West End

Feb 17, 2026

Before we start - Just a quick reminder that while these posts will remain free for everyone, I’m also writing a whole book here on substack, for paid subscribers only. TEN GIGS is a selective memoir - my life in ten gigs - one per chapter, one chapter every month. The introduction is available for free, and I’d really love it if you’d consider becoming a paid subscriber, so you can read the rest. I’ve set the payment amount to literally as low as it can go. But no biggie if you’d rather not!

I often brag on social media (can you imagine?) about working in the West End. Technically this is true - but I always feel a bit dishonest saying it. My West End venues are basements - rooms small enough that you can ruffle the hair of the front row if need be. I am fully aware that when I say West End, the implication is West End Theatre, so hence my slight sense of guilt.

Now obviously a lot of this is good old low self-esteem. The voices in my head that tell me that whatever I’m doing, it’s not really a thing, and it’s not really good enough. Luckily though, reality sometimes manages to be so undeniably lovely, that it can clamp a cloroform-soaked hankie over the mouth of my impostor syndrome, and put it to sleep for a bit.

As it was last week. I walked to my gig in piccadilly, right past the theatre where my old friend Jo is slaying them nightly in The Producers. There are, in London, a couple of slightly secret bars that are just for people to go to after doing their shows. We went to one after our shows. I still had the post act dopamine fizzing in my brain, and we talked about how awful it would be if this - all of this - stopped feeling special.

Because it still does, and I’ve been doing it since the bloody 80’s. It doesn’t feel special in a “I’m a special shiny magic boy” kind of way, it feels special in that all of us sitting around that table after our shows, had a hope when we were younger that it could be our life, and through work and dumb luck, it is. So it would be a sin not to be greateful - not to value it. It’s not everything - but it’s something.

This month I had to call my publisher to order myself some new copies of my book. My heart sank when they told me that I couldn’t do this as there were no copies available. My continuing fear since getting published was that nobody would care and I’d be Alan Partridge watching his book get pulped. This was, I immediately assumed, what had happened. It was over, I was done. Then they told me that I had completely sold out the initial print run, and I’d have to wait until next week, when they had printed more. I said thank you, hung up, and yelped happily to myself, startling the cat.

Anyway, to celebrate, I filmed myself reading the introduction to my book in an armchair, with an Ikea lamp behind me LIKE A GROWNUP.