There's More...

Do you ever have those idle moments, often in the empty hours of darkness when sleep won't come, when your mind wanders to strange places, dredging up memories of times and personalities past?  I certainly do and, of late, I've found myself wondering whatever happened to Irish comedian Jimmy Cricket.  Back when I was in my late teens and early twenties, he seemed to be ever present on TV, appearing on everything from children's programmes to those Summer time variety shows they used to film at seaside resorts.  At the height of his success I seem to recall that the comic from the town of Ballygobackwards had his own TV show which co-starred Rory Bremner.  Whilst Bremner has gone on to become a much-lauded TV satirist and comedy royalty, Jimmy Cricket just seemed to vanish from our screens.  Maybe I stopped watching the kind of programmes he appeared in, certainly they stopped making a lot of them, but he just seemed to abruptly fall off of the radar. 

Today, unexpectedly, my question was answered by a stack of flyers by the free newspapers in Sainsburys.  As I walked away from the checkouts after doing my shopping earlier this evening, I spotted the flyers in question, advertising a live performance by Jimmy Cricket at a local theatre only a couple of streets from where I live.  It was ten quid to get in with part of the proceeds going to the 'Help for Heroes' charity.  Just to prove that it really was the Jimmy Cricket, the flyer even had a picture of him emblazoned on it.  Sadly, time doesn't seem to have been kind to him - he looked about a hundred years old.  Mind you, he was still wearing that battered hat and his  trademark gum boots.  Even sadder was the fact, when I looked more closely at the flyer, that the show had already come and gone - nearly a month ago, yet huge stacks of the publicity material was still there in the supermarket, completely ignored by shoppers who neither knew nor cared who he was.  He may not have been a great comic, but he surely deserves better than a Friday night slot at a provincial community theatre.

But the question remains: just how did he go from prime time shows on national TV to a small venue in Crapchester in a period of thirty years or so?  I guess the answer lies in the kind of material he was known for.  Back in the eighties you could still go a long way with the kind of mild, family-friendly gags he purveyed.  Despite the rise of alternative comedy, there were still plenty of people who wanted to see a 'character' stand up whose persona was that of an amiable and naïve small town Irishman engaging in traditional, but gentle, cultural stereotyping.  I suppose the attempt to yoke him together with someone like Rory Bremner indicated that even back then TV executives could see the writing on the wall and realised that the tide was running against acts like JImmy Cricket.  Certainly these days I doubt that there's an audience for his kind of comedy - TV and live venues seem to be full of more aggressive stand ups pushing more contemporary and 'edgier' material.  Assuming that Jimmy Cricket hasn't changed his material radically, (I'd hate to think of him coming on stage in his hat and welly boots effing, blinding and telling us about his problems with erectile dysfunction - 'I told her, don't go, there's more, really, there's more..' - for instance), I can't see him pulling in the big audiences any more.  I'd imagine that his main audiences these days are nostalgic middle aged gits like me.  That said, I'm not sure I'd be willing to pay a tenner to indulge my curiosity as to what happened to him...