Goodbye, Ruby Tuesday

This week, we said goodbye to Ruby Tuesdays. Well, we said goodbye to the ‘Tuesday’ part in October 2013. This week, we said farewell to the rest of it.

We decided that with ever-growing commitments elsewhere, the night’s fifth birthday would be a good time to end it.

To keep a monthly club in central London going for five years without relying on other comics to fill the room is quite an achievement. There have been times when we have had extremely low audiences, but we never pulled a show when perhaps we should have done in hindsight.

There have also been times when we have had full rooms, and Monday’s show was perhaps our largest ever audience with more than 40 people crammed into a room that seats about 35.

I was co-hosting the night with Paul, in possibly the final ever outing as Love and Langton. We thought we’d put all the years performing together to use by attempting hosting duties as a double-act. This ended up going very badly and our ill-thought out opening of the show got next to no response from the audience. It wasn’t hard to see how we got a one-star review together.

We probably should have planned what we were going to say better, but I doubt this would have made a great deal of difference. I take some comfort from the fact that I now know that I work best on my own and that there is no future in the Love and Langton entity.

I then hosted most of the rest of the night on my own, with Paul chipping in bits here and there. It felt much more comfortable this way. The other acts we had on all did much better than their hosts and I think everyone who came to watch will remember the night for reasons best left undisclosed. If you want to know why, then you should really have come and only have yourself to blame for not attending.

The night was initially set-up in 2009 to give a bunch of us a regular gig once a month. It evolved in order to survive and we went on to have some of the best comedians on the circuit perform on our small stage.

We may bring it back a few times a year, but Ruby’s as a monthly club is no more. I will miss it, but everything has its time and it’s nice to go out on a high.

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