If you're going to go down, go down smiling
Occasionally I find myself on stage in real life – as opposed to in an anxiety dream, where I tread the boards almost nightly. But in all the public-speaking events I have done, I have only once heard the audience let out a sudden and audible sigh. The moment caught me off guard, because I hadn't thought the thing I'd said was remotely controversial.
But look, for every worst of times there's a best of times. And it was my job to write about it all in frequent newspaper columns, meaning the last six years or so have been very good for business. Not for actual business of course. God no. They've been absolutely terrible for actual business. But for the business of taking the piss – my business – it's been something of a golden era. Like being in the oil business at the turn of the 20th century.
Spool forward two-and-a-half centuries, and we find the legendary comedian Peter Cook taking over premises in Soho, where he founds a satirical nightclub on the back of the 1960s satire boom. But even as he launches the club, Cook acknowledges its own glorious, tragic, in-built failure. It is modelled, he declares drily, on all"those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War.
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