'I died so badly I saw a ghost'

Alasdair Beckett-King's out-of-body on-stage experience

comedy Many comedians have died on stage. Few go so badly they really believe they are now among the spirits.

But Alasdair Beckett-King has revealed he once saw a ghost in the audience – the spirit of an acquaintance who had died.

‘I died so badly at a gig in Middlesbrough that I thought I saw a ghost in the audience,’ he told Russell Howard on his Five Brilliant Things podcast.

He clarified: ‘I don't believe I saw a ghost, but I had the experience… It was terrible. It was in the Jury’s Inn, which is now a Leonardo hotel, in Middlesbrough. It wasn't a brilliant gig but it sold well.’

The redheaded comic said he came on after the compere did a routine about performing oral sex on a woman with a punchline about ginger pubes. ‘Then he immediately brought me on by saying the wrong name,’ Beckett-King recalled.

While recognising he should have done a gag about being ginger to respond to the MC’s joke, being introduced wrongly threw him off – and he had a patchy set from there on, also being put off by a table of teachers ‘who had a loud conversation for almost the entirety of the set’.

He said he was especially mortified as ‘it was the first time my parents and my sister had ever seen me do stand-up…’

And of seeing the ghostly apparition, Beckett-King added: ‘When you have a bad gig, somehow there's always a light that’s just on one audience member whose face you can see.

‘It was like that, and it was someone I knew. My first thought was, "Oh, great. So, another person who I know has come to see me have the worst gig of my life." And then I remember that that person had died earlier that year.

‘So, obviously it was just someone who looked like them because it's the North East and everyone is a white person, at least they were when I was growing up. So, everyone looked pretty much the same.

‘You know, you have an out-of-body experience in a bad gig. But genuinely I had a nauseous, dizzy feeling of leaving my body and watching myself on stage – like that dream where the ground falls away under your feet.

‘So I was like, "Oh, I wonder if this is what it's like to see a ghost, to have a supernatural experience?"

‘And it's not supernatural. What's happening is I’m bad at my job and I'm having a horrible day at work… It was so bad I became a believer.’