Protecting the boy
The sweet centre of James Acaster's Hecklers Welcome
‘Hecklers Welcome’ sounds like a gimmick to hang a new stand-up show on — which I guess it sort of is, really — although in James Acaster’s case it does also seem to be a genuine attempt to tackle his response to interruptions from the crowd, without giving up comedy altogether.
One of the recurring themes of the show that really stuck with me was the phrase ‘protecting the boy’, which follows an observation from Acaster’s therapist that, after a series of childhood incidents, he is always accompanied on stage by a younger version of himself, and any reaction to criticism is driven by a desire to shield that small boy from it.
School is probably the first (and possibly also the last) time that most of us were ever on stage. I remember as a primary school kid being asked to play the keyboard at the beginning of a special assembly, an opportunity about which I was very excited, but when the moment came, the speakers on my puny Yamaha were unable to rise above the noise of chattering parents, and as no adults intervened on my behalf (I shot a pleading look at my teacher but she responded only with vague ‘keep it going’ gesture) I just played until I was finished and left the stage without acknowledgement.
I’m sure that’s not the reason why I never became a top musician or performer, but as a formative experience, it’s the stuff of nightmares, really, and probably something that would take some dealing with if I were required, for my job, to stand up on stage and have people listen to what I’m doing.
I don’t know if it’s helpful or not to recognise that some of your biggest wobbles occur because you’re trying to protect that younger version of yourself. On the one hand, it’s quite scary to think that you’re still carrying, and will always carry, years-old vulnerabilities; on the other, well, at least you’ll know why certain things seem to cut so deep.
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‘I hate Britain,’ said James Acaster, at the start of his 2019 tour show Cold Lasagne Hate Myself 1999.
‘No, I phrased that wrong. I hate British people.’
That tour, which followed his acclaimed series of specials released on Netflix — Repertoire — and the success of his (now long-running) food podcast Off Menu with fellow comic Ed Gamble, should have been the culmination of everything he had spent his comedy life working for.
Hecklers had been something he was willing to tolerate as an up-and-coming act. One day, he told himself, I’ll only have my own fans coming to my shows, and they’ll just get it. But with that point seemingly reached, people were still shouting things out, and his response was less than constructive.
As he says in Hecklers Welcome, an angry reaction is fine if it suits your edgy comedy persona, but not if you’re interrupting a whimsical story about starting up your own honey business to tell someone to go and fuck themselves.1
There followed the pandemic, and an enforced break from stand-up, which he rather enjoyed. The obvious question followed: did he still want to do it anymore?
Acaster is at pains to emphasise that this is not just another case of a celebrity who is ‘loaded to fuck’ telling the general public about an enforced work/life balance epiphany that they could have had at any number of other points in their professional lives. No-one is forcing him to keep doing stand up, and if he did want to stop, he has plenty of other options. But he wanted to continue, even if heckling, he realised, would never cease.
Hence this show, the rules of which state that he must not get annoyed at any heckles, interruptions, silences or any other perceived slights that would previously have caused him to declare that the gig, and the audience, were ‘shit’ before proceeding to ruin the rest of the night for all concerned.
I have no idea if this has ever really been the case at any James Acaster shows: my experience has generally been through filmed and edited performances that rarely capture the true disasters of a midweek audience in a hostile market town.2
But as if to distinguish it from other glossy specials, two versions of Hecklers Welcome have been recorded and released: a gig filmed at Northampton, during which the written material appears to receive minimal interruption and was performed to its conclusion, and available via Sky Comedy; and an audio version recorded in Acaster’s hometown of Kettering which, according to the comedian himself, featured roughly 5% of the planned set.
The filmed version shows us that this is, at heart, a typically thoughtful and polished Acaster show, built around a genuine set of deep-seated anxieties about performing. The audio edition, meanwhile, quickly descends into chaos, and indicates that if the aim of the show was to make him more relaxed about such circumstances, then it succeeds on those terms, too.
The idea of protecting the child who previously floundered on stage is a theme that runs throughout both versions. In the planned material, there’s a journey through a series of early life mishaps, of misplaced confidence leading to public humiliation, and an exploration of how certain circumstances and situations, like rowdy teenagers on a train, can send the most confident and successful adults retreating to their formative years: feeling vulnerable, and not wanting to get picked on.
The Kettering gig features a more visceral link to childhood: that sense of returning to your hometown and immediately reverting, no matter what has happened since, to the age you were when you left. Even though the comedian has the microphone, is quick-witted to a professional standard, and has plenty of ammunition about the place to fire back, the situation somehow feels more precarious than it should.
Yet, despite everything — including a request to perform material from a previous set that would have most, an earlier incarnation of Acaster included, spitting feathers — the show is negotiated, via plenty of improvised laughs, to a successful conclusion.
It’s unclear what might be next for Acaster’s stand-up career. Both nights end on a positive note, albeit one that leaves the future ambiguous. The rather sweet notion of ‘protecting the boy’ aside, the show was never about letting go of the perfectionism that underscored his approach to writing and performing comedy, but accepting that heckling is going to happen, regardless of the material; and if you can’t change that, then you need to change your response to it.
In the end, he notes, the tour provided the same combination of highs and lows, in terms of audience reception, as any other: ‘I didn’t know what would happen if I told you you could do what you wanted. What I’ve learned is that you were doing whatever you wanted anyway.’
It was recently reported that Peter Kay asked for a heckler to be removed from one of his gigs for shouting ‘garlic bread?’ — one of his famous catchphrases — before apparently then comparing another to former Emmerdale actress Lisa Riley. Regardless of whether you consider it a bit ‘off’ for someone who has cultivated a loyal audience on the basis of repeating catchphrases, and even entire shows, to then turn on that audience, the news stories took on a mildly farcical tone as they breezed through the inevitable sampling of opinions from people who reckoned it was indeed a bit ‘off’ and others who thought it was perfectly fine, to a discussion of whether being compared to Lisa Riley was an offensive and fatphobic comment, before ending with a social media post from Riley herself — presumably after being inundated with correspondence from ‘the internet’ — saying it was all perfectly fine and that she thought Peter Kay was very funny. Great work from all involved!
This isn’t part of Acaster’s schtick, either. Stewart Lee, whose live shows I have seen a number of times, was always keen to dish out a barracking, even though the crowd was made up entirely of his target audience of eager metropolitan sycophants lapping up his every word.