mostly david ephgrave

While there was no reason to doubt it, I was delighted by the excitement today's announcement that Dr. John Cooper Clarke will play July's Hitchin Mostly Comedy Festival provoked. I'd like to think my judgment of what our audience wants to see is pretty sound, based on the club's popularity, but every so often there'll be a slight undercurrent of worry, particularly when there's either a lot of money involved or the event's taking place at a different venue to usual. In the case of John Cooper Clarke, I'd been working on the booking for a few months and had every crossable appendage assuming the position in the hope it would come good, but knew all along it would only work if we held it at Hitchin Town Hall so we could get enough people through the door to fund it. This obviously meant whittling down a date that both John and the venue could do while striking a deal with both that wasn't too expensive when a show of this nature has more overhea...

Today I sent the following email to few friends and people I know in the industry: …and the first response I received was this, from a fellow comic: Don’t you just love humanity? I actually wasn’t contacting them in their unnecessarily overstated capacity as a promoter, but as a fellow human being - and one who knows what it's like to try to pull together an audience. I didn’t break any rules and wasn’t pestering or being pushy; I’d just dropped them a line in the hope they'd show interest; they were the ones being unprofessional by being so blunt. It’s disheartening when you try to generate interest in what you do to feel like you’re shouting into silence. It’s not like I’m giving it the hard-sell. it can be difficult to keep faith in the worth of my work at the best of times, without being hit by such unpleasantness; I wouldn’t speak to anyone like that, however right I thought I might be; if my email was that ann...

Today we confirmed Mark Watson for July's Mostly Comedy, who’s another act we’ve been hoping to book for ages. The list of people to have played - or be soon to play - the club has become ridiculous. Just when I think we might not better who we’ve had for a while, another name sneaks in to make things interesting. I try hard to book people that will excite the club’s regulars when they hear about them; I work on the understanding if it’s the sort of person I’d be really interested to see, then the same will apply for other people too (a method that seems to be confirmed by how many of the dates sell out). July’s set to be a great month for Mostly. As with last year, we’re running two consecutive shows: the 20 th with Mark Watson & Bec Hill and the 21 st with Richard Herring & Hattie Hayridge. It will be a nice way to lead into our annual sabbatical in August due to Edinburgh. Then, before we know it, we’ll be in October, celebrating t...

I'm trying to remind myself today that I shouldn’t be disappointed that September’s instalment of our comedy club has sold slightly fewer tickets than usual. When you organise a regular event, it’s easy to forget the bigger picture; you get so caught up in the facts and figures for each individual date, you forget how things have been going overall. This has definitely been the case this month, when finalising our remaining 2016 line-ups; I’ve been so distracted by what’s ahead , I’ve overlooked how successful the rest of the year has been and how fortunate we are as a result. Booking bills for a comedy club is a juggling act. It’s like fishing: you repeatedly cast your line in the hope something good takes the bait and gets hooked. To stretch the analogy, you have lots of rods on the go, instead of relying on one. You’re always on the look out for the best possible outcome; I can't help but feel that by mixing my imagery, I’ve clouded my original point. We’re v...

I confused a Norwegian city with a new town in Hertfordshire today, with embarrassing results. It was in the midst of a chain of emails between a comedian's assistant and me that my idiotic mistake took place. I was trying to plug a gap in a forthcoming Mostly Comedy line-up when, within minutes of suggesting the date, I got the response they weren't available, as they were gigging in Stevenage that night. “That’s strange,” I thought, "as I've got tickets to see them in Stevenage the following month. Perhaps the assistant's got their dates mixed up.” (I think in full sentences.) I checked the venue’s website to see if an extra show had been added, and it hadn’t. This left me in a quandary: should I just leave it at that, or find a gentle way to suggest they may have made a mistake? You can guess which option I went with. I tried to make out the error was mine, without realising I’d made a different gaffe...

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...

This morning, I’m suffering from a unique kind of stress that only comes from learning that next week’s gala Mostly Comedy isn’t in the local paper. I can’t complain. The amount of coverage we’ve had over the years is fantastic. I also heard tell that the show was mentioned briefly in a piece on Hitchin Festival last week – but our ticket sales suffer noticeably when they don't write a feature about it. They have a catchment we could never reach on our own, and if we can’t spread the word sufficiently, we risk ending up with a sparsely populated and expensive gig. These days, our shows are sold primarily through Twitter and our mailing list. We’re lucky to have enough subscribers who are genuinely interested in the club to book tickets, plus a handful Twitter followers who repeatedly retweet our posts to push our line-up information about. This social interaction, however, soon reaches its limit, without a push from the local press. You need to reach the uninitiated to...

For the first time in seven years, I haven't written a press release for Mostly Comedy.  I've always made the local press deadlines every month, but this month I've had other things on my mind. My solo show became my priority. That said, I would have put some promotional material together if it had been strictly necessary, but it was less 'pressing' as we were already sold out.  (There I go again with my 'first thought jokes'; *cough* Brighton review *cough*.) Despite it being less important than usual, I'm still frustrated that I haven't done it. I'm a completest, so these things make me tetchy. It's also good to spread the word about such a great line-up (*cough* Sara Pascoe and Aisling Bea *cough*). It's good status for the club. But it's still out there, without us having to encourage it along. That's why people booked in the first place.  (...starting sentences with 'that' and 'but', David? Has...

I’ve spent most of the morning sending out texts and emails, trying to book some interesting acts for Mostly Comedy in the New Year. By being lucky enough to have such excellent line-ups in 2014, we’ve created a rod for our own back. In recent months we’ve had – and will have - Phill Jupitus, Stewart Lee, Kevin Eldon, Richard Herring, John Thomson and Sean Hughes, all of which sold out; some, weeks in advance. We now have to maintain the same level to keep the night selling, and to meet our audience's expectations. It’s not an awful position to be in. It still excites me to have these people on the bill. I would never have anticipated it when we started it. I see it as a challenge to see who we can get next. It’s fun to aim big. There’s no harm in asking somebody high profile, as they can only say no at worst. (Unless they own a gun.) The downside is you spend too much time concerned with admin. It takes ages, juggling names, bu...