Bad Publicity.


I found this flyer while sorting through my bedroom cupboard. Of all our shows’ taglines, this one had the worst.


We must have been possessed by the spirit of ITV. Reading it made me sick in my mouth. It’s the sort of sentence you’d see in a brochure for a Butlin’s Holiday Camp. Not that I’ve ever looked in one, of course. Not that I’ve ever looked.

What were we thinking? ‘Four characters, two situations, one night of comedy’ is less a tagline, more an equation. Perhaps we'd stumbled across the secret formula to funny. It only needs an exclamation mark to seal the deal.

Two’s Company wasn’t our finest hour. As shows go, it was a pretty cut-and-shut. We glued together two sitcom pilots with a couple of sketches. One of the sitcoms, 'Chipped, Battered and Burgered', was set in a chip shop in the early 1980s. The plot was basically a reworking of Fawlty Towers’ 'Basil the Rat'. Thank God Cleese and Booth’s lawyers never got wind of it.

Glyn wore a false moustache in it, thus saving him the bother of having to do much to differentiate from his other characters. The quick change before it was so tight, he only had a few, stressed seconds to glue the tache on. One night, it started peeling off as soon he took the stage. Lines were dropped left, right and centre as he tried to keep it balanced on his face. It amuses me to think that people paid to see this.


The blurb on the back of the flyer isn’t much better. ‘A cast of five comedy reprobates’ can fuck right off.

Popular posts from this blog

Shakerpuppetmaker.

Image
Have Parker from Thunderbirds and Noel Gallagher ever been seen in the same room? The resemblance is uncanny. So much so, I think something’s afoot. If my suspicions are correct, I've stumbled across a secret that will blow the music and puppet industry wide apart. In the mid-60s / mid-90s at least. It doesn’t take long to see the signposts. There’s the similarity between the name of Oasis’ first single, Supersonic, and Supermarianation, Gerry Anderson’s puppetry technique. The Gallagher brothers would often wear Parkas . Live Forever was clearly a reference to Captain Scarlet and Standing on the Shoulder of Giants to the size difference between Noel and his bandmates. The more you think about it, the more brazen it gets. It’s fishier than Area 51, Paul is Dead and JFK's assassination put together. The only glitch to the theory is scale . According to Wikipedia, Anderson’s marionettes were 1’10” and Gallagher is 5’8”. How does he maintain an illusion of avera...
Read more

Stevenage: A (Tiny) River Runs Through it.

If ever a river was mis-sold, it’s the Roaring Meg in Stevenage. I just walked past it on my way to the retail park that has taken its name. They’re similarly uninspiring. The river is less of a roar and more of a dribble; cystitis sufferers produce greater flow. The retail park is soulless. What was once a thriving enterprise is nearly devoid of atmosphere, save an underlying essence of emptiness and despair. With a Toys R Us. When it was first built I was excited. Back then, the thought of a bowling alley, an ice rink, a Harvester and a Blockbuster Video within a small surface area was enticing. I celebrated many birthdays on site. There was an indoor cricket pitch there for a while where I once had a joint party with a friend. Why someone with an almost pathological fear of sport would agree to such a venture is beyond me, but I did it. Now, there’s very little at the Roaring Meg of note. The river would be a metaphor for the shopping ce...
Read more

Hoo-ray and up She Rises.

So much has happened since my last post in March that this blog risks sounding like an itinerary. The main news is that Hitchin Mostly Comedy will return in the summer at a new venue, the Queen Mother Theatre . The road to this decision was convoluted, though enough fell into place en route to leave me optimistic about this new start. The catalyst was a survey I ran via our mailing list a few months back, in which I asked, "If the club returned in the current climate, with tickets still around £15 (and with similar line-ups), would you still attend?"; the response to which, in simple terms, was a resounding yes. Nearly 250 mailing list subscribers responded in a single week, with around a hundred also taking the option to leave some feedback. And only two people were abusive, which counts as a win when you consider they posted their comments online anonymously. Imagine how many more insults we would have received if the comedy club was a woman. Particularly if she was Diane ...
Read more