In 2001 I wrote a book called The Comedy Store (still available in some good bookshops – and quite a lot of bad ones) about the London comedy club that kick-started modern British comedy. The book was a bit of a mixed bag, but the best bits were where I shut up and let these comics talk about each other. And the comic they talked about most of all was Robin Williams. Their tales of seeing him perform for the sheer love of it, in front a few hundred tipsy punters, show what a great comic we’ve all lost.
Robin Williams first played the Comedy Store in 1980, on a trip to London to dub the voice-over for Robert Altman’s Popeye. The compere that evening was Alexei Sayle. ‘He’d finished filming Popeye in Malta with Robert Altman that day, got on a plane to London, got in a cab and said, “Take me to a comedy club,’ Sayle told me.
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