Comedy Bookathon.


For the last few days I’ve been on an act-booking blitz, confirming line-ups for next year’s Hitchin Mostly Comedy dates.

We’ve been trying to secure a handful of more high-profile names for months, to no avail. Then, for some inexplicable reason, the seal broke yesterday and a load came through at once. We’ve now got a nice mix of new and old faces coming to the club in early 2015, most of whom have graced the TV and radio airwaves enough to help us secure bums on seats (with the usual accompanying body parts in tow). We also have a an exciting iron or two in the fire for the Autumn, which we’ll have to sit on for a few months until final confirmation – and it’s never comfortable sitting on a hot iron, believe you me.

Confirming line-ups is stressful. It takes a lot of juggling to get them right. You have to balance the fees you pay out based on what’s affordable, on how much pull you think each act will have and on how they’ll work when you put them together. It’s a mix of past experience and guesswork. Even if someone has sold well before, there's no guarantee they will again. You cross your fingers and hope for the best.

However they sell, there’s a lot to look forward to. There are some great people coming to our venue in the next few months who we're looking forward to see. Now, we just need to write some new material to do alongside them; I wonder if I can hack into Dave Gorman’s cloud storage to steal a few of his slideshows.

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