And so we come to the final hurdle of the epic drivel about New York, oh the excitement is building to point of you doing naughty on the floor. I can tell.

The entertainment to be had in NYC also varies widely depending on what you’re looking for, but most of it will cost you a fair bit of cash. The two examples I was presented with, and present to you for your consideration, was a stand-up comedy night and a Broadway show.

The stand-up comedy left a lot to be desired if the Ha! club was anything to go by, it’s also the point that the HA! name may actually be ironic. You see, you’re led down to a basement where you are told that after paying for the entrance fee, you are then told you must buy two drinks as a minimum where everything is $10 each. Wonderful, I’m laughing already.

You then get three people on from the local area, whose most impressive lines include “Anyone here from South Carolina?” at which point someone says yes, and He responds “Oh Man!” That’s the joke. Yep. That’s it.

Although at some point one of them asked if anyone was bothered about the Royal Wedding (yes it was talked about all that time ago in March) and out of boredom, I said no, as I was in the front row. I then went on to explain clearly why I didn’t care, and also proceeded to then question how bored the Americans were to be looking at this sort thing, at which point there were more cheers from the audience than during his set. Curious, but there you are.

So basically it was a huge let-down and if you go to the HA! Comedy Club, find the exit instead. You’ll have a better laugh vomiting on a hobo.

One thing that many people say you should do while in New York is see a Broadway show, and the one that was chosen from the sheer lack of anything decent (sorry, the Adams Family? Again?) from Broadway.com, was How to Succeed in Business without really trying, staring Harry “Horse Botherer” Potter who basically it seems, has been trying to get away from the Potter franchise by doing a variety of plays on both sides of the Atlantic.

The premise of the show was that one guy called J. Pierpont Finch played by the wizard, a young but bright window-cleaner buys a book – “How To Succeed In Business” and following its advice joins the multi-national but slightly buggered up “World-Wide Wicket Company”. They sell paint…..probably, who knows?

Basically he starts from the mail-room where one or two key conversations later in which he gets the person above him either fired or moved to another section of the company, he then rises up the ranks (it seems that every time he references the book he turns to the audience and smiles with some music just so you know he’s doing naughty), yet somehow actually does f**k-all actual work.

The love interest comes from secretary Rosemary Pilkington, which she just falls for him straight away and sings various things, but Finch just carries on, until one bit where all of a sudden out of nowhere he starts singing Rosemary and falls for her too.

Don’t ask me, it’s what happened on stage.

Meanwhile, the president of the WWWC, J.B. Biggley played by John Potato Croquette (or the bloke who was nasty, and also buggering Murphy Brown in the TV series Boston Legal), tries to have an affair with some woman called Hedy LaRue, but then something else happens, some other bloke is involved who turns out is a gimp and blah blah blah, oh my, how will Mr Finch win against all this?

Well, the answer is yes, he wins, but it’s how he wins, and actually it seems to come out of nowhere, in quite a brilliant fashion.

Now it would be amazingly easy to now proceed down the road most tread, where we just rip the p*ss out of the thing and then go back to drinking heavily, as what happens during every post that gets written here. But for once, I’m forced to eat my bile and state for the record; Away from Harry Pothead, it seems that Daniel Radcliffe is actually a good stage actor. Not only that, he can move with the best of them, performing dance routines so elaborate, that pretty much anyone watching that sort of thing, let alone perform them would have a heart attack within 20 seconds.

The event was certainly a big occasion as you would expect from a Broadway production, with no less than 22 songs throughout the 2 and a bit hours you were in the tiny theatre for, and to be frank, what they did was nothing short of fantastic. It is certainly something that would be rarely seen over in London theatres….except for the Lion King, Les Miserables and Wicked to name just a few. All in all, it was an excellent show which, if we were to go into too much detail here, would slightly ruin it more than the spoiler type thing you’ve seen here already.

The sad fact is that the one production that would probably work quite well for the UK audiences will never see these shores, but you do get pretty much every other production in London, so in many ways you really feel that you wouldn’t miss much. That and the ticket prices on average are far higher than in London too, and there is more choice in the UK too it seems. So for the glitz and glamour, again it’s debatable as to whether or not it’s truly worth it.

So that’s your lot when it comes to New York. There actually is a hell of a lot more to write about the place, but in order to truly understand it, you do have to see it and condemn it for yourself. New York is not of course the whole of the US in one place, but given that’s meant to be an indicator of the country as a whole, it does seem to hit a very uneven balance between wonderful spectacle and god awful nightmare.

AND FINALLY:

Oh right, before we finally wrap up, there is the story of the Nurse I talked to in the bar, about the state of the US healthcare system, before proceeding onto the main reason she was there.

Before seeing the Harry Potter show, I had gone into a nearby bar because it was Happy Hour, and parked up with a couple of pints. On one side of my was a lovely lady all dressed up, which given the place was rather strange. She picked up on the accent and we got to talking about what she did for a living, which was being a nurse. I made the silly mistake of asking how bad was the health system in the US, and she then enlightened me on what is quite possibly the silliest thing next to Donald Trump.

Obamacare as it’s become known as, is the latest attempt in the US to introduce universal healthcare in the same vein as the NHS in the UK, therefore pretty much wiping out the need for over priced private insurance as is the case for the most part except in dire emergencies where the hospitals have to take you in regardless, but there are so many forms to fill out in those cases, that you would wish you were dead.

Basically because of the monopoly the drug companies have in the US and the power over the congress, everyone has bad mouthed the idea, claiming that it’s communism via the back door, and because no-one’s been able to explain the system in a better way, that’s why the common man on the street has no real idea what it is either and therefore, is also against it.

It was yet another way of demonstrating what money and access to the media can do for you in the land of the free and in a way, it’s a real lesson for all.

Then she mentioned she was dating a cop and it was their forth date, and she was taking him back to her hotel room across the street afterwards for sex, provided he didn’t say anything bad at dinner. Hell, if only dating was as straight forward as that here….