Brighton Fringe: From Washout to Sell-out

A week is a long time in politics. It’s even longer if you’re a Daddy Long Legs and your average lifespan is 24hrs. But in comedy, a week can be a roller coaster.

After months of writing, re-writing, cutting things out, rehearsing, putting things back in, publicising, fliering, hoping and shitting, all our hard work comes down to two gigs in one fine week in the middle of Brighton Fringe Festival. One fine week prefixed by Chris losing his voice, Pete’s inexplicable nose-bleeds and my unfortunate rash. From our point of view, the first gig was a bit of a washout. Despite hours of fliering and my ridiculous headgear we only got 13 people through the door. And most of those were people we knew. We were initially taken aback by the turnout (and I think this was reflected in our energy at the start of the show) but the material was well received, we got consistent laughter, and the delivery and performance was good. We were just pissed off that no-one was there to see it, although with the show being at 22:00 on a Tuesday we were always going to struggle for numbers (despite being comedy pick of the day in the local newspaper and the fringe email!).

The second show couldn’t have been more different to the first. Demoralised by the first show, we threw caution to the wind and gave up on fliering and rehearsing. Instead we hired our resident heavy, Jon, to force people to come and utilised the power of Facebook to network our way to success. It worked. The second show was a sell-out. More chairs had to be brought into the theatre and the show had to start late as a result. The energy levels were good all the way through, the material consistently went down well and it was much more enjoyable than the first gig. Because of the first gig we went into the second a bit more relaxed and confident which allowed us to play around with the material a bit more and ad-lib some extra material. As the gig went on, however, I think we became a little bit more self-conscious and because of this (and lighting and sound issues) we missed out a couple of sections and lines. This was really annoying as we reference them later in the show and some good material was lost.

Overall, the festival was a great experience. I think our performance was more solid in the first gig – we performed the material well and without (much) mistake but the second gig was much more enjoyable and allowed us to gauge the quality of the material more effectively. The bigger audience also allowed us to establish a better rapport and atmosphere – because of the small audience at the first gig this was very difficult. Most of all, we’ve got a better idea of what works and what doesn’t in the show. We’re playing around with the material a lot more now which means we’re writing new bits and improving sections. The familiarity also means the performance is getting better. But there’s still a long way to go before Edinburgh. The show will be further road tested in Manchester, London and Brighton before then. It’ll be polished, refined and tweaked but rest assured we’ll return infantile, silly and slightly obscene.

Dan