I Am What I Am John Barrowman (books that read to you txt) 📖

booked. In fact, before I’d even reached my final performance at the Royal Albert Hall in London, I heard from their management that they wanted to make sure the Royal Albert Hall was on my itinerary for 2010.6

Every audience on this tour had a distinctive personality. I adjusted my banter and played and joked with them accordingly. For example, about ten minutes into the show in Glasgow, I realized I’d slipped into my Scottish accent and was blethering with the audience just as if I’d gotten off the corporation bus with them at George Square. Normally, this wouldn’t have mattered, but the Glasgow concert was filmed for a DVD release – and so the accent might throw off viewers who don’t know my family’s history.

As it turned out, my accent was the least of my concerns in Glasgow. I was having some fun introducing the band and the dancers when, suddenly, I tore my trousers: the rip was big enough that my white briefs could be seen from the balcony.

Despite my comments in an earlier chapter about how well West End performers can lift their dance partners, I’d made a vain attempt to lift one of the J4s as she was leaving the stage. All I’d succeeded in doing was popping my trouser seam. Funnily enough, not everyone in the audience was aware of what I’d done, until I told them – in between bursts of hysterical laughter – because I initially kept my rear to the band. All was recorded for posterity on the DVD, of course.

After Rhys, my PA, made a mad dash to the tour bus and rummaged through my already packed suits, I took a quick break, dashed offstage and changed into an intact pair of trousers for the rest of the show. Bob’s your uncle!7 Thank God for all those years of changing in the wings between scenes.

In Blackburn, the audience was ready to ‘partay’. So much so that by the middle of the second act, they were dancing in the aisles and almost right onstage with me. Thank goodness the set was raised and I had some height on them. At one point, I cut out a couple of stories because I was worried about the folks in the front row … and myself, to be honest. Even at the close of my encore, the Blackburn fans kept dancing and shouting for more.

At the Oxford concert, a hyperactive usher with a torch kept darting up and down the aisles, shining his light on anyone who was taking pictures on mobile phones. He was distracting everyone with his diligence, including me. If there was one phone on, there were hundreds (even though the tour management had, as they so often do, asked that no pictures be taken). In fact, it was a bit like watching a wave wash across the hall when they all beamed on … which reminds me of a relatively recent concert experience of my own.

I was attending a charity gig at Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium. It was being held on behalf of one of the aid charities raising money after the terrible tsunami in 2004. David Tennant, Russell T. Davies, Julie Gardner, Phil Collinson (then a producer of Doctor Who), and I were seated together in a private box. We had filled our plates from the buffet and were jamming to Keane when, all of a sudden, Russell and I looked across the audience and saw that a Mexican wave had started across the stadium. Russell looked at me and we both cracked up. Doing the wave at a tsunami concert was so wrong.

At my concerts, which were slickly managed and precisely organized thanks to Paul Crockford (our tour producer) and Steve Rayment (tour manager), it turned out that there was a good side to the wave of mobiles in my audience. All those fans snapping pics and taking videos meant that my family in the States was able to track the tour via YouTube. When my mum and dad first joined me onstage in Glasgow, my mum to sing a duet of ‘Amazing Grace’ and both of them to dance with me, Carole and Clare texted ‘bravo’ to them within hours of their performances thanks to YouTube.

My parents had so much fun doing ‘The Slosh’, a line dance performed at Scottish weddings almost as much as the hokey-cokey or the Gay Gordons.8 Although The Slosh can be set to any number of songs, our family’s favourite is Tony Orlando and Dawn’s ‘Knock Three Times’. As the tour continued, I worked it out with the male dancers, James and Jamie, that they’d lift my mum at the end of the dance. Unfortunately, the female dancers, ‘Jennie Fabulous’ and Kate, had a bit more work to do to get my dad into the air; instead, they’d lift up only one of his legs. At every venue, during the interval, my parents had a line of requests for their autographs and photos.

I loved the fact that this concert tour was a family affair. What with having my parents physically with me, plus the company of the video of family photos, which showed snaps of the whole gang, I really felt as if the entire Barrowman clan was with me on this tour.

When I performed at the Cardiff Arena, it was like playing on my home turf. Cardiff was my largest audience of the tour because the venue was an indoor stadium. The numbers were easily in excess of 2,500; I was thrilled. After that concert, I threw a party for many of my neighbours and BBC Wales friends, including David Tennant, who I had made sure had seats in a private box for the gig. He’d have been mobbed otherwise.

From Cardiff, we headed to the Portsmouth Guildhall, where it was difficult to leave after the concert because the waiting crowds outside the stage door were massive. Regrettably, all I could do was thank them for their support, and then I had to get straight