My son plays Spider-Man ..& I’m doing stand-up in village halls
COMEDIAN ON HOLLYWOOD STAR’S RISE TO FAME
Musical. Not immediately, because he hadn’t any formal dance training at this point, so they trained him for nearly two years before debuting in his first speaking part on stage. And with Nikki and his little brothers, I sat in the stalls each night bursting with pride but also bemusement at realising I was now the second most successful showbiz person in my family; a feeling compounded since this run of Tom’s coincided with my stand-up career being rescued by village halls.
I was already well into my fallow comedy period. I had stopped being able to bag TV slots and Rural Arts loomed into view – an organisation that brings the performing arts to the countryside; to folk whose entertainment is usually confined to lambing.
This means doing one-man shows in village halls and other impossibly uncool venues. I would arrive and usually be met by the organising “committee” taking a break from laying out too much quiche on a trestle table. Some of their questions were could be terrifying. “We’ve got some children coming, can you do magic?” From my dressing room (disabled toilet) I would take to the stage (the floor) and begin each show with the same opening; that such shows were not “an earner”, but because most of the villagers were present and their houses were therefore empty, to make ends meet I was being accompanied by a couple of burglars. They would roar and I would be away.
They were great shows for the villages, but less so for my ego. I recall doing a show in Hampshire and haring back to London to pick up Tom from the Victoria Palace Theatre. A good job he usually did three curtain calls as it meant I was never late.
So, my ego was bruised, but never irreparably, because I have always viewed Tom’s success as an extension of my own. It occurred to me how fortunate I might be to be given a funny story about a dad and his son that I might be able to share with the world. I could write a book about it and maybe even take a show up to Edinburgh again, the city that had given me all my big breaks. But I rowed back because, ‘Is a kid in a musical enough?” I pondered and suspected not.
Lucky for me, Hollywood came calling with Tom appearing in the movie, The Impossible with Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor. Tom’s performance was enough to get him noticed in LA. The City of Dreams or Crushed Dreams – for most wannabes whose ranks I feared Tom would one day join.
Not because I didn’t believe in him, but because I didn’t imagine that such good fortune happened to an ordinary family like ours. And so, I always tempered his ambitions with my own sage advice; drawing upon my wisdom and my own showbiz experience. On this front I have always been flat
wrong – the roles have kept coming and this remains a family joke – that dad knows nothing! Now Tom is Spider-Man, the Eclipse is complete. My story is fully formed, cooked and ready to be served.
At the Edinburgh festival, if a show is going to catch people’s attention, it needs an angle which I now have. Use whatever you have, right? Plus, it’s payback time for all the lifts and the love and the advice. Okay, maybe not the advice. Tom came to my show last week at Abingdon FC and he loved it. Phew! Thanks, Tom, I said, and you’re a great Spider-Man too! In contrast to Abingdon FC, Tom does press junkets in hotels that ordinary people daren’t go near in case a doorman gets the door and expects twenty quid in return. At Claridge’s, just off London’s Bond Street – so handy if one is ever caught short for jewels or garish clothes – Tom’s bedroom had a telly over his bath and a heated toilet seat.
In comedy, timing is everything and with Spider-Man: Homecoming in cinemas and Eclipsed being my first fringe in over a decade, my timing has been digital. One of the lines in my show goes: “Because Tom is Spider-Man, I guess this means I don’t need to do this any more.” This is not true. First, because I have four sons, three of whom earn bugger-all and it turns out that I am probably only funny enough to have had two kids.
And finally, because I love making people laugh. It’s the only thing I’ve ever been good at, so why not get back on stage and make people rock with laughter? At least, this is the plan…
Dominic Holland’s stand-up show Eclipsed continues at the Voodoo Rooms Ballroom at 4.40pm for the month of August on the Free Fringe.