Breaking it up...

Ever since I got punched in the eye (with a camera, by a Glaswegian woman, mad with drunken fury that I’d stopped her trying to murder her friend), I’ve been questioning the wisdom of intervening in street confrontations.

I was put to the test on Saturday night. Another girlfight, less vicious and this time set in Birmingham. Two girls, each in five inch heels teetering and pushing at each other while one bloke was in the middle desperately pleading with them to become calmer. He was looking around for help exactly the way I had been in Edinburgh that night. Did I help him? I didn’t. I had visions of one of those stilettos, stained in WKD blue, puncturing one of my lungs as it got hammered through my chest...less PTSD, more Post Female Rage Disorder. In the end one was led away, everything died down and nobody was any worse off.

If I had intervened, nobody would have thanked me. The girls wouldn’t have thanked me, the other blokes passively watching wouldn’t have thanked me (I was screwing up their chances of seeing a fight) and the bouncers likely as not wouldn’t have thanked me for trying to do their job. What would I have got out of it?

When I was 11 I was beaten up by about four other boys as I was walking home from a car boot sale. It wasn’t a particularly vicious beating…I had some bruises, a bit of a black eye and a slightly red cheek, but psychologically it was much deeper. I refused to go to that part of town for nearly two years afterwards…my dad doing all he could to try to get me over it by making me walk back there with him, but the idea of just being in that area filled me with dread. While it was going on, all I had wanted was for someone to intervene in some way. To stop what was happening from happening and I guess that what has made me lunge in stupidly in the past and try to help other people.

To highlight the stupidity of doing this at all…in mid-July I was at a bar in the West end of London watching a band, a typical busy meat-market type bar full of tourists trying to get off with each other. The crowd ‘billowed’ out in front of me and suddenly I saw one guy get another in a headlock, while a third started hitting the trapped guy in the face.

I was completely overcome by three things…how unfair it was that two guys were ganging up on one, how tightly the guy was trapped in the headlock and how ratty looking the third bloke was, who was aiming gleeful punches at the restrained bloke’s head.

I found it hard to watch. I jumped out of the crowd onto the ratty bloke and pushed him off. Suddenly I was face to face with the bouncers, who’d come in a second later to sort it out. They were stood with a bloke in a ripped t-shirt.

I looked the bouncers in the eye

‘I was trying to stop it…that dude was being battered by two other blokes and you shouldn’t throw him out’. I turned to the ripped t-shirt guy ‘this fella is ok, don’t throw him out’. They didn’t but threw the other two out.

Long story short, I had unwittingly defended the neck-cranker.

Ratboy and victim got thrown out together and god knows what happened to them, but me and neck-cranker had a few shots of sambucca together and he was a decent guy…and if his story was true, he wasn’t the instigator anyway…

So it’s a tough one…I got involved, albeit slightly, but would have ended up sticking up for the outnumbered guy even though he was in the wrong…the whole thing would have been a silly macho disaster area. But then to never get involved? It’s horrible when the diffusion of responsibility kicks in and nobody steps in to help in a situation where someone is getting victimised but as soon as someone does they throw themselves directly in the line of fire and have to be prepared for the consequences.

When I got chinned (in my eye) by a girl with a camera, I had no perception that I could get hit. As far as I was concerned, I was stopping a larger girl hitting a smaller girl while all around, people did nothing.  Ten minutes later, they were apparently friends again and I was desperately icing my eye prior to my show the next day. The only reaction from the crowd (and there must have been at least twenty people there) was a massive ‘Ooooohh’ when the girl connected her swing. It was like they were watching youtube live.

Would I intervene again? I think it’s hard to say. It depends on whether a black eye is worse than the powerless angst of knowing you let something bad happen when you could have helped…if someone had stepped in and helped me when I was 11, they’d have stayed in my mind as a hero forever.

Coming out of character

I've been doing a character called Philberto on the comedy circuit for a few years now and when I come off stage there are a significant number of people who aren't sure whether they've seen a character or not.

Philberto is a Portuguese reality tv show winner...at some gigs I am able to go into the background of this but at gigs where it seems a simpler approach is required I just go for tried and tested material that works. This ends up with me basically just doing Philberto as a Portuguese comedian...which it's fair to assume he's become after 4 years on the circuit.

The dilemma i'm facing is whether to come out of character at the end of a show...at some gigs if I can't be bothered to explain to audience members who talk to me that it is a character, I just keep it going offstage till I'm out the door. At other gigs I blow myself out of the water onstage and admit it, which gets a reaction varying from 'wow I had no idea' to 'that dude just tricked me' to 'why?'

Having just done my first Edinburgh show (and indeed, first gigs for years) as ME presenting four different characters it was a different proposition. Audiences knew straight away they were dealing with a persona and there was none of the confusion I can sometimes face in the first minutes of a club gig, which can lead to a kind of 'what's that foreign bloke going on about?' vibe.

Someone pointed out to me that as me, I have virtually no online presence at all, as I've always been listed as Philberto. After the latest Edinburgh run, that has to change and now I'll be listed as 'Milo McCabe as...' when I'm performing club gigs.

As big as that is in my mind, 95% of club audiences pay no attention at all to the names on the bill if they aren't immediately recogniseable from TV...so I really doubt it'll make any difference whatsoever.

Why do characters and not 'straight' stand-up? It's an odd one. There's the obvious answer that having a character can make things easier by putting up a barrier between the performer's real personality and the crowd...kind of giving the stand-up a shield to hide behind if things get tough...and that's why a lot of comics start off as character acts and then evolve into 'themselves' or a version thereof onstage, but I went the other way, funnily enough for the same reasons.

When I started out as 'me' I was anything but. I got away with it, by and large, with a mixture of projected confidence and energy, but nothing that came out of my mouth was genuine. I wasn't doing stuff that I found funny, I was doing stuff that I thought would be funny and was ultimately soulless.

When I started doing a character, in a bizarre way I found that I could be much more honest with my performance...exhibit certain aspects of myself behind the safety net that comes with a persona...it's not me, it's him. I could genuinely give it 100% onstage and I could do stuff that I liked and found funny.

I'm a white middle class guy from Surrey who's never had any genuine hardship and a healthy relationship with my parents...I don't have any strong political views, don't have a big point to prove to people and am not massively status driven...basically, I don't have  many of the building blocks traditionally required to be a really good comic...but I do have a comedian for a father and a personality that can be baffling for some when I'm not self-monitoring.

And I love comedy that doesn't make sense as long as it comes from a genuine place...comedy that you can't see coming or where it's come from and being a character act gives me more of a license to do that.