Let’s meet Jamie MacDonald, the latest in a distinguished, if rather small, band of blind stand-up comedians. Jamie has the eye condition retinitis pigmentosa, which, as he says himself, is easier to have than to spell and he’s recently ended a four-part series of Radio 4 called Life on the Blink. It’s much easier to get a flavour of Jamie’s comedy by listening to it, rather than me trying to describe it. But as any blind person, who ventures out alone, will know, asking directions from sighted people is pretty much a waste of time – their landmarks mean nothing to us. And Jamie imagines the fun of revenge really, giving our kind of directions to a sighted pedestrian.
Clip – Jamie MacDonald
"What you want to do is you want to take 179 medium steps to the left, you’ll get to some bollards, when the third one cracks your knee, reach out for a plate glass window. From there it’s an eight-metre crab walk to the right into a rough wooden fence, now grab on and follow that till you get five splinters in your hand and you drag your head through three sticky out bushes. Now brace yourself, the last one’s holly! At the end of the alley there is a Victorian spiral staircase, now plummet down with about 1G and bust out at the bottom, dizzy, on to the main road. Now you want to hear the traffic coming down your left-hand side because if it’s coming down your right-hand side, you’re screwed because that’s you in the fast lane. Tumble down a tiny embankment, twist your ankle, tear your trousers, let out an involuntary scream – arhhhh – and then turn right on to a tiny pavement. Now this is where it gets a bit tricky."
White
I got a lot of recognisable laughs from your series but that was the biggest probably, that sounded like it came from the heart.
MacDonald
Yeah, thank you very much. Yeah that was some of the relatable stuff I put in the Radio 4 show because my kind of mission on stand-up is not to enlighten or anything like that or inspire but it’s just to entertain with our day-to-days lives because I think if you’ve got a certain type of attitude, we do live quite funny lives.
White
We do. What was the impetus though for you, not just to laugh at yourself but to laugh at yourself on the stage?
MacDonald
Ah, well, I think the – I think a lot of people with the kind of sight loss we go through, the journey and I ended up – I was in denial for quite a long time, then I started using a white stick and then that was fantastic but with that freedom and liberation I felt I lost a lot of my identity, I went from being Jamie to just – oh look, there’s a blind guy. And that wound me up quite a lot. I was working in a bank and I was just fading into the wall – just, there’s the blind guy coming, oh isn’t he brave, oh god, oh… I couldn’t bear it. So, I’d been going to this comedy club in Shoreditch, in London and as I say in the show, the people that were performing there were weird and wonderful and I decided that society had classed me as weird, so why not try and be wonderful. And I signed up and I spent a month working on a set and worrying about how the hell I was going to the stage and then I did it, I went up and had a five cathartic minutes of blind banter, which the schadenfreude loving people of Shoreditch seemed to go for. And then it just – it just went from there.
White
Now the series you’ve just done for Radio 4, it was very upfront about your blindness, could you, do you, do stand-up without reference to being blind or is the audience likely to be so focused on it that you feel it has to be part of the act?
MacDonald
Yeah, I’ve struggled with that one a lot because I do, in the hour long shows, I do off into non-blind stuff about Scottish independence and Glasgow and various things about my own other – my non-blind life. And – but when I was first starting out and I was doing a fringe show in Edinburgh in 2013, my view is you’ve always got to be upfront and honest with an audience. And if you just turn up and they didn’t know you were a blind comedian, political correctness would say that they shouldn’t be annoyed but they would be furious – I didn’t sign up to a blind comedian, what’s this nonsense, I don’t want to go it, I want to see a normal person. So, I – I bit the bullet and just called this show That Funny Blind Guy and had my head poking through a venetian blind and I thought – well, if you don’t get it from that.
White
Now your latest project is a TV documentary, it was on BBC 2. It’s quite hard to describe, so I’m going to get you to do that for me but, in essence, it’s a kind of road trip to discover how creative people adjust to their loss of sight.
Clip – Blind Ambition
"So, are you impressed Jamie – the people we’ve found, a really cool credible young rapper?
If you got them by not just Googling blind rapper, blind photographer, in fact you probably got me by going blind comedian.
Have you ever searched blind comedian?
Do you know I don’t – I don’t think I have because I know there’s only a few of us and I know who they all are. Put Scotland in at the end.
Scotland’s only blind comedian.
Yehhh.
Neil Skene.
Oh no.
Neil Skene – you’re not even Scotland’s blind comedian.
That is outrageous."
White
Was that genuinely spontaneous Jamie, that there was another comedian who claimed to be the only Scottish blind comedian?
MacDonald
Yeah, it absolutely was, I’ve never heard of the guy. But fair play to Neil Skene, he must be doing very well, somewhere – somewhere else.
White
Get in touch with us Neil, we’ll have you on.
MacDonald
No, you can have us debate – stop picking a fight Peter, come on.
White
Tell me a bit more, though, about the idea behind it because you had quite a range of creative people on didn’t you?
MacDonald
Yes. So, Jamie Leary is the guy that created the show, he’s a TV director of note, he’s well established but he’s got myopia, he’s got serious myopia. Now I’m not up on that, I’m an RP man. But he’s now at the point where he’s facing surgery to maintain his eyesight that could go wrong and see him lose his sight. And that caused him a bit of concern and he thought, well, is this going to be the end of my creative life, should I lose my sight. Well, hang on, let’s see about what other creatives are out there in the blind world just being good, not being good because they’re blind but just being good despite being blind.
White
Right. And you also had – you had a blind rapper, you had a blind wood turner and you had a blind photographer as well.
MacDonald
Yes, we had a blind photographer, still a bit suspicious of that one.
White
Well, can I just ask you about that – would it be fair to say that you play the role of the sceptic in this documentary really, I mean you struggled to understand, as I admit I do as a totally blind person, why blind people would want to take photographs. Was that how you saw your role as the sceptic?
MacDonald
No, no, no, I was very, very, very un-sceptical about everything else apart from the blind photographer, Ian, who’s a lovely guy and he’s got 95% blindness but the 5% he has is basically quite a clear pinprick of sight which he uses to phenomenal effect, so he is actually taking photos and he’s seen what he’s taken and he’s seen the shots and he can go for everything a photographer needs to do. So – but he is still very much blind, so that settles it for me because I just thought – well any – any good photo I take just is an accident and I’ll never know. Then we had the rapper and the wood turner and my personal favourite, we went to see an opera singer, she was absolutely wonderful.
White
Right, well, by very great good fortune, we actually managed to have the opera singer with us – Lizzie…
MacDonald
No way.
White
We do…
Capener
Hi.
White
Lizzie Capener, opera singer for the past 20 years. You’ve sung with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the King’s Consort. You’ve made recordings for Radio 3 and Classic FM. Appeared in the Three Choirs Festival and was a judge in the BBC 1 singing competition. What on earth were you doing with this rabble?
Capener
I’m not sure, that was a great introduction, thanks Jamie.
MacDonald
Pleasure.
Capener
Yeah, they – so I presume Jamie and Jamie did their Google of blind singer, blind opera singer and came up with me. I know there are a couple of others but I was obviously a bit luckier than Jamie and came to the top of the listing rather than further down.
MacDonald
There’s not a Mrs Skene out there that’s a good singer.
White
I mean the concept is interesting, which is to find out what happens to the creative urge, as it were, as you lose vision and we’ve talked about the photography, as an example, is there a sense in which loss can actually be something that makes you more creative?
Capener
I’m not sure that there’s a direct link. I’ve been singing all my life, I started singing for my dad’s church choir when I was five and I wasn’t diagnosed with my RP until I was 17 and already, by then, I was more or less on the path to wanting to be a professional singer. I mean it has, as I’ve lost more of my sight, it has driven me more, I can say that, but I’m not sure that there would be a direct link between the creativity.
White
Jamie MacDonald, what conclusions did you come to – is there a link – did you come to any firm conclusions after your documentary?
MacDonald
I think I just had confirmed to me what I already thought, is that there’s just amazing creative people out there doing their jobs who have bad eyesight. And it may drive them more, it may drive them less, it’s almost irrelevant to the quality of their work. Lizzie’s a fantastic singer and that’s nothing to do with her eyesight and it hasn’t been. I mean the only problem I think Lizzie has is trying to find the concert halls, like I’m trying to find them myself, it’s more arbitrary stuff that’s a problem in Lizzie and mine’s game.
White
Jamie, what’s your next project and are we going to hear anything more of Life on the Blink on Radio 4?
MacDonald
Well, I’m just waiting to find that out myself, Peter, we’re in for a second series but we’ve not had it confirmed yet. Yeah, we’ve got a couple of things in the pipeline – I’m in a sitcom up in Scotland where I play a horrible bigot, which I’m very much…
White
Surely not.
MacDonald
…yeah, absolutely.
White
Well, we’ll try and find out for you about your series for you, if we possibly can…
MacDonald
Oh that’ll be great, get the inside scoop.
White
… well I enjoyed it and also Lizzie Capener, thank you very much indeed for joining us.
Capener
Thank you.