Why John Shuttleworth creator abandoned a Fringe run

John Shuttleworth creator Graham Fellows has revealed that he abandoned a new comedy character after being hit by memory loss.

The comic pulled out of the 2006 Edinburgh Fringe midway through the festival with what was described at the time as a ‘mystery illness’.

Now Fellows has spoken about his 'little crisis' when his mind went blank midway through a performance as Dave Tordoff, a flashy concreter from Goole with ambitions to break into after-dinner speaking.

Writing in the Sunday Express, he said: ‘All was going well... when, suddenly, halfway through the three-week run, mid-performance, my mind went completely blank.

‘Too many late night Guinesses, plus domestic stress back home, had taken their toll. I saw tumbleweed blow across the stage, went "um" half a dozen times, before a line floated back into my mind and I said it backwards. I think.

‘I don't remember what happened exactly but somehow I recovered and got to the end of the performance.

‘Something had happened, though: I had lost my nerve for the first time as a performer, and I had been acting since the early Seventies.

‘I returned to my digs in the New Town, packed my bags, lay fully clothed on my bed until it got light and then got a taxi to the train station and limped back to Lincolnshire to lick my wounds.’

Fellows, 54, has not performed the character since and says Tordoff is ‘sitting impatiently on the back burner’. However, has continued to perform as Shuttleworth and as college lecturer Brian Appleton since the incident.

‘Shuttleworth would have sailed through the memory loss situation,’ he wrote. ‘Now I'm well over my little crisis I realise I have always had a problem remembering material; but whereas it was disabling to be like that as Dave Tordoff, a brash, stupid but fast-talking man, with Shuttleworth it has never been a problem. If anything, when it happens, it strengthens the character as forgetting what he is talking about is exactly what a man like Shuttleworth would do.

‘Brian Appleton is a college lecturer, a thinker and a talker, supposedly more capable than me at talking and remembering. So I am worried again...

‘What if, though, in the middle of my show at the Pleasance during this year's Edinburgh Fringe, when I am absolutely flying, on top of my game, the audience in the palm of my sweaty hand (21 years on, the venues are all still unbearably hot), what if my mind suddenly goes blank and the tumbleweed reappears?’

Published: 28 Jul 2013