mostly david ephgrave

Last night, Jack Dee played Mostly Comedy; something we would never have dreamt would happen when we started the club, back in 2008. Jack Dee at Hitchin Mostly Comedy (22.11.17) I regularly have to catch myself when another big name comes to Hitchin, which happens these days with alarming regularity. In 2017 alone we’ve hosted an impressive list of acts who’d never been to Mostly before, such as Ardal O’Hanlon, Reginald D Hunter, Mark Watson, Angelos Epithemiou, Katy Brand and Hal Cruttenden, not to mention some of our favourite regulars, like Arthur Smith, Norman Lovett, Richard Herring and Hattie Hayridge. For an event that started solely as an excuse to write more material, it’s crazy how it’s snowballed, and having a household name like Dee come to town is the icing on the cake; I’m already searching my mind for who to try to book next. Ivo Graham at last night's gig. The unexpected treat for many last night was Ivo Graham's set, which wa...

I’m pleased to report everything seems to be done and dusted regarding our reinstated extra Mostly Comedy on 22 nd November with Jack Dee and Ivo Graham, with all the original ticketholders successfully snapping up their original bookings in under a day. My high-tech checklist. It was a relief when I logged into our ticketing system yesterday at 9am to see people were already re-securing their tickets as soon as they returned to sale. I continued to keep an eye on it all day, answering the odd email query, while making sure there were no administrative mistakes lurking that would lead to us overselling, or to the wrong number of seats going to the wrong person to create inevitable chaos. Thankfully nothing like that happened; in fact, only one of the 48 individual ticketing links had been sent to the wrong person, and that was the fault of the ticketing company and not me (smug face); this was swiftly resolved before the proverbial doo-dah hit...

Today’s been a strange mix of organising the ticketing situation for this month’s once-cancelled, now reinstated Mostly Comedy with Jack Dee and making pizza dough from scratch; I wonder if you can guess which was more therapeutic? It’s fair to say the former of the two was the most complicated; while we’ve known the show was going ahead for a day or so, we had to sit on it until we’d spoken to our ticketing provider (the excellent WeGotTickets) to work out the best way to ensure everyone who’d originally booked would have a chance to reclaim their tickets (minus any booking fee) before they were returned to general sale; this was by no means as easy as it sounds, as I had to set up forty-eight individual ticket links (one for every original transaction) and send them our manually to the people who nabbed them in the first place, making sure each individual punter would only be able to buy the same amount of seats or fewer than they bought originally; not ...