Is this what success looks like?

This week I gigged in Swindon and so spent 5+ hours in a car with two other London comics. Being the least experienced act of the three I spent the time listening as the 'alpha comic'* held forth.

He'd been on the professional circuit for twenty years and was a ten-year veteran of the Jongleurs chain of comedy clubs that is the equivalent to Yuk Yuk's in Canada and that club in every American city that caters for office parties, birthdays and bachelorette's nights. Jongleurs is simultaneously the holy grail for UK comics (it pays well) and a focus of intense derision (audiences full of drunk 'comedy illiterates').

His conversation (well, monologue) was peppered with the names of comics from back in the day. Some he mentioned are now genuinely famous and others would be known to British comedy aficionados but most were common-or-garden variety circuit comics still telling their jokes at clubs and pubs up and down the country.

As a headline act he was earning between £150 and £400 a set, so a show a night for five nights a week means he probably earns about £70K before tax. As I was musing a few weeks back, here is a man who's his own boss and who gets paid for doing something he obviously loves, occasionally as far afield as Germany, Holland, Dubai and Singapore. He even has a mortgage; the gateway to Middle England respectability.

So is this what success looks like?

Ten years ago his thinking had been that now he'd made it to the rarefied heights of Jongleurs, it was just a matter of time before he picked up a radio or TV deal. After that he'd be in a position to cut back on the unedifying experience of spending your nights in strangers' cars driving to places like Swindon to perform to fifty non-paying punters for £150.

His analysis was that just as he'd paid his dues multichannel digital television came along and changed everything. Time was when once you'd been on the box you didn't look back. Even if you chose to do a live gig those magic words As Seen On TV! meant you'd be in a larger venue, perhaps even an actual theatre with a proper dressing room and seating hundreds.

In other words his career plan was based on a world where television equaled popularity. Unsurprising when a full 50% of the population of Great Britain watched the 1977 Morcambe & Wise Christmas Special. These days the fact that a comic has appeared on television is no indicator of anything more than the fact that he's been around for a few years. Stick it out on the circuit and sooner or later you'll find yourself doing something for BBC4 at midnight. Except now it's just another £150 gig and only your mum will care.

The fact that I was going to Swindon in the same car to do the same gig for substantially less money means that there's always going to be downward pressure on his earning ability. That mortgage isn't success so much as a predictor that he'll be spending the next twenty years as he's spent the last twenty; in cars going up and down the M4.

* In his wonderful book House of Lies: How management consultants steal your watch and then tell you the time, Martin Kihn has a fantastic graph showing how much junior McKinsey consultants should talk when interacting socially with senior team-members. The parallels between my two worlds never end