mostly david ephgrave

Tonight’s Mostly Comedy at the Sun Hotel with Arthur Smith and Phil Wang was a great way to draw a line under what's been a truly exceptional year for the club. Arthur Smith, on-stage at The Sun Hotel, Hitchin (13.12.17) We’re all too aware of how lucky we are to be running an event with such ardent and consistent support. Just the last few months have been a case in point, with Jack Dee, Phill Jupitus and Henning Wehn’s dates all selling out in a matter of minutes; a few years ago we would never have dreamt this possible and yet here it is; we always hoped the club would become a hot ticket that stayed in a smallish room and didn't lose it roots and that’s exactly what’s happened; it’s extraordinary really. Doggett & Ephgrave being weird, pre-show. It shows how much we’ve grown to accept the calibre of line-ups we host to have an act of Arthur Smith’s stature play the club again for us to barely bat an eyelid. It helps ...

Yesterday saw the second sold out Mostly Comedy in a row, though this time we were playing host to a line-up who’ve all performed at the club in the past; one of them, very regularly. (The bill - in case you're wondering - was Lucy Porter, Phil Kay and Brodi Snook.) I think it was inevitable yesterday’s show would be more relaxed than the day before, as we had less to prove by nature of the fact we knew everyone on the bill, and the gig hadn’t had the same dramatic ‘selling out in fourteen minutes to be cancelled and then reinstated’ lead-up. That said, there’s always a risk you’ll keep telling yourself it will be easier for you to be too laid back and make mistakes. Phil Kay, on top form last night (23.11.17) The glaringly big difference was I was hosting alone, as Glyn was in Wimborne, kicking off the adult panto tour he company manages every year. On paper, this shouldn’t have been too much of a challenge, as I was turning up t...

Tonight’s Mostly Comedy was stupidly good - insanely stupidly good - but at the same time it was a little terrifying, as I spent the whole show in a metaphorical vacuum, barely able to hear a thing. I should explain: for the last week or so, my right ear has been purely ornamental, due to a mix of a low-level infection and an unnecessarily large wax quota. This actually started when I was in Edinburgh, when every so often I’d feel like I was in an aeroplane waiting for my ear to pop; usually it would clear eventually; that was until the last week, when it’s actually closed shop…and has done nothing of use since except hold up my sunglasses. I went to the doctors on Monday, who gave me some ear drops to help clear things up, but sadly these haven’t quite kicked in yet; consequently I spent tonight feeling like I was using in-ear monitors, as all I could hear was my own voice uncomfortably close and nothing else. I did a set at the top of the gig, which Glyn insisted...

Tonight’s Mostly Comedy was one of those effortless gigs where everything fell into place. A selection of shots of tonight's line-up, featuring us, Mark Watson, Bec Hill and a bonus pic of Glen Davies. After the show, there was a definite sense between Glyn, our tech Paul that it was a night we should be proud of. Mostly’s one of those things that can comes gently in and out of favour in your mind, what with all the organization and the fact our identities get lost in the midst of an event people forget we’re the originators of. You also start to take for granted the level of line-ups we have as a matter of course, which are really quite extraordinary. This week is a case in point. Tonight was the first in a three-day-straight of Mostly Comedy shows, with Mark Watson and Bec Hill tonight in Hitchin, Richard Herring and Hattie Hayridge tomorrow in Hitchin too and an extra bill of five previews in Letchworth tomorrow topped by Norman Lovett...

Today, I nipped to Letchworth to meet with illustrator (and one-time - two-time - comedy poet) Mushybees, to discuss an event Mostly Comedy will act as surrogate parents to as part of Letchworth’s Arts Takeover in a couple of weeks. Months ago he got into contact to see if we’d be up for co-organising a comedy stage as part of Letchworth’s weekend of arts-based attractions in July; something I’d provisionally said yes to, before things got hectic in the lead-up to Edinburgh and we didn’t take it any further. Despite not getting down to the nitty-gritty straight away, we managed to pull a line-up together in a back-and-forth of emails yesterday, leading to me getting Glyn’s blessing and us deciding we’d officially go ahead with it (whatever ‘officially’ means in this context). In reality, it’s not complicated: from 12pm until 6pm-ish on the 22 nd July, Glyn, Mushybees and I will host four Edinburgh previews from four acts (including me), before Nor...

Today, in an extraordinary turn of events, we watched Stewart Lee’s appearance at September’s Mostly Comedy sell out in four hours. It's the quickest that one of our shows has sold to date; the previous record being held jointly by Phill Jupitus and Stewart Lee (again), whose tickets were snapped up in under a week. We had expected the gig to sell fast, but not as rapidly as this. The signs were evident from the off, when twenty-five tickets went in the first five minutes. It made for an exciting day, checking in every half an hour, to see how many had gone. Now that there are none left, I don’t know what  to do with myself; perhaps I’ll take up fishing. Sadly, it's not always as easy as this. If you book the right headliner though, and you run a gig in an unsaturated area, you should do all right. It helps that our tickets are cheap, and that we've built up a good mailing list. It's still amazing that just an email, a tweet and a Facebook message can result ...