comedy

A child-free night out

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Our toddler is approaching 17 months old now, and yet last night was the first time that Christine and I had a child-free night out, as a couple. We’ve struggled to get childcare in place, and our toddler is still breastfeeding before bedtime. Thankfully, this time we managed to arrange for a friend to look after them.

We went to a recording of I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue in Halifax. This is the second time we’ve seen the show be recorded; we saw the last two episodes of series 61 being recorded in Bradford in 2014. This time, they were recording the last episode of series 67, with guests Susan Calman (who we also saw later in 2014) and John Finnemore. Graeme Garden, one of the three regulars, wasn’t present for the recording, but Barry Cryer and Tim Brooke-Taylor were.

Though not quite a sell-out, the Victoria Theatre in Halifax was very busy. Tickets for ISIHAC recordings tend to only cost around £5, and so it’s a relatively cheap night out. Though each show is only around 30 minutes when broadcast, significantly more is recorded, and two episodes are taped at each recording.

These two episodes will be broadcast in July, I believe. Watch out for Susan’s lovely singing voice (although her vocal range did prove a limiting factor in the Pick Up Song round), and some controversial moves in Mornington Crescent. Sadly, you won’t get to see John’s facial expressions as he sings One Song To The Tune Of Another, such are the limitations of radio.

When we got home at about 10:30pm, our toddler was still awake but very, very tired. Suffice to say they were still asleep when we put them in the pushchair to go to the childminders this morning. Apparently they’d been perfectly happy whilst we were out. Hopefully, if our finances improve and we can get childcare again, then we’ll be able to have a few more nights out.

Dara Ó Briain’s Crowd Tickler

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dara6
Dara Ó Briain at the 2014 Festival of Curiosity, by Sandra on Flickr. CC-licensed.

Wednesday last week marked 30 months of marriage for Christine and I. Co-incidentally, the Irish comic Dara Ó Briain was performing his latest show Crowd Tickler in Halifax on the same day, and a handful of tickets were still available the week before, so we went to see him.

This was the second time we’d seen Dara in Halifax; we also saw his previous show, Craic Dealer, a few years ago. If I’m honest, I was a bit disappointed with Craic Dealer, having not found it as funny as some of Dara’s other material. We’d seen This is the Show (or ‘TITS’ for short) broadcast on TV, which is worth watching as and when it’s available, and we always make time to watch Mock the Week when it’s on.

Fortunately, Crowd Tickler is a great show. It’s part-improvised, based on interactions with the audience and some local factual knowledge that Dara has gleamed either through research or previous visits. If you get front row seats to one of Dara’s gigs, expect to be asked a number of questions throughout the show. Thankfully, Dara isn’t the sort of comedian to utterly ridicule you but there may be a few laughs at your expense.

My favourite routine was about TV dramas, particularly on streaming services like Netflix, and how there are so many and that they can sometimes tend towards the utterly ridiculous – ‘a Scandinavian crime drama about a detective who smells crime scenes!’. Which was funny in itself, until Dara pointed out that this is basically the plot of Marvel’s Daredevil.

And then he went about improvising our own crime drama, based on audience suggestions. So we ended up with a detective with Tourette’s who used to be a taxidermist, investigating a ping pong player who killed someone with a rollerskate.

Another of my favourite routines of his was about tunnel boring machines. Doesn’t sound like the most interesting subject but if you see people tweeting him ‘Poor Chuggy!’ after a gig, then you’ll know why.

Crowd Tickler is almost at the end of its run with only a few more shows left – Dara has been touring it for over a year now. There’s just a couple of UK dates, a few nights in Dublin, and then he’ll be off to tickle various European nations in the new year. Fortunately, a DVD of the show is due out in a little over a week (sponsored link), and based on what we saw, it should be a very good show to watch.

George Egg – Anarchist Cook

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Photos of the recipe cards from George Egg's Anarchist Cook show.

Last week, as part of the British Science Festival, we went to see George Egg perform his show ‘Anarchist Cook’ at The Studio theatre in Bradford. George Egg is a touring stand-up comedian who consequently spends a lot of time in budget hotels. As he finishes his comedy gigs in the late evenings, it’s often difficult to find any decent food available (apart from pizza and kebab shops).

So, the show is based on the premise of: what can you cook in an average hotel room, using only the equipment that’s there?

This is, of course, bearing in mind that you don’t usually get a cooker, oven or any cooking utensils in an average hotel room. Instead, George Egg cooks a three course meal in just over an hour, using an iron, a kettle, a pillow case, some of the complementary salt and pepper sachets, some foraged plants from hotel reception, and a Gideon Bible.

The starter includes crostini toasted on the iron, ricotta that had been strained through a pillow case using UHT milk sachets (209 sachets to be exact), and a salad with leaves from a spider plant (which until now I didn’t know was edible). For the main course, he steamed sea bass in the travel kettle, and desert was pancakes, again cooked on the iron.

These were just three of the recipes that George has come up with, and he mentions others in his show. This includes curing your own salami sausages (requires a hotel room with removal ceiling tiles and being able to request the same room a few weeks later), and making bread using a complimentary wine bottle as a rolling pin and the countertop in the bathroom.

It was a good show, clocking in at around an hour long, and the audience were invited to try the food at the end. Alas, by the time we’d made it out, it had all been eaten – the show was free, funded by the science festival’s sponsors, and so it was a full house. We did, however, buy the recipe cards – although we’ll probably use more conventional cooking utensils to make them.

The Anarchist Cook show has recently run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and George Egg is due to reprise it at a couple of dates in Wales next month. Hopefully he’ll be able to tour it elsewhere soon as it’s a good show to watch – it’s both entertaining, and educational. If not, he also has plenty of stand-up dates coming up as well.

Disclosure: I work for the University of Bradford who were this year’s host of the British Science Festival.

Susan Calman

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ACMS #8 @ Edfringe13: Susan Calman
Photo by Isabelle on Flickr, CC-licensed.

After seeing Frisky & Mannish on Friday, Christine and I went to another comedy gig on Sunday. This time it was to see Susan Calman, a diminutive Scottish lesbian and stand-up comedian on her tour ‘Ladylike’, at the Trades Club in Hebden Bridge. Hebden Bridge is something of a lesbian capital and so it was not surprising that the gig had sold out a few weeks ago.

I’m familiar with Susan Calman through her work on BBC Radio 4 – she is a regular guest on the weekly panel show The News Quiz, and has presented two series of her own show Susan Calman is Convicted. On TV, she’s appeared on Have I Got News For You and a few other programmes, mainly in Scotland. She’s been top of my list of stand-up comedians whom I have yet to see live so last night was a chance to fix this.

And I’m pleased to say it was really worth waiting for. Calman is a fantastic observational comedian, with all of her material drawn from her own life and experiences. It helps that she has an interesting story to tell – about her height, her sexuality, her career change and her three cats, each of whom has its own theme song.

Her tour continues into next year and whilst a number of dates are already sold out, hopefully there will be a gig near you with tickets still available. If you want to hear someone who is charming, inspirational and, most of all, hilariously funny, then find the time to go and see her when you can. Tour dates are on her web site.

Now, to make time to see Bethany Black and Chris Addison, who make up the rest of my list of comedians to see live.

I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue comes to Bradford

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Garden of Light

Last night, the long-running BBC Radio 4 show I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue came to Bradford, for the recording of the final two episodes of its 61st series. On the air since 1972, it has featured mostly the same participants throughout all 400+ episodes.

Unlike some TV and radio recordings, the tickets for ISIHAC were not free – but not expensive either; our restricted view tickets were £5 each, and others were £7.50. Although each episode of ISIHAC is broadcast in a 30 minute slot, the recording takes around three hours, with an interval. This is mainly because two shows are recorded at a time. If you’re a listener, the second, fourth and sixth episodes usually start with the host, Jack Dee, announcing that it is their second week at whichever location they are recording. In reality, the week is compressed into a twenty minute interval.

As you’d perhaps expect, a lot more is recorded than broadcast, and some bits have to be re-recorded at the end if the producer wasn’t happy with it. There was also a reference to the Tour de France having happened, as it’ll be broadcast in six weeks’ time, whereas in reality it’s still a couple of weeks away.

It was a really enjoyable experience, with the usual rounds of Uxbridge English Dictionary, One Song To The Tune Of Another, Sound Charades, Late Arrivals, Swanny Kazoo, and – of course – Mornington Crescent. As it was the last episode to be recorded in the series, ‘bog standard’ rules were played on this occasion. Christine wasn’t familiar with the game so I had to give her a quick overview of the rules, and there was controversy when Tim Brooke-Taylor tried to play Turnham Green after Parsons Green.

The guest was Andy Hamilton, along with the regulars of Barry Cryer, Tim Brooke-Taylor and Graeme Garden. These three are all in the 70s now and I’m sure this will be the only time I will have been able to see all three of them together. Sadly I didn’t have a chance to see the show when former presenter Humphrey Lyttelton was alive, as he sadly passed away aged 86 in 2008. But we did get to see the lovely Samantha, who, as always, was keeping the teams in check, and the state of the art laser display board.

There are usually two series of ISIHAC recorded each year – this being the first – so there will be another series being recorded in the autumn. I would definitely recommend going to watch it.

Boing

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Hope you enjoy that extra day we have to stick in every 4 years so that the seasons remain in order!

No special plans, although I’ve spent almost half of it asleep now since I only just got up. And then when messing around with Real Alternative I realised I’d missed out on this week’s Radio 4 comedy shows, so that was another hour wasted.

Thanks for the comments about the re-design, I’m glad to hear that all of you who have commented like it.