Festivus.


Today we announced we’ll be hosting a week’s worth of Mostly Comedy dates - a Mostly Comedy Festival in fact - in July to mark the club’s tenth birthday.

It’s something we’ve been toying with for a while, and this year seemed the right time to introduce it. As with last summer, we’re running two standard Mostly Comedy line-ups on the Thursday and Friday at The Sun - the former date with Tony Law and Hattie Hayridge is already on sale - but this time we’re adding three nights of split-bill Edinburgh previews on the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday at the Market Theatre next door. This will be in the actual theatre as opposed to the studio where we used to run the club, which is the perfect space for previews in that it doesn’t need a massive audience to have a good atmosphere, or that’s the theory at least.

It’s already been super-easy to fill the Market Theatre slots as comics are always keen to book previews in July, what with the Fringe being imminent. Both myself and Glyn’s and my longtime director Glen Davies will be filling a slot each, and we’ll let slip who else will be doing it in the coming weeks. We intend to sell special festival tickets that will be valid for the Monday-Wednesday at a discounted rate, as well as selling each night separately for those who’d prefer to book that way. Hopefully this will create enough interest to cross-promote each night; we’ll keep the Thursday and Friday separate, what with them being bigger shows at our usual venue...or at least that’s the plan at the moment.

While I hope the Festival will be a success, we don’t need to pull big crowds for the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday dates to work; comedians are used to doing previews to next-to-no-one, so anything else is a bonus. If it goes well, we might do it every year, but we’ll see how it goes; it’s a bit of an experiment. It just so happens the Hitchin Festival falls in the same month, so that should help us sell tickets. We’re certainly not running it for profit, but every little helps; we have a few plans for the actual month of our tenth birthday (which is October) too, but we'll keep that under our metaphorical hat for now.

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