PLUME: When you walked onto that stage, what went through your mind as far as handling the audience and getting off alive?
FROST: God, I don’t think it was a case of handling the audience at that point, I think it was just getting in, getting my stuff, saying my stuff as quickly as I could, and getting off and drinking a beer. You know, there was no kind of…
PLUME: Just trying to make it out of the club alive.
FROST: Yeah, exactly. So in the end, I did twelve gigs.
PLUME: Did you ever find a comfort level?
FROST: No, never. Never. Never. I hated it. I hated it.
PLUME: What kind of advice did Simon give you during those gigs?
FROST: You know – god, let me think. I mean, things like “Be yourself.” And, you know, I think I was trying to be a persona on stage, when I think I’m actually funnier when I’m myself, you know? That sounds quite stupid, but…
PLUME: Well, experience has borne that out.
FROST: Yeah, yeah. But… I just… I couldn’t cope with the nerves – the nerves killed me at that point because I’d never really performed. I didn’t know what it meant, you know? I didn’t know what the feeling inside me was and I didn’t know what to do with it and how to cope with it and if it was right and was I dying.
PLUME: Well, what was the audience reaction as far as you can remember?
FROST: Okay, well, six gigs were absolutely amazing and six gigs I got booed offstage within a minute.
PLUME: Well, I hope you built to the amazing and didn’t start off amazing and build to the boos.
FROST: No, it was kind of one-on, one-off, and in the end I just thought, “Can’t do it, I don’t want to do it.”
PLUME: So was the last gig a booed-off-stage gig?
FROST: Oh god, let me think: probably. I remember wading into the audience and saying to some businessman, “Come on, you f***ing idiot, you wanna fight?” And I think I got thrown out of the club.
PLUME: So you really engendered yourself to the audience.
FROST: Yeah. Where I live now, funnily enough, is a place called St. Margaret’s, which is in Twickenham, in southwest London. And there’s a comedy club here called The Bearcat, and I did one of my twelve gigs at The Bearcat Club and didn’t know that, you know, eight, ten years later I would be living just around the corner.
PLUME: So does it still bring back horrible memories every time you pass by?
FROST: Well, no, that’s my local pub now so I go in there quite a bit. But The Bearcat was one of my bad ones, I got booed off very quickly. It was the night Lady Diana died. I did the gig, and I think I came out and said something awful about her. And I just got booed off immediately.
PLUME: So that really should have put you off current affairs type of comedy.
FROST: Yeah. Be topical… but not that topical.
PLUME: You might want to be a bit more – too soon?
FROST: Exactly. It was too soon, you’re right.
PLUME: Was there a certain point where Simon kind of accepted that you weren’t that comfortable, or did he keep encouraging you to go back out?
FROST: No, I think… I mean, god, I think he probably accepted it but wished I’d carried on secretly, like a kind of moody dad, finding out his son doesn’t want to play football or cricket.
PLUME: So he failed at his Obi-Wan role.
FROST: Well, I think… when it came to stand-up, he did, but, you know, he’s always kept that kind of father persona, even now… you know, we do things and often I’ll see him looking at me and I know exactly what that look means: “There he is. There’s my boy!” But, you know, around about that time was the time I kinda started to think… when I met Simon, it was the time I started to think, “There’s a bigger world out there,” you know? And it’s not all about drinking and taking ecstasy and… you know, I mean –
PLUME: Was it something you hadn’t really contemplated to that extent?
FROST: No, not at all. Not at all, you know? I just – I didn’t, you know, I’d never…
PLUME: Do you think if you hadn’t met Simon, you still would have been content working the type of job you had – like at the restaurant or something like that?
FROST: Probably, although I would say that I’d probably be a manager by now.
PLUME: Your choice or theirs?
FROST: Oh god, probably mine. But I just didn’t… I didn’t think, you know? I didn’t know really about music or I didn’t read books, and I didn’t watch… you know, I’d watch a film but I’d never look at it as a piece of cinema, do you know what I mean?
PLUME: Right.
FROST: There’s a difference between watching a film and watching a bit of cinema and enjoying a film as a piece of cinema. You know, Simon opened that kind of door where… oh, what’s it called? But you watch a film and it… intertextualization. You watch a film and it refers somehow to another film and you get it – you kind of get the joke, you get the kind of… the in reference, you know?
PLUME: So you actually could start analyzing filmmakers and filmmaking at this point…
FROST: Yeah, exactly. You can analyze where they’re coming from and what it means and… you know, there’s so much more to… I didn’t realize this, there was so much more to things. There was this whole world out there that I just hadn’t even thought about.
PLUME: So Simon was really like a cultural university?
FROST: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I mean, where the kibbutz was my life university, he was my culture university. Although, to be honest, on the kibbutz – the best job I ever had was they had their own museum and gallery. And so I worked in there for a couple of months. And that was a great job. because the old guy who used to work in there used to give me paint and paintbrushes and I used to… well, I started painting. I paint now. I mean, you know, I enjoy painting, so I think that’s where I got my love of painting from.
PLUME: What aspects of painting really appeal to you – just the freedom of creativity or…?
FROST: Yeah, I mean…
PLUME: Watching something come together?
FROST: Yeah, I think that not knowing… I mean, I don’t know what I’m going to do when I’m doing it… My painting’s been likened to, you know, if a guy’s had a stroke and he’s in hospital and they say, “Maybe you should paint, it might fix your brain.” It’s that kind of painting, you know?
PLUME: So it’s almost instinctual.
FROST: Yeah, but you know what? It makes me happy.
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