Last night saw the first airing of Love and Langton’s Dirty Laundry and it was a good one.
We returned to The Big Green Bookshop in Wood Green, the same venue where our journey began for our Edinburgh 2011 show. With England playing football on the same night, I was concerned that this would mean that audience numbers would be down. My concerns were unfounded and there were a good 25-30 people in attendance in a relatively small room.
Last year, the venue was only open for our preview, but this year we were on last as part of the monthly comedy night the bookshop runs.
A large percentage of the audience were 17-year-old girls, who were there to support a friend who had her first ever gig and she did very well. But as far as audience demography goes, I’d say that it is highly unlikely that we’ll experience anything similar at 11pm in Edinburgh. Even so, it is good to perform for audiences you never imagined performing in front of and we made them laugh.
Paul was on first out of us and his set can accurately be described as a workshopping session. He needs to get it all honed, but knowing him as I do, I suspect he’ll be annoyingly good by the time Edinburgh comes around.
Whereas I have been writing and trialling my set for the past six months, and used most of it down at Brighton Fringe. There is just a new five minutes for it that I tried out last Sunday and appears to be in pretty good shape. Even so, what I thought would be 20 minutes turned out to be 16, so I still have a bit more material that I need to generate. My set was well received, I just need to tighten a few things up; but other than that, all is looking good.
With last year’s show, we had a good run of previews and made the mistake of thinking that because of this, the Fringe would be relatively plain sailing. It wasn’t and some days were really tough, so I am under no illusions of the challenge that awaits us. If anything, I’ve been trying to arrange a good number of our previews in venues that will prove challenging to get us battle-hardened.
In financial news, for last night’s gig I was also paid £10, which takes my total comedy takings for the week to £40 and a pint, making it my most lucrative non-festival week ever.