I was in leafy Croydon on Thursday night, to do the LAST official preview of Hey Hey 16K at The Oval Tavern for The Croydon Comedy Festival. The festival's been organised by Mr T Eveleigh and it seems to have turned out GRATE - a great variety of ACTS, big and small, and several other venues attached around the HUB of The Oval. Being there in the inaugral year felt like being at the START of something proper!
I was joined by Mr S Hewitt who, much to my surprise, had never been to The Oval before. I thought everybody had! Shortly after we arrived we had a conflab with Tim about the stage set-up - usually the gigs for the Comedy Festival have taken place on a raised stage/dining area out in the beer garden, with a microphone and fairy lights. We agreed that, as we'd not be using amplification, we'd do our bit on ground level, so we moved the seating around accordingly and then Steve stood in various points to make sure he could be seen. He could!
Tim then introduced us to the bar staff so we could get my favourite kind of beer (FREE BEER) and we settled down for Danielle Ward, who did approx half of her Fringe Show "Dani Frankenstein" on the actual raised bit. She was singing along to backing tracks, which sounded GRATE through the pub's PA system, it really worked!
The interval found Tim back on stage reading out NUMBERS - people who'd ordered food from the barbecue got given a NUMBER which Tim then read out to let you know your food was ready. It was VERY exciting, in his words it was "like Bingo but everybody wins".
Then it was us, and it went Quite Well. I was a bit worried about keeping people's attention for the whole show, and this worry was borne out as some of the audience DID get a bit "lively" towards the end! It was about 3 or 4 hours LATER than we'd usually do the show, and as with last week in Balham I think people expected something a bit more Standard Comedy. However, it was still a LOT of fun to do and we got it almost entirely RIGHT, and also afterwards there were lots of smiling faces when we got out from under the stage lights, so all was well. Steve and I chatted to various lovely people who'd enjoyed it and i ended up having a lengthy discussion about The Sylvester McCoy era of Doctor Who, and thus it was a very happy MJ Hibbett (and Steve) who set off into the night shortly afterwards, bound for London town, safe in the knowledge that the show WORKS.
Now all we have to do is perform it 15 times in a row in Scotland. EEK!
