Christening Mostly Comedy.


Whilst sorting through some paperwork this morning, I stumbled across mine and Glyn’s original notes to decide a name for Mostly Comedy.


I’m not surprised I still had them, as I’m a natural hoarder. It takes me years to get rid of anything. If it weren't for the obvious hygiene implications, I’d have every piece of toilet paper I’ve ever used, neatly filed away. I say “neatly”; they’d be festering in a bin bag in my garage.

(Let’s move away from that train of thought.)

It struck me how quickly we'd settled on the name. It only took one side of A5 paper. Mostly Comedy was clearly the best choice; Mad Half Hour Comedy Club sounds like something presented by Pat Sharp.

I’d been toying with the word 'Mostly' for a few years. It started life as an adlib at the end of a solo acoustic gig. I'd signed off my set by saying “I’ve been mostly David Ephgrave”. If the show hadn’t been recorded, I would have forgotten the phrase. Mostly David Ephgrave became the proposed title for an album I was making at the time, with the help of my knob-twiddling* friend Ashley Mann. It was never finished, due to apathy, but the name still stuck.

On the other side of the paper, we mapped out our first line-up. They were a mix of school and drama school friends. Paul Harry Allen was the only professional comic. We sprinkled the only two bits of short comic material we'd written back then through the night. The projector-based stand-up didn’t start until Gig Two, when we decided to make use of the screen already rigged behind the stage.


The club's come along way since then. We now have the likes of Stewart Lee, Phill Jupitus, Sean Hughes and Henning Wehn on the bill as a matter of course. I would never have predicted that. Perhaps this scrap of paper will one day be displayed at the British Museum. I wonder if I could also interest them in my used bog roll collection.

*In a production sense. 

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