Blog: Doctor Doom in Peckham

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On Friday afternoon I found myself travelling SOUTH to distant PECKHAM where I was due to perform the official WORLD PREMIERE of Data and Doctor Doom at UAL's Creative Computing Institute as part of London Data Week. It was a very very hot day to be schlepping across the tube network with a backpack full of GEAR, so I was delighted to arrive in the sophisticated environs of THE HUB, where there was no air conditioning but there WERE loads of fans all set up to keep things COOL.

After a moment of sitting down saying "OOF" I got myself set up with the MASSIVE screen in there, so that the scene was set as below:



The screen there was WAY bigger and also CLEARER than any screen I have previously used, which was slightly FRIGHTENING but also dead good when, for instance, I showed the slide of 266 comics, cartoons, books, radio plays and games in my corpus and you could actually SEE the covers properly! It also meant I could put the main title slide up and people would SEE if from all the way down the corridor and know where they were going.

I did some nervous pacing around and soon we had a hardy crew of DATA FIENDS in the room. It felt a bit weird to be sat in the same room IGNORING each other so instead we had a lovely chat about other shows people had seen, either on London Data Week or on various Fringes. When I was doing revisions for the shows I had originally put in a bit of CROWD WORK at the start, as I'd been told that was a good way to make everyone feel they were having An Unique Experience, but I ended up taking it out because that sort of CROWD WORK always feels fake to me (e.g. "where are you from/what do you do for a living?" sort of thing). It was only when I was heading home that I realised we had done CROWD WORK together anyway, although I would use the non-comedy terminology of "having a chat" instead.

Anyway, just after 3.30pm we LEAPT into the actual show itself and it was... pretty good! I made a LOT of mistakes but had cunningly made everyone aware this was likely beforehand and they were just plain LOVELY. Best of all, when we got to the end someone asked if they could ask a QUESTION and this led to an impromptu Q&A session, which was not only really good fun but also RIDICULOUSLY NERDY at times. I didn't think a show about data and superhero comics could GET much nerdier, but it definitely did!



There were a whole lot of LEARNING POINTS for me, having done the revised show in front of an audience for the first time - not least of which is CALM DOWN it is FINE - but it was a thoroughly enjoyable experience with a thoroughly delightful audience. The tour is now officially ON - next stop Watford!

posted 14/7/2025 by MJ Hibbett

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