A hard night

My first gig for two weeks last night was hard work and not an enjoyable experience.

I’m still not feeling totally with it. My Fringe-lag has been prolonged by a stag-do and then a wedding less than a week later. So I wasn’t feeling entirely energised when I took to the stage on MC duties. In my opening gambit, I managed to get some titters but nothing substantial. I knew it was going to be a tough night.

We had nine audience members at the start, but following the first act we lost four. Thankfully just as I was padding in the hope that more people would arrive, two more did and I brought the second act on. It got worse before it got better, so I had work to do before bringing on act number three. But by the end of the first half, the acts were doing pretty well in the circumstances and there was some audible laughter.

However, during the interval three more audience members left. So we carried on with four audience and it was hard going. Then just as I was about to bring on the penultimate act, two more left. So we had just two people to perform to for the rest of the gig. Thank you Mike and Juan Pablo from Columbia, without you there would have been no show by the end.

And this is the problem with getting people in as audience who weren’t there to see comedy, they often have other plans already so will stay for some of the night but often won’t feel any obligation to stay for the duration of the show.

As a promoter you have to take responsibility if a night is not a successful one, equally so when you are on MC duties and I acknowledge that I didn’t get the promoting side or running order totally right. I have some flyers due to arrive any day now, so hopefully a couple of hours of that a few days before the gig should get some people in. There are also issues with the bar which need addressing and it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to go into detail about on here.

We will carry on, the other option is admitting defeat and that would be far too easy.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *