mostly david ephgrave

I'm surprised the Mostly Comedy Festival's not selling as well as last year's at the moment, outside of the Dr John Cooper Clarke date, which is long sold out. Perhaps the fact the sold-out gig is markedly more expensive than our other dates (we had to keep in line with the rest of his tour) has had a negative impact. Or more likely, I haven't been promoting it enough lately, but it's hard to find the time when there's so much other stuff to do; today, I had a worrying moment when I finally turned the page on my calendar to see how alarmingly close the Fringe is now, and I'm nowhere near ready. And the inevitable extra admin brought on by lack of money and all those cancelled previews is a perfect storm of stress to add to the equation; it's not a lot of fun. The trick will have to be making every day count for the next few weeks, and to very quickly get to the point of putting down the admin and picking up the show itself. It doesn't have to be ...

It was gratifying to see July's Hitchin Town Hall Mostly Comedy date with Dr. John Cooper Clarke sell more than our usual venue The Sun's capacity across the weekend's pre-sale - and more still today - thus boding well for how things should continue. As I've said previously, while I was sure the show would prove popular amongst our audience, there was still a slight hesitation on my part, largely due to the risk that goes with staging an event at a venue that's more expensive to us and over twice our normal capacity. Without going into specifics, it's also easily the biggest fee we've confirmed an act for in our ten year history. That said, the end justified the means as we've already covered that figure in three days of sale-time, which is something we would never have dreamt of when we started the club at The George back in 2008. The good news is this initial spike in interest affords us the opportunity to relax, safe in the knowledge that the show...

I bet you didn't book to attend two screenings of a rare Wings film today to end up missing both. Because let's face it: that's the sort of behaviour that's reserved for me. What's frustrating was I was really looking forward to going until I ran out of time to leave for the first showing; I then booked for the second one on a whim to end up running out of time for that one too. The reason for my tardiness was, as ever, due to Mostly Comedy, when it suddenly became in our interest to get the Dr. John Cooper Clarke show on sale as soon as possible to line up with an advert for his tour in the Guardian Guide this weekend, which for some reason took forever to do. I also had to sort out a few things for my dad before a couple of doctors' appointments on Tuesday and Wednesday, and the race to get this all done before I caught the train to London snowballed in a stressful enough way for me to end up pulling the plug on my McCartney-based jolly; so it was that I m...

While there was no reason to doubt it, I was delighted by the excitement today's announcement that Dr. John Cooper Clarke will play July's Hitchin Mostly Comedy Festival provoked. I'd like to think my judgment of what our audience wants to see is pretty sound, based on the club's popularity, but every so often there'll be a slight undercurrent of worry, particularly when there's either a lot of money involved or the event's taking place at a different venue to usual. In the case of John Cooper Clarke, I'd been working on the booking for a few months and had every crossable appendage assuming the position in the hope it would come good, but knew all along it would only work if we held it at Hitchin Town Hall so we could get enough people through the door to fund it. This obviously meant whittling down a date that both John and the venue could do while striking a deal with both that wasn't too expensive when a show of this nature has more overhea...