I finished touring the Marginal Mystery Tour a week ago. I am still decompressing. It was an amazing experience to be on the road for five weeks, traipsing around the country. This is just by way of a big thank you to the many thousands who came to see it.
As ever, there were times when the venues were packed to the rafters, like in my regular haunts of the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh, the Lowry in Salford, the City Varieties in Leeds, and the Apex in Bury St Edmunds. And there were other times when we were a more, shall we say, select congregation. A less well-attended evening at the Crewe Lyceum theatre will live long in the memory, not least for the question, written on a card during the interval which I read out at the end of the show. ‘Saturday night in Crewe. Why?’ Then there were all the other wonderful places, from Loughborough to Exeter, Horsham to Ilkley.
Talking of those questions, I have kept them all. There are probably the best part of 600 hand written cards, all of which I read out (or attempted to) and only a few of which I discarded. The commonest themes related, for some reason, to Gary Imlach, and the insatiable desire to know more about the most enigmatic man in sports broadcasting. I can only repeat the greatest answer ever given to the age old question of ‘What does Gary do for the other 49 weeks of the year?’, which came from Chris Boardman, who attended one of my shows back in 2016. I read out exactly that question on stage, only to hear Chris’s voice emerge from the darkness of the stalls. ‘The hoovering!’
But what I particularly enjoyed about putting my book, 1923, on stage, was creating a show that worked on a few different levels. The exceptionally tricky thing to try and achieve was to allow the story of the film (in which there are precious few, perhaps even no jokes at all) to sit in a place that did it justice, while also creating a show that (hopefully) put a smile on the face from time to time; poking fun at the cycling world and at the even stranger broadcasting world that sits alongside it.
I was very touched to feel the audience come on that journey with me, from crashing in the moat at Leeds Castle, to contracting Covid in Belgium and eventually meeting Michel in La Roche Bernard, all the while accompanied by the presence of Théo Beeckman. I would like to think that he has been passed on to a good number of other people, and become a small part of their shared understanding of the history of Europe and of the Tour de France. I know that he is a small part of me, and will forever be.
And finally, I would like to thank the many hundreds of people who hung around after the show to say hello at every venue. I was quite overwhelmed by your kindness. And I was also the recipient of a number of quite unsolicited messages and gifts; a CD of a jazz trumpeter, an epic poem based on the Tour de France, a book on the principles of architecture by Le Corbusier (first published in 1923), a collection of editions of Le Miroir du Tour from the 1960s, and a tiny bespoke bookshelf that documents my various interests (thank you Paul). Extraordinary.
Many people contributed towards the successful run of the Marginal Mystery Tour. My oldest friend in the word Simon Scardifield helped me devise the show and my newest friend Tom Clutterbuck was my indefatigable and extremely talented Tour Manager (thank you, Tom, for the company and the education).
Thanks also to Al Murray (the Pub Landlord!) for his performance as the voice of Henri Desgrange! Jay Marks, Alice Kelly and Nigel McIntyre, as well as all the staff at Performance Communications all played very important parts in ensuring the smooth running of the tour. Thank you one and all.
Mostly, though, thank you for coming! It was a strange time to be on the road with a show celebrating the legacy of ITV’s Tour de France programme. But the warmth of your reactions to the breaking news told me everything I needed to know about the esteem in which you/we hold the race that means the world.
Oh, and I hope to be reviving the Marginal Mystery Tour for the autumn of 2025, and will share any news of further dates as soon as I have them!