This blog has been laying dormant for some time and I've decided to start up again.  However, today I am going to use the words of my hero, Eric Morecambe.

Anyone in the performance industry may relate to this; particularly those that feed on the drug of laughter. Enjoy.

ERIC MORECAMBE:

So it began, what Fred Allen called the Treadmill to Oblivion. For us it was the plodding around of show after show after show. Before each the pleasurable anticipation, then the fears, the returning insecurity – will they reject us? The rituals of make-up and superstition. The familiar dressing room smells, the pinpricks of discomfort, the butterflies in the stomach, the tributes, the deferences, the knock on the door. That bladder again though you know it will be only a few drops, a nuisance to be shaken off. The ascent into the wings. The girls on the brightly lit stage garish in close-up, damp with sweat as they crowd past you. The darkened audience – what are they like tonight? The drum roll, then suddenly you’re on and no longer yourself but an addict in an adrenaline fix that takes you through an hour and a quarter of a sort of unendurable pleasure indefinitely prolonged to a climax of final applause and a detumescence that leaves you sweating and shaking, clear-headed about every detail of the performance, but curiously numb to all else. People are talking. Drinks being offered. Bustle. Sounds. Faces. People, people. Doors shutting so loud they hurt. Then you’re limp, sitting in a chair, peeling off your wet clothes, slugging back a drink, dragging on a cigarette…

This is success. This is what you have stalked and captured, this triumph of successful suffering, this spasm of creativity but not the creativity of something finite like a building or a statue, but a creativity so much more lasting because you have fixed in time a moment of satisfaction for a polyglot entity called an audience, participated in it, and centred their attention upon yourself, which is something on which you are hooked.

Taken from ‘Eric & Ernie – The Autobiography of Morecambe & Wise’. Published by W.H.Allen 1973