’d been entered in the competition.

We got our picture on the front cover Herald and Post which was a bit embarrassing as we were signing on at the time. We said nowt. No one noticed.

We spent the fifty quid on tabs and a return ticket to London on the National Express to build on this success. No one gave a fuck, no one noticed so, pockets stuffed full of wagon wheels, we came home.

We entered another comedy competition a couple of years later, the Hackney Empire New Act of the Year 1991. We got through to the semi-finals, which either shows how good we were, or how shit the competition was.

Not wanting to do the same act again, for fear of boring the judges, we shook things up a bit by performing the whole act in just our pants. ‘There ARE children here’ was the heckle that probably lost us the competition, so we came home. Again.

Obviously we bitched about all the other less deserving acts on the bill, the eventual winner, who ever they were, they were all shit because they beat us. The wankers.

It’s part and parcel of being in a competition, slagging off the other acts. Every one pretends they care about all the other turns, every one gets all Mandela, because no one likes a sore loser – apart from the sore losers who huddle together hating the winner.

These days you can’t move for comedy competitions, and as a result, the streets and cyberspace are packed full of resentful losers, friends of losers and people who just enjoy bitching on line, adding fire to the flaming.

Winning a comedy competition could be a short cut to ‘100% Guaranteed Success!!!!!’ Every programme maker, festival director, arts correspondent and posh totty from Avalon wants you, everybody knows your name, held aloft on the shoulders of giants!

In reality though, no one gives a tinker’s cuss if so- and-so won that and so-and-so won this. What matters is the moment you step out on stage every night.

That’s the beauty of a meritocracy. The competition is a blip, a hiccup. The real battle is lost and won on the boards.

Don’t be begrudging someone getting a foot on the ladder; competitions create more rankle than cheers and do you really think a stag do from Clitheroe dressed as Nazis gives a fuck about you winning a grand followed by a script writing meeting with someone at Radio 4?

They don’t. They just want to hear a knob joke. Save your energies for polishing your material, and stop entering competitions. They’re a fools errand.