Jumping through hoops
Last updated 10:49, Friday, 14 November 2008
Climbing on stage and trying to make a room full of strangers laugh? No. Jumping through hoops of fire? Definitely not. Juggling knives while balanced on a wheeled board atop a dangerously high platform? Not even close.
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AJ James – award-winning comedian, acrobat and gymnast – what is the most difficult thing you’ve ever had to do?
“Looking after Lizzie,” he says. “THAT’S tough.”
Lizzie is AJ’s two-year-old daughter. Says dad: “It’s a much bigger challenge than my work. If I screw up a show, I put it down to experience. If I fail to look after my kids I’ve got to live with that for the rest of my life.
“And you don’t get a round of applause. Although she’ll sometimes say ‘I love you daddy’.”
Lizzie and her eight-year-old brother Tim have partially derailed AJ’s previous existence and put him on a new path. But AJ is striving to prove that a responsible parent can still play the fool.
This is the role 33-year-old AJ has moulded for himself since his teens when he left behind Andrew John Hudspith from Manchester and created his globe-trotting, knife-juggling alter-ego.
Cumbrians have seen AJ James perform at festivals around his adopted home county and in Keswick’s Market Square. This year he was crowned Fool of Muncaster Castle with a performance which distilled his jaw-dropping talents for comedy, acrobatics and escapology.
The feats which flow like water have been chiselled by a lifetime of hard labour. As a child AJ spent hours every day practising for a gymnastics display team which performed all over the country. He trained as an acrobat, moving to Spain in his late teens then travelling further south, following the summer and the street festival crowds.
He insists that British street performers are the best in the world. “Some countries subsidise performers in the name of the arts. Here you’re only paid what someone decides to drop in your hat.”
AJ’s hat afforded him enough to live in Australia for four years. He then worked in Japan and across mainland Europe before moving to Cumbria eight years ago.
Home is now near Penrith, with his partner Toni Spence. She is a director of Appleby-based youth circus group Euphoric Circus. AJ’s circus skills are still in the bank, there when needed, but these days his passions are parenting and comedy. As every parent knows, the two are often natural bedfellows.
Since April AJ has run and compered Carlisle’s only regular comedy club, The Howling Owl, at Spirit, on Crosby Street, on the first Friday of the month, as well as being a house-husband. Describing life as a parent brings out his stand-up side. “When my partner was the primary carer, she said that was her supporting my career. Now I’m the primary carer, I’m a leech.”
Fatherhood brings particular challenges for men who relish adrenaline. In AJ’s case, out went solo climbing and kayaking and in came comedy. You can die on stage every night but you still come home to the kids. AJ approaches his new career with the same methodical eye which hones his juggling and his somersaults: how could I do that better?
As a child his mother pushed him to succeed and that voice still echoes. One day 20 years ago heavy snow made it too dangerous for Mrs Hudspith to drive her son to his gymnastics class. So he walked, six miles each way. He used to measure every gram of fat he ate. Sometimes he burned himself out through over-training until he barely had the strength to move.
“I think essentially I’m quite needy for approval and admiration,” he admits. “The feeling after a show is a euphoric respite from that needyness and for a while I feel normal.
“My younger sister got into University College London a few years ago. It’s ranked one of the best universities in the world. I thought ‘Brilliant! Now I don’t have the pressure to succeed. I can just tell jokes for a living.’
“I still feel pressure to achieve but I’ve got it in perspective now. I am ambitious. I want to have an empire of comedy clubs. But it’s more important to me what kind of person I become in that process. I’d like to think I have a better balance between ambition and humanity.”
One reason for opening a comedy club in Carlisle was to experience the joy of finishing a gig and being back in bed without a three-hour drive. The Howling Owl also has nights in Grange-over-Sands and Barrow with another in the pipeline for Workington.
Cumbria might be handy for driving home but it’s not always the best place to draw a crowd. “Cumbrian audiences are loyal but initially it’s hard to get people out of the house and to try something new,” says AJ.
“If you go out in Newcastle or Sheffield on a Friday night there are thousands of people. If I go out in Carlisle with some flyers, the city’s dead. Venues and promoters don’t help each other because they see each other as competition.
“That attitude is why Carlisle is dead. In other cities venues flyer each other’s gigs. In Carlisle they don’t think ‘How can we work together and get lots of people to come out?’ Instead they think ‘There’s only 10 people walking about and I want them all to come into my place.’ There could be 10,000 if they thought more collectively.”
At least living in Cumbria gives a sense of perspective on the wider world and a feast of material which a rat-race does not afford. “If you’re outside it all you can observe and think. I’ve lived in Sydney’s bohemian quarter, in Barcelona, Paris, Tokyo. When you’re surrounded by artistic types you completely lose your perspective. You become jaded about what a privilege it is to entertain people for a living. And there’s so much more material living somewhere like Cumbria.”
Such as? “Where I live there’s lots of road kill. That’s meat with good karma. It died naturally, kind of. And because it’s flat it fits nicely in my George Foreman grill.”
Comedians and acrobats don’t always smile. There have been hard times but through it all no one has ever told AJ he should pack it in and get a proper job. No one except himself. When Tim was born he thought “I can’t just be a street performer.” So AJ opened a sports injury clinic, then found himself turning down lucrative comedy engagements for a £25 booking. It seems he can’t escape this life, which is probably just as well.
“Nearly every winter at some point I get really skint and think ‘Maybe I should get a job.’ But I’m just not a person who could ever work for someone else.”
He is the sort of person who appreciates the importance of being frivolous. Telling jokes and juggling knives may not be quite up there with eating and drinking but these fripperies have lasted almost as long. And in credit-crunched hard times silliness is one of the things we cling to.
“In times of recession comedy booms,” says AJ. “As someone once said, we take our comedians seriously and treat our politicians as a joke.”
