Wakefield Theatre Royal, Thurs March 4th

There are some weary faces this morning as we leave the Coventry Hill hotel, but, pleasingly, no sense of anticlimax after yesterday. Instead there's just a workmanlike "let's get on with it " vibe as we pile into the vehicles and head onto the M1 bound for Wakefield. Arthur and I ride in the truck today as we have to use the time to plan another project for Transmedia, and I'm ashamed to say that shortly after we'd finished, my tiredness overcame me and the next thing I knew we were sixty miles north and pulling off the M1. I REALLY need to try and cut that out when I'm driving.....The Theatre Royal is a lovely, ornate little theatre with two balcony levels, very much like the Theatre Royal in Lincoln, which is still one of our favourite gigs. There's a crew of impressively chunky lads waiting to help us load in, and apart from the pain of having to stick the truck in a special park about a quarter of a mile away and walk back on me poor old suffering pins, once again everything flies in and gets built quickly and efficiently. There's only one drawback with the theatre, and that's the orchestra pit which yawns hungrily some ten feet below the front of the stage, filled with nice convenient things to break limbs on should you stumble over the stage lip and take a header. In today's health and safety obsessed society I'm more than a little shocked that there's not even a rope barrier, but I'm even more disappointed when Pug refuses to " accidentally " fall down there and break a leg, thus allowing us to make an enormous insurance claim against the theatre and underwrite the tour. You just can't get the staff these days. Later in the afternoon we find that we have something of a treat on the culinary front today...there's an Italian restaurant right next door to the theatre which does special discount for performers and their crews, so rather than doing the McDonald's Two - Step we get an aromatic bundle of freshly - cooked goodies delivered to the stage door. Once I've got on the other side of my superb chicken risotto the world is a MUCH better place and I'm raring to go again....such little pleasures become your markers or reference points when you're on tour, and you'll remember a place more because of good catering, a nice hotel, a cosy pub or free laundry facilities backstage than because of it's history, culture or architechture. For example, Venice, which is a bit good on the old history, culture and architecture front, really, is forever in my mind as the place where we found that a member of one of my crews had relatives who ran a restaurant on the waterfront, and these lovely people closed up to the public and threw a special July 4th meal for the American band and crew I was touring with. Yes, I KNOW there's the Doge's Palace, the Bridge Of Sighs, St Marco's Square and the Campanile, but there was also pasta carbonara and the finest tiramisu known to man, and guess which one was more important to us at the time ?! There's lots of other good things to commend today's venue, though, one of them being an almost sell - out crowd, and that also helps keep any possible post - Coventry blues away for the band. The balconies tower above you here and the audience is very, very close, so it has all the potential to be a cracking show. This was one of the gigs, like Derby, that had us scratching our heads when we saw the ticket sales in advance. We've never been here before; in fact we've only ever been NEAR here once, and that was quite a while ago, but for some reason we've caught the imagination and, as with Derby, we've got great attendances on our very first visit. It makes things like Llandudno even more puzzling; how can we do numbers like this on our debut appearance somewhere when our numbers actually went DOWN on a return visit somewhere else ? It's not as though we went down badly last time in North Wales...quite the contrary in fact...but it just doesn't add up, and trying to explain it to the band isn't easy as we don't know the answers ourselves. We can really only put it down to the efforts of the theatres themselves; some of the smaller places like this know their clientele well and have databases which they can target with e-flyers and the like, and some of them do a lot of work with postering and the local press. Interestingly one of my guests tonight tells me she visits the theatre quite regularly and she hadn't known the show was on until I called, but they've clearly been doing SOMETHING right here. It's a great turnout for a cold March Thursday, and once again we get that cheer as the band walk on in darkness during the opening video footage. The boys are getting good at working the big stages now, but they are absolutely irresistible in these more intimate venues. They're enjoying it too, and there's no doubt that this communicates itself to the crowd.There are a couple of odd moments tonight such as when Chris doesn't come in with his normal line on the chat before I'm A Boy, and Steve's " comedy stool " on the medley section actually comes to bits as he flings it back to Nick, but this is another one of those nights when nothing can stop us. We've even managed to overcome the shock of having to paint our lovingly - crafted Golden Box Of Wonderment, so that it's now the Black Box Of Bafflement, but it seems to have worked, as Phil gets a big laugh with the " Hank gag " tonight. It's been another corker of a show and I'm ridiculously pleased about that fact that my guests ( Hi David and Sheena !) both loved it. I AM proud of all this and what we're doing with it....we're probably just a bit too close to it at the minute to be totally objective. Just as we leave we hear that tomorrow's show in Scunthorpe is also on the verge of sellout, so it's a happy bunch of Booties that tumble out into the cold Yorkshire air. Wonder what those Rock Gods are thinking.....