I was put in a very awkward situation tonight.

We went to see Stewart Lee at the Hall for Cornwall and as expected he was on top form. The warm-up act however, got a mixed reaction to say the least. The fantastically German, Henning Wehn provided a surprising support act. I’ve only known him from Fighting Talk and was expecting someone else to turn up so it was a pleasant surprise.

He naturally got onto the topic of football and was building towards a tongue-in-cheek joke surrounding how the game, that used to be working class, is now out of the price range of the working class. He was building towards something before he mentioned the McCann story. Now I happened to be sitting on the row with two people, either side of me, who weren’t too pleased and didn’t understand that he was obviously building up to something. They started heckling him and he was visibly taken back by it. Eventually a few more people joined in with the heckles culminating in ‘You’re losing the audience’.

Now that’s not just any heckle, that essentially halts the whole gig. You can’t really come back with many retorts to that. To be fair he didn’t have any retorts to the original heckles and didn’t seem like he knew what to do. He froze up, never really finished that story and fumbled around with some props but he never got to finish what was, up until that point, a good set. It just goes to show how one line, one joke can be taken the wrong way and totally destroy any rapport with the audience.

I felt bad and talked to him afterwards and bought a DVD that he signed. So it worked out alright in the end. Still…

Tough Crowd