Tonight, the Bloomsbury Theatre in London hosts what is known to the excitable as "a galaxy of top comic talent" - Stewart Lee, Richard Herring, Simon Amstell, Simon Munnery, Phill Jupitus and more - performing at an event called Tedstock. Said event is a benefit to raise money to pay for the widespread release of a 4CD set called Walking Down The Road, containing the entire recorded works of Ted Chippington, a comedian moderately popular with people who went to indie gigs 20 years ago.
There have been big puffs across the media for Tedstock - 3,000 words in the Independent last week, a feature by Stewart Lee in the Guardian's own Guide on Saturday; an item on BBC2's Culture Show that same day.
I didn't see The Culture Show, so it may be exempt from criticism, but one thing bothered me about the other two pieces. They banged on about Tedstock (long since sold out) but failed to do something that might have been of more use to Chippington: neither piece mentioned the fact that, on Sunday night, anyone who wanted to could have paid a few quid on the door of the Bull & Gate pub in north London and seen the man himself perform, supporting his old labelmates the Nightingales.
It was an odd event; an odd crowd. There were maybe 120 people there, a great many of them men in their late 30s or early 40s, and plenty of them unaccompanied (I was one of those loners: I couldn't persuade anyone to go with me). The bottom-of-the-bill act, three young women from Norwich playing pleasingly angular music under the name of Violet Violet, seemed bemused by it all. "Are you all here to see Ted Chippington?" their guitarist asked, to cheers of assent from the men old enough to be their fathers. "We've never heard of him. We've heard he's some sort of genius of lyricism or something."
Just before half-nine, Chippington came on - "Four minutes early," he observed, to the kind of laughter usually reserved for Woody Allen's moose joke. He mumbled his way through 20 minutes or so of unscripted banter, including a couple of new jokes ("Walking down the road the other day, chap come up to me. He said, 'D'you want some?' I said, 'What have you got then mate?'").
I laughed, though I'm not sure if it was because Chippington was good or because the event had the feeling of a closed club where we were all in on the joke - the joke being that by any normal standards, Chippington simply is not the least bit funny. At a trestle table by the door I paid £15 for the 4CD set, which is available even if Tedstock tickets aren't (you find out how by emailing bigprint@hotmail.com). On the way home, I wondered whether sometimes legends - I've been quoting Chippington jokes since the mid-80s - are best left unexhumed.
