Tonight’s Mostly
Comedy had a very special headliner - true to form - in Simon Day and was a great gig
all in all, though the last few hours before the show were a little frenetic,
so we went into it pretty stressed.
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| June's Hitchin Mostly Comedy line-up: (clockwise from top) Simon Day, Spring Day and Lorna Shaw. |
If there’s one
thing I could eliminate from the whole Mostly Comedy experience it would be the tendency for
a race-to-the-finish (or more accurately, a race to the start) with no
backstage to disappear to to get your head together for it; just a dressing
room would do, rather than slipping into the gents’ (which has the world’s
slowest closing outer door) feeling sweaty and low status, hoping you won't first meet meet the main act when they burst in on you in your
underwear.
Running the club
means constantly switching hats, much like that old, chaotic Tommy
Cooper sketch, and the lack of a proper backstage area is often the final straw
that breaks the camel’s back, to mix metaphors. This evening wasn’t helped by
my only remembering last-minute that the bulb in the angle-poise lamp we use
for the hand shadows material we were doing exploded a few months back, with the bayonet part stuck inside it so you couldn’t fix a new one. This led to me poking
at it with a pair of scissors (not the ideal tool to use, but it was off) while on
speakerphone to Glyn to see if he knew of where there might be another lamp. In the end, my wife
nipped home to get the nearest thing we had to replace it, which initially was
too diffuse, until our techie Andy had the wise idea to remove the outer - for
want of a better word - orb that surrounds it.
Once we got
started, things settled a bit, but I still didn’t feel exactly on form due
to the stress of it all. I barely had time to speak to all the acts, which was
a shame, but I think they enjoyed it. Simon's set was great and I managed
to at least have a quick chat about some of his other projects I’d seen
and heard recently, but he seemed to keen to potentially come back. It’s funny, but it
only just came into my head that I first saw him perform in person when I went
to see 'The Fast Show Live' in the West End twenty years ago; where on Earth did
that time go? I ASKED A QUESTION.