josie long
Not a big week for live comedy in London unless you are Jewish or like Jewish humour. The two most notable gigs are Bennett Arron’s Rabbi Santa show tonight at the King’s Head, featuring Arron, Mark Maier, Sol Bernstein and Joe Bor.
Josie Long brings her officially ‘best-reviewed comedy show’ at the Edinburgh Festival in 2014 and total Fringe sell-out ‘Cara Josephine’ to the Soho Theatre from Mon 19th January – Saturday 31st January. Tickets here.
2014 Musical Comedy Awards winner David Elms has made a short film entitled Swag about a man whose life is changed when he buys a new hat. There will be a screening of the film at the Pleasance in London on September 29 followed by a fundraising comedy gig.
The 12-minute silent film has just been completed and after this screening the plan is to submit it to festivals all over the world. The aim of this event is to help to pay for production costs and festival submissions.
Last year Beyond The Joke talked to Josie Long about Arts Emergency, the charity she has co-founded to support students who may struggle to pay for further education.
The line-up for ARGComFest, aka Actually Rather Good Comedy Festival, has just been announced. The two-day Fringe Preview festival is returning for a third year over the weekend of July 5 & 6. There will be 32 Edinburgh previews in two days, this year moving from last year's venue in Camden Town to The Garage, Highbury Corner, in Islington. One ticket covers access to all shows - there are either daily or weekend tickets. The festival is organised by James Lowey with the help of Matthew Crosby's contacts book.
It might have been a Sunday but it was no day of rest for the comedians at the Machynlleth Festival. One of the reasons that the weekend is so laid back is that there are no Foster’s-style prizes, so nobody feels like they are in competition. Tom Craine, however, would have won the prize for Earliest Comedian when I spotted him outside the box office around 9.30am. It turned out that he was rushing off home and had a morning train to catch.
Anybody interested in recent comedy history should have been at I Say with Alexei Sayle, the inaugural "Comedy Conversation" at Dave's Leicester Comedy Festival earlier this week. It was an opportunity to see someone who wasn't just there at the start of modern comedy, but someone who can genuinely claim to have actually started it all off.
Benefit gigs are usually crammed with acts doing quick smash-and-grab sets, partly for the cause, sometimes to try out new material and sometimes, let's not beat around the bush here, to win new fans. This year's benefit for experimental radio station Resonance was different. There was an MC plus only three acts who all had the opportunity to do longer, 30 minutes-ish sets.
So the world of BBC panel games has finally entered the 20th Century. Women don't just have the right to vote now, there is more good news. BBC Director of Television Danny Cohen has been quoted in the Observer as saying that "We're not going to have panel shows on any more with no women on them. You can't do that.
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