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Mostly Birthdays.


Tonight’s Mostly Comedy was great.

Like last month, we were in the lovely position of being sold out. This definitely contributed to the atmosphere. There’s something immensely satisfying about standing backstage, listening to the sound of a hundred and one people packed into a tight room, laughing uncontrollably; it’s not so good with a hundred in, but that extra one makes all the difference (particularly if it's Kriss Akabusi).

(Glyn and I get the odd laugh too, it’s just harder to get the audience to do it in unison.)

Tonight’s saw the club’s seventh anniversary, and my, how time has flown. It seems like only yesterday that we moved to The Market Theatre, when in reality we’ve been there for three years. While Mostly is still relatively young as an event, it’s incredible to see how much it’s grown in such a short space of time. We started it on a whim, as a vehicle to write more material together, not knowing what kind of beast we’d unleash on the North Hertfordshire area. If you’d told me at our first show, whose line-up essentially consisted of us and a collection of school and college friends, that in seven years time we’d be booking Paul Daniels, not to mention the ever-growing list of top-flight comedians, I would have laughed in your face (then charged you £3 please, as that was the price to get in. No wonder we couldn’t book anyone).

The special occasion didn’t go unmarked. We sang happy birthday to ourselves, as is only right. We also used it as a chance to roll out a favourite piece of material, the Beard Board (another way of saying we ran out of time to get together to write anything new). I tried out some new stuff on my own though, and was pleased with the response. All in all, it was a good night. I also got to tell Kevin Eldon how brilliant I thought he was as Bill Kerr in The Missing Hancocks without embarrassing myself. Well, I think I got away with it.

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