mostly david ephgrave

When I woke up today, I logged into the Mostly Comedy ticketing system on the off-chance, to see how sales were faring for next June’s show with Stewart Lee and Norman Lovett (which went on pre-sale to our mailing list subscribers at 9:00am this morning), and was amazed to find forty-seven tickets had already been snapped up in the first five minutes. The day started as it was set to go on. By 9:10am, we’d sold sixty-nine; by 9:20am, the tally stood at eighty. Within an hour, we’d sold slightly more than the capacity of our soon-to-be previous venue The Market Theatre, and minutes later, we had completely sold out; by far the fastest tickets have gone for any of our events to date. We had expected demand to be high, based on Lee’s last two visits to the club, but not as high as this; particularly when the gig is still seven months away. It was extraordinary and very exciting – and bodes well for how things will go in our new venue in the New Year. ...

I don’t know what to do with myself when there's no Mostly Comedy to repeatedly check ticket sales for. It’s the first thing I do when I switch on my computer. Then I do it again…and again. If I’m walking down the street, I’ll check it on my phone. It’s a habit I can’t get out of. I think I’m obsessed. It’s not about making money; if we set the club up with that as our motivation, we went into the wrong business. I just want to see that it does well. It’s a mixture of pride and compulsion: I can’t get the Mostly Comedy ticket-selling-monkey off my back. If anything, I should be pleased to have a break. Our next date is in September with Stewart Lee, which sold out in four hours back in June. Before long, we’ll turn our minds to finalising our Autumn / Winter line-ups and then put them on sale. I’ll have another list of gigs to fixate about then. At least it stops me from constantly flicking all my light switches on and off. There are wo...