Seeing Ollie Fox perform in London

In a light blue shirt and dark jeans, I turned and dived down into Balham tube station. My night had just begun but, at 4 pm, it wasn’t quite the end of work. The train was busy but not rammed as it would be an hour later, full of commuters racing to get home, carriages hot with sweaty, corporate breath. 

If you were to stay on the tube the whole evening, you’d invariably see those same city dogs, freshened up, cologned and careering off to Soho in their technicolours. They’d be perfumed with pre-drink, make-up-ed, and heading into a London that glows neon and rose-tinted across its beaconing hubs.

But it was far too early for that. I was in London to see some comedy, specifically my best friend, Ollie (@olliefoxcomedy), performing at “Up The Creek”, a comedy club near Greenwich, in East London. Specifically, the comedy club was right by the Cutty Sark, a fancy old ship that used to transport wool from Australia to the UK. It’s one of the last “clipper” ships ever built, and it was the fastest boat in the world in the 1800s.

Another friend joined for the comedy and we met up before Ollie arrived. While we waited, we went for a stroll and stood by the great ship, gazing longingly out over the Thames. It was becoming dark but in the west, there was a remaining haze of fading yellow. It made a small blueish dent in the encroaching black night: trickles of faded gold clung onto contrails hanging above the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf opposite us, across the river. The lights of the banks were still on, clustered on different floors like a retro dance floor. I thought about how they were slaving away while I stood, at leisure, looking at the spectacular view, and thinking about them. “They’re doing God’s work”, I reassured myself.

We went into the comedy club and took our seats at the back of the room. There were over 170 people in attendance and already there was a merry buzz in the air. Before Ollie came on there were two other acts. The host was a booming, blonde, middle-aged woman who warmed up the crowd with a twenty-minute set. She was followed by a thirty-something man who wore a brown cardigan and made self-deprecating jokes about his age, appearance, and inability to arouse respect from other men. The crowd heartily applauded as he brought his act to a close. My friend and I had only laughed at certain moments. We were both sober and far away from the stage. Towards the front of the room were large groups of men and women who regularly heckled and cried out laughing, totally absorbed in their drunken, Friday night experience.

Ollie came on a little while after the interval. The host had just left the crowd bemused with a story of how she had once hooked up with a 21-year-old. She had been 38 at the time and had been outraged when he told her - “you have pretty feet”. As the crowd laughed and frowned in confusion, she called Ollie up to the stage. He introduced himself and said a few opening words to a steady current of chuckles. 

When I look back on that evening, I remember how I thought Ollie was like a professional athlete. He was totally at ease on the stage, he glowed with confidence and moved with finesse and flow. I remember thinking of Aristotle’s quote about excellence: that we are what we repeatedly do, and so excellence is not an act but a habit. This man before me was the product of the hundreds of gigs he had done over the past three years. Every movement, the slightest gesture and inflexion of his voice was streamlined. It appeared so natural, so cool, but therein lay its greatness. Although he was joking about being awkward with women, about losing his hair and looking ill, or even teaching Latin, he was the master of the room and I felt myself being taken under the power of his jokes and the hypnotising nature of his voice. 

When he first came on stage, he was smiling at the crowd and enjoying his moment with them. He paused all of a sudden as if reflecting on his moment, there on the stage, and his life as a comedian at that very second, how far he had come. He shrugged at the crowd: “You know, I like to think I’m a good lover” he said with a cheeky earnestness. “I once told a woman she had pretty feet”. This one line, delivered in Ollie’s cheeky nonchalance, made the crowd explode with laughter - it felt like the roar of a packed pub during an England match. What had been an average punchline from the host a minute earlier became the top joke of the whole evening. It was one of those punchlines which made a crowd lose control, gasp for breath and collapse onto their friends’ shoulders in near-paralysis. Sat at the back as I was, I had a perfect view of everyone else in the room. And when the words had come out of Ollie’s mouth, for at least two seconds the rest of the crowd seemed completely out of control in their laughter, like the final days of Rome or like a scene from the 2023 film, Babylon.

After he had finished his set and another had performed, I met him outside and we decided to head back to his house in Balham. Our friend took a bus back to his flat in Bermondsey. 

I have a fond memory of Ollie and I sitting on the DLR line, that night, in an empty carriage heading past Canary Wharf. For the Americans and other non-Brits reading this, the DLR is a line on The London Underground. It stands for the “Docklands Light Railway” and is an underground line designed to connect London’s two main financial centres: Canary Wharf and the City of London. The first time I ever went on it was with my grandparents when I was little. We sat at the front and looked at all the skyscrapers.

Ollie and I weren’t at the front of the train, but we stretched out in our seats and chatted as the train cruised by Canary Wharf. There were fewer offices illuminated in the towers at this time. On one building, near the top, we could see the yellow badge belonging to EY, the huge multinational, professional services company. We had friends who were currently working there, one in particular who had just moved to Italy with the company. It felt nice to be nowhere near it, not attached to it or bound by its late nights and tall glass tower. 

Ollie and I walked out of Balham Station fifteen minutes later. I was in the same light blue shirt and dark jeans, and the train was a lot less busy. This time, however, I was my friend, I felt so much pride and love for him. We grinned in the warmth of each other’s company and peered gleefully into bars along the main road.