CityLife

End of a chapter for Hardy

Jeremy Hardy

WHEN Jeremy Hardy’s show rolls into The Lowry this weekend, it’ll be the end of the road for him. Well, this tour anyway. Though, he hasn’t actually got any gigs booked in for next year at all.

“I need to get a book written next year. but it means it’s the first time in 25 years I’ve got no gigs, quite weird. You get scared that nobody will book you again. There is that thing that you think one day they might just say, oh, bored of you,” Hardy bemoans.

“New comedians keep coming up all the time, which is very irritating and people keep encouraging them, not trying to thwart them,” he sighs. managing quite effectively, albeit tongue in cheek, to sound like he’s 147 rather than 47.

“I did a gig in Brighton recently and I bumped into somebody I know after the gig thinking they’d been to my gig and they’d been to see somebody else. I thought that’s terrible! Even people I know are going to see other comedians.”

Always a giggle

It’s always a giggle chatting with Hardy, the comedian’s deadpan wit isn’t just reserved for his stand up or radio appearances on The News Quiz, I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue and the like.

His entertaining gripes are in evidence in his conversation, too, an ongoing one over the last few chats we’ve had has been the trauma of travelling to and from gigs when you’ve been gigging for over two decades.

He started out travelling by train but last time we spoke he was getting lost driving himself to gigs.

“I was on the road and you nearly made me crash. Travelling across the countryside getting very lost,” he recalls. But he doesn’t like all the people on trains, he’s a bit shy. “I get quite, um… I don’t know, when I’m on stage a lot I hate the feeling that people are looking at me,” he confesses, laughing at the irony of it.

Still the next gig he has coming up is in Blackheath, just down the road from where he lives in South London. “That’s about five miles away, it’ll only take me about five hours to get there on Friday.”

British identity

There’s rarely a consistent theme to a Hardy show, it’s more a case of including whatever is bothering him at the time.

“There are a few true stories, catching up with what’s going on in politics, this and that really. Bit of stuff about tracing family history, about British identity, what else? Oh, terrorism, about religion usual sorts of stuff. Death, famine, pestilence and war.”

Death was a main theme last time, too. “Yeah, that’s always a main theme. Never far from my conversation,” he chuckles.

So what’s this book you’re meant to be writing?

Sleep and idle about

“I said I’d write a book last year. This guy was saying: have you got any hobbies. I said no, I’ve got no hobbies I don’t do anything other than work and sleep and idle about .

“IThen I started talking about how I’d written a short story about the lies in your family history that you’d told or the things that you’re told about your ancestors and you find out they’re not true.

“IHe said why don’t you do your family history ,so I said oh yeah, all right. They thought they were getting it on Monday and I haven’t started it yet. Anyway I’ve got to do that in January.”

Terrible liar

But there are some hitches in Hardy family history, or rather one very unreliable link.

“My grandmother was a terrible liar. We were supposed to be descended from Christopher Wren, which is all rubbish, we’re supposed to have land in Kent , which we haven’t, and all the stuff I was told is all just rubbish, so that’s part of the inspiration for the book.

“But my grandmother did know Paul Robeson, we think. She's supposed to have met him when he was staying in a boarding house in the early Twenties,  but to pin that down would be quite difficult.”
 

But before all that is committed to laptop, there’s the tour to complete. Have you got anything planned for after the last show at The Lowry?

Not the best idea

“I’m staying at my sister’s in Stockport, but I know The Pogues are having a party that night, a friend of mine’s on tour with them and I was quite tempted to go,

“I think that could probably end quite badly.  Apparently it’s Spider’s 50th birthday and they’re having a do on the Saturday night. I might pop over, I don’t know, it’s probably not the best idea is it?”

Probably not…

Jeremy Hardy is at the Lowry on Friday and Saturday, December 12 and 13. £16. Call 0870 787 5780.