“Don’t ruminate”, advised my teammate, Nick. Good and kind advice, but he might as well have told me not to breathe – my ADHD is of the “extremely sensitive to what people think of me” kind.

So here’s what happened. I did my first improv show of the year with my troupe, Not Suitable For Beebies, as part of The Mixer (a space for new and developing teams) at Hoopla Impro.

It’s a great idea for an improv show – basically adult movies as a starting point, but reimagined as being kid-friendly. We’re still honing and improving it, but there’s definitely something there, and we’re getting funnier as we begin to learn each other’s ways, tics and foibles.

Tonight’s was, in my view, the best we’ve done yet, and certainly the best I’ve managed to perform in it (I haven’t been brilliant in our earlier attempts).

I introduced, with Lisa, in my traditional gurning kid’s tv presenter personality. I always give this character a different name, and for some reason I said… “and I’m Fred Titmus”, which got a laugh.

Tits.

We’re still working on the intro, which I think needs to be a bit quicker so we have more time to get into the meat of the game, but the important stuff is in place. The audience gets it, and they come up with excellent suggestions (the person who suggested Eyes Wide Shut, we studiously ignored, although, hey, it could have worked).

We ended up doing PG (or, indeed, U) versions of three suggestions in the end: Nightmare on Elm Street, Kill Bill, and Titanic. [1]

I wasn’t in Nightmare in Elm Street – or rather, in our kid friendly version of it. I was feeling a little rusty, but didn’t feel any moments in which an extra character was needed. Lisa was a very Scottish sharp-nailed Freddie, which led to an important lesson for the kiddle winkles in the audience (don’t ever fall asleep / don’t play with knives), and Grant wisely saw when the bit was running out of steam and stepped up to ask the audience for another suggestion.

The second, I got more involved in. This was a child-friendly version of Kill Bill, in which I made a belated arrival as the eponymous Bill, who exchanged mother fudgers with Elliot (“oh yeah? Well I fudged YOUR mother!”) before being bested in a truly epic tickle-fight.

The third, I was most involved in of all. I came on stage as “Leonardo DiCaprio”, and explained that I was working class, and poor, but my heart was full of important things like art, and romance, and… love.

For reasons known only to my mind in that split second, I played Leonardo DiCaprio / Jack as a kind of loveable ragamuffin from the streets of the east end, and stuck my arms out to both sides and was forever in some kind of ludicrous cockney crouch.

After accidentally interrupting the bridge of the ship, I finally made it down to the “bowels of the ship”, where we planned to hang out with the Irish third class passengers.

After the ship crashed into a giant ice lolly (gamely played by Hannah), I finally got to have my steamy “special hugging” scene with Kate Winslett in an imaginary car. “This makes me feel tingly in my magic areas”, I said to the audience, as Darren on tech pulled a perfect end-of-show blackout.

Now, I appreciate the paragraphs above make absolutely no sense unless you were at the show, as improv is infuriatingly difficult to write about without making everyone who is doing it sound like an insufferable pillock.

You will, though, have to take my word for it that it was a good show, with some very funny performances, clear character choices, and some very judicious editing (editing in improv is underratedly difficult, but it’s all about choosing the exact right moment to end a scene – preferably at the funniest or most satisfying bit).

And speaking about myself, as I am wont to do on this, my personal blog, it felt like I made a bit of a breakthrough tonight in terms of my comfort performing this team. Not that they made me uncomfortable before – they’re all lovely people – but because I hadn’t, quite, “let go” in the way one needs to for improv to work.

People talk about flow state and all that jazz, but when a scene truly clicks, you’re not thinking at all, you’re existing specifically in the moment, and you realise that all those people you dismissed as dangerous cultists were right all along: improv is pretty magical.

So you’ll understand what I was a bit freaked out, five minutes later, to be accused of doing a character that was racist towards the Irish.

We were the last act on, and I’d come back to the seats at the back, on my own, to applaud the MC (who, earlier, had accused me of being her dad, as I answered all her dad’s dadrock pub quiz questions about Radiohead and Kevin Shields that she’d been using as a hosting device) and cheer the mention of all the acts who had performed.

As soon as this was done and the lights went up, the man who was sitting on his own in front of me – I recognised him as having been in one of the other acts – said something to be about how what I’d done was unacceptable, and how I wouldn’t dare do it about any other nationality or race.

Talking of race, at this point in the conversation my mind was racing to understand what on earth he could have been talking about.

He was a bit tipsy, a lot angry, and told me in no uncertain terms that my portrayal of Leo DiCaprio was deeply offensive.

And so of course my mind raced. Christ. Had I said or done anything anti-Irish?

I couldn’t think of anything. The DiCaprio that I manifested ended up having three consistent character traits, if you can call them that: he was a silly Dickensian cockney, he was from humble backgrounds, and he wished and dreamed of big and beautiful things.

(I steered well clear of the actual actor’s problematic relationships with much younger women, like, erm, a sea captain avoiding an iceberg).

He said again I was being offensive to the Irish. But… how? DiCaprio’s character isn’t Irish. I didn’t perform him as Irish. I did mention there were Irish people dancing jigs in third class, but… this is what happened in the film? I certainly didn’t say the Irish are all drunk, or violent, or permanetly doing the riverdance.

At this point in the conversation, I made an error, saying, pointlessly, that I was half Irish myself, and that my Dad was from Dublin.

“Oh yeah, which part?”

“South Dublin”.

“Which part of South Dublin?”

“I can’t remember”.

“Yeah, yeah. I’m sure you can’t…”, he said, implying I was making the whole thing up, and beginning to move away.

At this point I got midly irked, and said to him, “listen, I am half Irish. My dad died last year. But more importantly, I wasn’t playing Leonardo DiCaprio as Irish, or making fun of the Irish in any way.”

The conversation ended there, and I went down to join my troupe and some people I’d met and chatted to from other groups. Obviously I immediately splurged what had just happened to all and sundry, and for what it’s worth, no-one I spoke to thought I’d said or done anything wrong.

“Sometimes you just have to accept that people will react badly, and there’s nothing you can do”, advised Drew, an experienced American improviser who had taken part in a very funny musical twoprov with our own Hannah.

So – just one of those things. The timing of it was annoying, as it came immediately after I came off stage, buzzing with adrenaline, and as everyone knows I am extremely rubbish at confrontation or aggression of any kind. Not that this guy was aggressive: he was just accusatory about things that seemed, on the face of it, utterly absurd.

So there we go, Nick. I did ruminate, as was always going to happen. But now I’ve written it all down, the rumination is over, I can feel happy about the show, and get on with getting slightly better at improv (next time, my DiCaprio is going to be Scottish).

Oh, one other note, which feels important given I’m someone who is doing shows much more regularly these days: I didn’t drink any booze afterwards, I stuck to the Lucky Saint. It’s weird – for singing with The Highchurches, I still feel like I need a beer, which at the moment isn’t an issue because our gigs are pretty sporadic. But if I’m in bars and venues multiple times a week, doing sketch comedy, improv comedy, and music both folk and with the band, it’s good if I can get into the habit of knowing I don’t need a drink to relax afterwards. Lucky Saint tricks me into thinking I’ve had a beer anyway.

I didn’t drink at the wassail either, come to think of it, as I was in preparation for Sunday’s 24 hour solidarity hunger strike.

Now all I need to do is figure out how to sleep within, ooooh, five hours of being on stage.

Oh, and if you’re wondering who the Scottish woman is, it was a fellow improviser who very kindly took the photos of the show that you see peppering this blog post.

She’s from Fife and seems very good at improv indeed.

[1] Another thing we’re still doing, is to ask the audience member who makes the suggestion to do a quick synopsis of the film. I’m not sure if this is a good idea, for the same reason as above, which is that it does slow things down a little bit. But it does help the cast who may not have seen the film in question. Perhaps we just need to speed this bit up.