Bruce Dessau
Has anyone tried to attack you while you've been at work recently? Probably not, but a news story today suggests that it happened to Terry Alderton during a gig this week. The Essex stand-up was doing a charity gig at the Prince William of Gloucester Barracks in Grantham when, according to Chortle, someone jumped onstage.
Sunday 14/4/13 Coincidence corner. NBC's Saturday Night Live in America did a punk spoof this week as a tribute to Margaret Thatcher, which included their own Grundy/Pistols parody. Not as good as Eldon of course, but they got the colour of the set pretty close.
This is my review of Pappy's that ran during the Edinburgh Festival last August. I was on the Foster's Award Panel and I really thought they had a chance of winning it. Their shows had always been huge fun but this one upped the ante, adding an emotional kick to the giggles. They are also very nice down-to-earth people, though that did not have any bearing on the result.
Clarification – The Comedy Club referred to throughout this article is not to be confused with the entirely different "The Comedy Club Ltd" which does not run any regular comedy clubs in central London but does put on special comedy nights and books comedians for events and corporate functions. There is no association between the two organisations.
Well, he came, he saw, he played the wrong venue, didn't do much in the way of advance press, but he conquered. After all the fuss about Louis CK jumping from the Bloomsbury Theatre on his last UK visit to the Hammersmith Apollo and the O2 Arena, the reviews gave him a unanimous thumbs up.
When the fifth Chortle Award winner was announced last night and Pappy's won best Character or Sketch Act I received a sharp nudge in the ribs from my partner as she said "you know the results already don't you." I explained that I had been on the panel that chose the nominees, so they were educated, informed guesses, but the winners were chosen by readers of Chortle so ultimately any nominated name could have come out of Chortlemeister Steve Bennett's hat.
The Altitude Comedy Festival returned to Mayrhofen in Austria last week, offering the perfect holiday for anyone who likes a combination of winter sports and gags. As ever the five-day laugh binge was a terrific opportunity to see Arena stars playing small theatres and clubs. John Bishop and Eddie Izzard both headlined Gala gigs in the relatively intimate - for them – 550-seater Europahaus, but also took the opportunity to get back to their club roots and do some smaller, intimate shows in the bars around town.
Steve Coogan is Bafta-nominated for Best Male Performance in a Comedy Programme for Welcome to the Places of My Life, Sky's revival of the Alan Partridge franchise. Coogan's career is a fascinating case study of the way a brilliant, successful character can be hard to shake off. I first saw Coogan do an embryonic version of sports-jumpered presenter Alan Partridge two decades ago when he won the Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Festival.
Comedy on film is clearly all the rage.
In 2003 I reviewed Ealing Live, a modest little comedy club in a dingy back room at Ealing Film Studios. It was an oddly memorable gig. None of the people involved were particularly famous but for some reason lost in the mists of time Joan Collins was in the audience. And because of her presence rather than because of any great insight I concluded the piece with a painful pun saying that a new comic dynasty - geddit? – was emerging here.
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