mostly david ephgrave

The thing that made this year bearable for me was, without a doubt, meditation. If it hadn't been for the often-weekly Zoom classes run by the Letchworth Centre of Healthy Living, I wouldn't have leant so heavily into the gift of space and perspective that meditation can give. It was all about grounding for me and quieting the noise and the anxiety. Of course, it doesn't take your problems away, but it creates a little breathing space to consider them with equanimity. And that's a useful tool to have in your arsenal. (Insert euphemism here.) The problem for me is my deeply ingrained fear and depression, which is hard to work around. I hate how depression zaps so much energy from me. It stagnates my creativity and fucks with my sense of self-worth; something which has become harder to sidestep in the past year, although I'm determined not to let it beat me.  It helps that I understand the cause of my poor mental health with more clarity now, in the wake of the atmosp...

Pulling together a couple of composite images to summarise Mostly Comedy 's 2020 act roll-call - as I do every year - served to underline what a great bunch of people have either appeared at the club or guested on our podcast since January. Stills, taken from some of our Zoom-based More Than Mostly Comedy Podcast interviews this year. ...plus a few more. Of course, the year was nothing like we'd planned, with just two proper live dates in January & February thanks to COVID-19, but at least we managed to make a virtue of adversity by dipping more heavily into the podcast than usual, with ten new episodes already released and another three waiting to be edited; that's far more than we would have done had the club been open, so that's good. And even if we'd gone ahead with the onstage interviews we'd intended to do at the club this year, it's unlikely we'd have had such an impressive roster of guests; that's the advantage of being interviewing peop...

I was so sad to learn that Tony Phillips passed away earlier this month. Tony was a bit of a local celebrity and was a face you'd always see around Hitchin, whether you knew him or not. He was a longterm friend of Doggett & Ephgrave, who always supported our projects and often lent us a hand as we did to him. And he was a creative powerhouse, forever writing and performing, and always trying something new; he put us (relative) youngsters to shame really. I believe it was 2010 when he took a two-hander about Glenn Miller to the Edinburgh Fringe. Glyn and I were there that year with our first stand-up show 'Big In Small Places', which he was good enough to attend with Hitchin's Town Centre Manager Keith Hoskins in tow. We popped to the Pleasance a few days later to watch his play, which he'd written as well as appearing in it, and we were stuck by how good it was; it still sticks in my mind vividly. It could have toured easily and had a life beyond the Fringe (whi...