Micky P Kerr relives his Britain's Got Talent nightmare

I’ve been performing as a comic for just over five years, and in that  time I’ve come to understand what a bad gig really is and what it can do to your state of mind.

Most comedians are needy by nature (please like me!). We require constant affirmation of our unique greatness via the medium of laughter from adoring crowds, however, it doesn’t always work out that way.

I’ll never forget my first bad gig. It was a Sunday night and I walked onto the stage a confident man (I walked off it a broken one). I’d been performing for about three months and it seemed that the world of comedy was a doddle. I was doing a five-minute spot and for the first time in my life I was performing to an audience with an average age of about 170.

I played them a folk song about Jimmy Savile (crass and hack, thanks for judging me so quickly) and literally no one laughed. At all. Not even once. 

I’d performed this song before and it had worked, so I knew the laughter points – but none of them were triggered. I remember just dying inside within 20 seconds of starting the song. You have a voice inside your head that kind of talks to you as you’re performing: ‘We need to leave right now, this is painful, these people are terrible and so are you.’

However, I didn’t leave, I just kept on with the routine until its bitter end and left the stage to one individual hand clap and a lot of shaking heads. 

I was mortified. It was the longest drive home ever and I genuinely thought about giving up comedy - after every bad gig I still have that same thought. 

I’ve never played that song again, I filed it under ‘risky’ and left it alone. 

That experience did, however, spur me on to write better material that wouldn’t allow me to leave the stage wanting to cry. I asked myself the question, how do you impress old people? You could vote for Brexit I suppose but I actually want to make them laugh.

"Your next bad gig is already in the post,’ one wise comic once told me in a green room. This genuinely sends a shiver down my spine. In a weird way, this is what makes performing comedy so exhilarating, you know it could wrong so when it goes right that makes it all the more satisfying. 

However, when it goes wrong, it is the most unforgiving of all art forms. Everyone suffers, the crowd, the bookers and of course, the needy idiot orchestrating the entire fiasco from the stage. Bad gigs can stay with you. 

One stands out in particular for me because unfortunately it was seen by 15 MILLION people. 

I’d made it into the final of the biggest entertainment show on TV, the routines I’d used to get me there were well chosen by yours truly and I had one left that was perfect for the show. It involved some Bee Gees songs and I was told by the producers (the day before the final) that I couldn’t use it because of copyright. 

I was completely stumped. It was then that the producers convinced me to play a song that I’d filed under ‘risky’ many years ago. They told me it was brilliant and when I played it in rehearsal they all fell about laughing. 

I kept on saying things like, ‘I really don’t think this is going to work guys’ but they were adamant I do it and I didn’t have a plan B so I trusted their judgement. It wasn’t the Jimmy Savile song, by the way, although in many respects I wish it had been. 

Bad gigs usually go wrong from the very start, this one was no different. I’d chosen completely the wrong material for the occasion and even the ‘happy clappy’ BGT brigade couldn’t get on board with me. I styled it out as best I could and of course told the audience they were terrible (naturally). 

It didn’t really sink in that night, but I woke up the next morning feeling depressed about it. To be honest, a year later it still plays on my mind and I’m still reminded about it. For weeks after the show, virtually everybody I know came up to me and said, ‘Oh my God, you proper bottled it in the final’ and all I could do was agree. 

The show gave me a lot of publicity but it also left me feeling embarrassed. Everyone I knew had seen me do a really crap gig and then get told off by Amanda Holden.

Today, society has a new added layer of complexity– social media. People took out their phones to tell me I was crap, some rather aggressively while others expressed their genuine disappointment and said I’d ‘let them down’.

This continued for days, I was constantly reminded about how much of a ‘c*nt’ I was (their words) and it was a lonely place. Even the newspapers were slagging me off and I found it difficult to deal with all the negativity being thrown at me. 

All I could do was try to focus on the fact that I’d made it to the final, try to take the positive but it was hard. One week I’m teaching in a primary school and then suddenly I’m the biggest twat in the UK. A bad gig plays on your mind and the realm of social media kept me frozen in time. The abuse kept coming for months and I was constantly being reminded about something I wanted to forget. 

Social media definitely has a dark side and a high-profile performance can expose you to that. People type nasty things that they wouldn’t ever dream of saying out loud. I found myself scrolling past any positive comments and focusing only on the negative ones, it was psychological self-harming. 

I just want people to like me so I ignored the nice comments and focused on the negative ones. Human beings are weird. I’m weird. 

Eventually, people just couldn’t handle the fact that Meg from Love Island had fake tits so that did take some of the heat off. 

However, social media STILL likes to remind me that I bottled it (a year later) so I’m not out of the woods yet. I received a tweet yesterday telling me I’d fucked up the 2018 final. Cheers pal, I’d almost forgotten.  

• Micky P Kerr will be performing his new show, Kerr In The Community, at the Underbelly Bristo Square at 5:45pm during the Edinburgh Fringe

Published: 2 Jul 2019