mr tom bell's Blog
(Article for Rebel magazine)
It's funny 'cause it's true - Discuss
A big part of what people admire about stand up comedy is its honesty. They'll will tell you "you're so brave!" because they "could never do that!" Just you on stage with a muttering of people judging not only your words and timbre, but your entire personality. I've been booed the moment I've walked on stage just for having slightly unruly hair. Not the most fun ever, so acts put up a barrier, they hide behind different names, different voices, they completely alter their personalities and what they wear. Honesty can be in short demand, but when it's real, it can be devastating.
Until recently it seemed I would need to take a stage name. I didn't want to, I liked my real name, crisp and short and the first thing my parents ever gave me. But they'd not done their research; there was already an actor called Tom Bell, a fine actor, often cruelly typecast as a paedophile or psychopath. Furthermore they criminally hadn't checked to see if Spotlight, the actor's directory (which apparently you have to be in to get those advert castings all your friends are getting), would take derivations of names. They don't. Not Tommy Bell, not Thomas Bell not Tom Bell Jr.
If I wanted to be in Spotlight (imagine the castings) I would need a stage name, but I knew I would feel dishonest on stage. And moreover, what would I change? Not my surname, my family name, a family who, despite their early oversight, had done a pretty good job with the subsequent parenting, but changing my first name seemed a ludicrous idea, people would start calling me Chris or Ben or Laura and I'd be irritated every time.
Another year of no castings I devised a plan, to use a stage name so ludicrous that it obviously wasn't my real name. That opened some doors: Noah Totteridge, Papa Hazzard, "The Curator", all came close, but all ultimately lost out to the one perfect stage name, lovingly and punishingly devised. My mind was pulsing, this was going to change the shape of my career forever. In a flurry of keyboard activity, my agent and I swapped e-mails, me asking if there was already a Flash Jackson in Spotlight, him to let me know that the actor Tom Bell had just died. It was an odd sensation that seeped from that e-mail. The death of a namesake, it transpires, can be surprisingly moving, and with it the knock-on, untimely death of Flash Jackson.
I'm glad. My comedy is far too meandering and piss-whimsical to ever fall comfortably from the mouth of a Flash. I sometimes wonder what Flash Jackson would be doing right now had he lived. Probably not the story-telling gig Tom Bell just did in a folk café in Olso. He'd be doing a corporate gig for an Oil Tycoon before a heady weekend run at Jongleurs Leicester. I bet he'd be good friends with John Barrowman and I bet he'd have nailed every one of the 4 advert castings he's had in the two years since joining Spotlight. Not like that Tom Bell.
And yet, the idea of comedians proclaiming the truth where others daren't is an endearing one. "Jesters do oft prove prophets" as Shakespeare wrote in King Lear. But truth, like so much stand up, can be cripplingly dull. Men and women are certainly different, cats and dogs often have amusingly anthropomorphic qualities and life as a black woman sure has its ups and downs, but it's dull. Particularly dreary are comedian's lives; an unending parade of tea and self doubt. The very craft of stand up can be made so false, phrases such as "I overheard someone in the interval say…" "I've never told this on stage before, but…" "Well, that was a new bit". Reader, they are lying to you.
I lied earlier. I didn't find out about the other Tom Bell's death in that exciting, dramatic manner. I had decided on Flash Jackson for months but done nothing about it, then I got a text from my friend Ed Weeks. Not only is it not a great story, it's not a story at all.
True honesty in stand up is rare. It doesn't come from pointing out things we'd all sort of noticed but hadn't been bothered to acknowledge until that point, like a bad magic eye puzzle, instead it comes when an act stops worrying about what people will think and opens up their heart. Daniel Kitson famously went on stage in Melbourne moments after a break up, ditched his show for that night and just spoke for hours about the relationship that had just ended. The lead singer of The Lucksmiths saw it and ended up writing a song about it. Amazing! Likewise, Stewart Lee's onstage response to the protests against "Jerry Springer The Opera" was to push blasphemy to the very limit. It could have been cheap but it wasn't, it was stunning and heartfelt and could only have happened in stand up.
That's what I, and a lot of other comics, aspire to do. At last year's Edinburgh Fringe I did my first solo show. It was going to be a loose collection of jokes, but after being booed off stage on my last gig of the year I spent that Christmas close to tears and, looking for some sort of solace, wrote a show where I interviewed genuine tapes of myself I made aged 7. In a happy ending, the show became a surprise hit, a surprise to me certainly. One of few moments I have truly been scared on stage was when my Dad first saw this show, but for the same reasons it was scary, it was also one of my favourite ever gigs. At the end my Dad jumped from his seat and cheered, proud, I hope, of his lazily named son, still rocking it for the Bells.
Hot diggity. x
Mr Tom Bell should spend more time writing.