Christmas Already?

I’m no Scrooge but I’m sick and tired of all the Christmas nonsense which is currently permeating everyday life. Everywhere you look on television, in shops or...well basically just on television and in shops, there’s just bloody Christmas this and Christmas that. It’s not even December yet for god sake! They’ve been taking bookings for Christmas parties at my local pub since September. Soon we’ll have the January sales and it’ll be straight back into preparations for next Christmas. Why won't they just let us celebrate Shrove Tuesday in peace?

I have therefore decided to respond in kind. Next year my birthday celebrations (which should take place entirely on July 27th) will begin in May. A protracted preamble will ensue before culminating in a dull drab celebration on July 27th which would’ve been much more exciting had we not built it up beyond recognition for the previous three months. And just in case you’re worried that you’ll miss my May celebrations, there’ll be adverts all over T.V and mince pies will be half price.

Dan

Hull Comedy Festival

After taking part in Brighton’s Fresh Meat festival last month we were eager to continue our foray into live comedy. This time we would be doing our own one hour gig in front of paying customers as part of Hull’s Comedy Festival. Even though this had been planned in early June we hadn’t given much thought to the show until two weeks before we were due to perform. This meant that we had to publicise, write and rehearse the show in a very short amount of time. Chris was also busy teaching which meant we would only have one day to rehearse together in Hull.

Dan and I had travelled up to Hull a week early to prepare and publicise the gig. This proved to be time consuming and tiring due to having to walk around Hull from gig to gig handing out flyers and putting up posters. We also went to a few promotional events to meet other performers and to show films.

The amount of take-away food we consumed in this period began to increase. Having grown up in Hull we knew where the best take-aways were and that they were half the price of those in Brighton. The worst case of this was the night of Chris’s arrival. Dan and I had been out all day setting up the tech in the venue and were starving when we eventually finished at around 8pm. Chris wasn’t due in till 10 so we went for a Wetherspoon’s curry and waited. He was early so we finished up and set off for home. He hadn’t eaten so we decided to get him a pizza from the local pizza place, Pizza Hot (which for some reason looks uncannily like a Pizza Hut). We ended up getting a 15” a 12” and some garlic bread to share as it had been a full hour since our last meal. Chris would then continue to live on take-away food for his remaining time in Hull before declaring that he ‘was ever so greezy’.

The venue was a bit of a nightmare due to none of the staff knowing anything about the set up of the room and how to work the AV. The old massive CRT project wasn’t correctly configured and not only overspilled the screen but was blurry in the left corner. The PA system also didn’t have the correct leads which meant we could only use subwoofers that tended to distort.

One day before we were set to perform my confidence was quite low. What with the tech problems and the lack of rehearsing and ticket sales my conception of the show was that it would be poorly performed, badly attended and with bad sound and vision.

This was a new festival and a show unlike the others that were being put on so we didn’t have much of an idea of what to expect on the night. However, with a last minute gasp of energy we improved the AV greatly (Dan blacking out most of the windows in the room with some of my mum’s bin liner bags helped a lot). The day of the gig our rehearsals went well. We had all been good boys and not only learnt our respective lines but improved them (or in Dan’s case written and adlibbed loads more). All we needed now were punters.

Ten minutes before the show was set to start we were told that we had only sold ten tickets in advance, mostly to friends. At this point I shat my pants and cursed all the nights we spent handing out flyers and putting up posters. The land lady was also quite eager to have an interval (so she could sell drinks to our friends to at least make some money) which meant us performing a quick rewrite of the act in order to incorporate an interval.

Luckily the numbers of people swelled to nearly 40, meaning we had to give instructions to Jonny (our tech and ticket man) to put out more chairs.

The gig itself went well. No mistakes were made and confidence was so high we riffed and played around with the material. The films were particularly well received. Perhaps this was due to the contextualisation that we gave them beforehand as we were able to explain the motivation behind Deep Catalyst and Safe Blokes.

After the gig we were approached by a number of people who said that they had enjoyed the show and wanted to know more about us, which was nice. One guy even said that he had come after seeing a poster in a local take-away. It just shows you that the £90 we spent on printing and the hours of trudging round handing out flyers and posters paid off by bringing in £5 from one lonely guy who had nothing better to do with his Friday night than see three pricks trying to be funny.

Pete