'After 15 minutes, my audience walked out': standups on their Edinburgh debuts
Bridget Christie got locked out, Nina Conti ran off with a monkey – and Reginald D Hunter begged his ex for help. Top comedians relive their first fringe gig
Tue 14 Aug 2018 06.00 BST
Smashing it … clockwise from left, Doc Brown, Felicity Ward, Reginald D Hunter, Nina Conti, David O’Doherty, Luisa Omielan. Composite: Murdo Macleod and Tristram Kenton for the Guardian‘Another act got my review’Dave Gorman
I was 19 and nowhere near ready. I had a decent enough act – if there was a full house and everyone was up for it. But I had none of the skills needed for working a small, arms-folded, go-on-prove-it audience. Luckily, the only reviewer who came along didn’t hear my name and reviewed me under the title of the double act I’d replaced at the last minute. “Brute Farce,” wrote the critic, “is a strange young man who mumbles as he walks about the stage.” They’re probably still peeved.
Dave Gorman’s With Great Powerpoint Comes Great Responsibilitypoint tour starts in September.
‘I got locked out with my audience’Bridget Christie
My show was called The Cheese Roll and it climaxed with me re-enacting Gloucester’s famous cheese-rolling competition using a papier-mache model of Cooper’s Hill with two tiny figures and a mini Babybel. It was 2006 and I was on at 12pm in the back room of the Holyrood Tavern. No one came.
One day, though, I managed to get a small crowd together because my supportive sister Eileen had come all the way from Gloucester and I didn’t want her to be the only person in the audience. When we got there, the doors were locked. My audience began to arrive and we all waited on the pavement together for ages – in the rain. It turned out the bar manager had gone clubbing the night before and overslept. So everyone left without seeing the show and Eileen got her train home.
Bridget Christie: What Now? is on a UK tour.
‘After 15 minutes, they all walked out’David O’Doherty
One show marked the bleakest point of my entire comedy career. Five people came and they’d won their tickets off the radio. After 15 minutes, they all walked out together, leaving just me and the tech guy. That was an interesting philosophical dilemma. Was this still a show? Should I just keep on going? Maybe they’ve all gone for a wee and will come back?
When a team goes out of the World Cup, there’s this crouched position players go into where they just stare at a fixed point. I recall doing that. My tech hugged me and we had 45 minutes to kill, so we went for the maximum amount of beer you can drink in that time.
In Edinburgh you always have another show the next night so there isn’t too long to lick your wounds. Some nights the show absolutely flew. There is no such thing as an overnight success in comedy. It takes years to get any good. You’re forged in fire. And Edinburgh is the hottest fire of all.
David O’Doherty: You Have to Laugh is at Assembly George Square theatre.
‘They said: We’re here for Beyoncé!’Luisa Omielan
My first solo show was called What Would Beyoncé Do? and it was life-changing. I was performing above a pub, an incredibly sweaty 60-seater. The first time I showed up, there was a queue. “What are you here for?” I asked. They replied: “The Beyoncé show.” I was like: “Oh, OK! Wait there!” I ended up having to turn away 70 to 80 people a night, if not more. It got ridiculous. When the judges for the comedy awards first came, they couldn’t get in.
Luisa Omielan: Politics for Bitches is at Gilded Balloon Teviot.
The Lunchtime Club lineup included Suzy Ruffell‘You’d smash it one day then die on your arse the next’Suzi Ruffell
It was 2011 and I was in a midday show called The Lunchtime Club. The Tron, where we were performing, was broken into one night so John Kearns – one of my three fellow performers – went on stage the next day and pretended to be a policeman. He interrogated the audience and they loved it.
You’d smash it one day and die on your arse the next. But that’s the best way to learn. I remember being in awe of people who were doing a full hour. I did 15 minutes a day with the Lunchtime Club and we got one review that said: “I’d be astounded if any of these comedians becomes a professional comic.”
Suzi Ruffell: Nocturnal is at the Pleasance Courtyard.
‘It was the most intense thing ever’Felicity Ward
Worryingly, I was given a 120-seat venue. I sold out once in the course of the month and was delighted. Then I got a review so scathing and personal I can almost repeat it word-for-word a decade later. Weirdly, it still gave me three stars.
I remember that first fringe being the most intense thing I’d ever done, but at the end of it people told me I’d had a really good year. I thought: “I don’t want to know what a bad year feels like.” And then the following year I found out.
Felicity Ward: Busting a Nut is at the Pleasance Courtyard.
‘There were 18 of us sleeping on the floor’Tony Slattery
I was reading modern and medieval languages at Cambridge and in 1979 hitchhiked to Edinburgh to perform with the university’s Mummers troupe. I played Jack Dapper in A Roaring Girl, a kind of proto-feminist Jacobean play. There was a kids’ show, too, a duologue by Stephen Fry, and Simon McBurney was there as well. It was a charmed time. We were all young and beautiful, 18 of us sleeping in the same space in a rented flat. We won the Scotsman’s Fringe First award.
Edinburgh is still a joyous and exciting place to be. The fringe programme is now 14ft thick but back then it was very slim indeed. In 1981 I was lucky enough to work with Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry and Emma Thompson when we did the Cellar Tapes revue. It won the inaugural Perrier award. It was televised on BBC2 which was great. What else did we get? A case of Perrier each and a London run in the New End theatre in Hampstead which was a converted morgue with a capacity of about 70. But it was still gorgeous
Tony Slattery’s Crimes Against Improv is at the Stand and Slattery Will Get You Nowhere is at the Stand’s New Town theatre.
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‘The only way was up’ … Lucy Porter. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Guardian‘I sat on the steps and sobbed’Lucy Porter
I was on a mixed bill of rookie comics. After a few days, the reality of the situation dawned on me: I was paying a fortune to sleep in a cupboard and perform to 10 drunks a night in a temporarily repurposed Sea Cadets hut. And that day I’d spent three hours out in the rain, attempting to hand out pictures of myself to impervious tourists.
I snapped. I sat on the steps behind my venue and sobbed. But after that cathartic cry, things started to improve. I realised that having to adapt my act to fluctuations in audience size and sobriety was teaching me resilience, and that being at the bottom of the performing pile meant the only way was up.
Glorious drunken nights followed, including furtive kisses round the back of the Gilded Balloon and many chip suppers. I wept at Waverley station when it was time to go back to Manchester – and I’ve been on the emotional rollercoaster that is the fringe ever since.
Lucy Porter: Pass It On is at Pleasance Courtyard.
‘I got stared at for not being Scottish’David Baddiel
I was doing street theatre with Jez Benstock but I can’t remember a single thing we did. Not a single joke, not even if we wore costumes. The only thing I can say for certain is that it was 1982 and we earned next to no money. I have a tiny, tiny memory of being stared at with a bit more confusion and aggression than Jez, because I wasn’t Scottish. That’s it. But it couldn’t have been that terrible as I’ve been back nearly 20 times.
David Baddiel’s AniMalcolm is at the Gilded Balloon Teviot.
‘I watched them crumple my flyers’Stephen K Amos
I was MC for a London outfit called Screaming Blue Murder. They took comics up to Edinburgh every year for a package show so a bunch of us went up in 1995. The company put us all up. The only thing we had to do was flyer for three hours a day. That was my first experience of flyering and I wouldn’t like to go back. There’s nothing more disheartening than someone taking a flyer, looking at it, looking at your face, then uttering the words: “Are you funny?” Then you have 30 seconds to sell your show before watching them walk off down the Royal Mile, crumpling your flyer and throwing it to the ground.
One year, I was performing at the Gilded Balloon and the entire building had a fire alarm. Like the pied piper, I led my audience out and continued the show standing on a crate. I spotted all the other comics who’d had to abandon their shows. So we just did an impromptu live gig there. Daniel Kitson, John Bishop – everyone did five minutes. That’s the spirit of the festival.
The Stephen K Amos Talk Show is at the Gilded Balloon Teviot and out on Audible this month.
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‘I psyched myself up in a cupboard’ … Helen Lederer. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian‘Ten lagers a night gave me thrush’Helen Lederer
My very first Edinburgh was in a sketch show in 1982. The next year I went up on my own doing standup, sandwiched between Arnold Brown and Norman Lovett. I used to psyche myself up in a cupboard all day just so I could get on stage and do my set about periods and masturbation, two words that apparently sounded very middle class when I said them – which could have been down to timing or because I was middle class. I didn’t win the Perrier award but I did develop a nasty strain of thrush due to drinking 10 lagers a night.
Helen Lederer: I Might As Well Say It is at the Underbelly.
‘I was an x-rated ventriloquist’Nina Conti
Ken Campbell had written me a play. He called it an “x-rated one-woman ventriloquial farce”. I’d done two sold-out shows in London so I was excited. But in Edinburgh, all I can remember is four people and either Ken or my dad in the audience. I was scared of Ken because he was such a formidable intellect and had a fierce temper. I was trying to do my best doing all these voices and would tell him: “You’ve written something that is impossible, what can I do?” He’d say: “I’m not interested in anything less than you doing the impossible. That’s what I want!” Monkey, a puppet I still use, was in that show. Ken had made him be in love with me, which I found disgusting. I felt like I knew what Monkey should say. I did five minutes on my own with Monkey in Nicholas Parsons’ show and got laughs. So the next year I went back and did standup.
Nina Conti is Monkey is at the Underbelly.
‘There was no mic and no toilets’Viv Groskop
I did a show in what was effectively a derelict building. It had seven venues spread over three floors, with hundreds of people coming in and out every hour, but not a single toilet and no running water. For the first few shows, I had no microphone so had to shout. I quickly lost my voice.
The Birthday Girls, a sketch group, were performing in the “room” next door (ie on the other side of a black curtain). They had songs in their act and I had to rewrite my material so that the punchlines came during the quieter bits inbetween.
I bought hundreds of party poppers for the audience to use to drown out the deafening noise from the Edinburgh Tattoo fireworks that went off at the same time every bloody night. So the show basically became a terrible and unintentional piece of performance art.
Viv Groskop: Vivalicious is at the Underbelly.
‘Every night was like New Year’s Eve’Doc Brown
I was running a youth club and working for the BBC as a gag writer. One of the guys I was working with, Danny Robbins, invited me to do five minutes in character within his show. It was in a Portakabin in the Pleasance. Well, I say in the Pleasance – it was like walk through the Pleasance Courtyard where all the fun stuff is, keep walking, past the bins, behind the carpark and the train tracks. And just when you think the Pleasance is completely finished, it was there. People would never find it. The show was terribly promoted. We’d have eight or 10 people a night. Halfway through the run, I wrote a little rap and started promoting it myself around the courtyard.
The festival is like New Year’s Eve every night. It’s very hard to be professional because there’s so much fun to be had. There was a lot of heavy drinking, late nights, a severe lack of sleep. And, because I was only doing five minutes a day, I felt no reason to be disciplined.
Doc Brown stars in Cleaning Up, a new ITV drama with Sheridan Smith.
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‘Trivialising an atrocity’ … Marcus Brigstocke‘I was match fit and loving it’Marcus Brigstocke
There were seven of us in the show and we called ourselves Club Seals. I was doing standup in a double act and doing it solo as well. I ended up winning the BBC New Comedian award – because I was performing every night, twice, as a standup and I’d do other venues, too, like the Bearpit. I was match fit and loving it.
We asked Newcastle Brown Ale to sponsor our show. They saidour name trivialised an atrocity. We thought that was terribly funny so got T-shirts saying: “Club Seals – trivialising an atrocity since 1996.”
Marcus Brigstocke: Devil May Care is at the Pleasance Courtyard.
‘We lived on baked potatoes’Jan Ravens
I remember the smells of Edinburgh – hops, beer, baked potatoes. The tatty shop was just down the road from where we played. We lived on them. It was 1978, the end of my second year at Cambridge, and we were in a Footlights revue directed by Clive Anderson. There were six of us: four blokes and two women in a show called Stagefright. We all had to wear white jeans and white shirts with a different coloured tie, which was more flattering for the men than the women. Clive is very good at comedy and the rhythm of jokes. He’d written a lot of the show. I had a song which was like a parody of Tammy Wynette. I had a bright pink dress and a blonde wig. It was about Margaret Thatcher. I think it was really not very feminist looking back on it.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2018/aug/14/edinburgh-festival-fringe-comedians-first-time
Tue 14 Aug 2018 06.00 BST
Smashing it … clockwise from left, Doc Brown, Felicity Ward, Reginald D Hunter, Nina Conti, David O’Doherty, Luisa Omielan. Composite: Murdo Macleod and Tristram Kenton for the Guardian‘Another act got my review’Dave Gorman
I was 19 and nowhere near ready. I had a decent enough act – if there was a full house and everyone was up for it. But I had none of the skills needed for working a small, arms-folded, go-on-prove-it audience. Luckily, the only reviewer who came along didn’t hear my name and reviewed me under the title of the double act I’d replaced at the last minute. “Brute Farce,” wrote the critic, “is a strange young man who mumbles as he walks about the stage.” They’re probably still peeved.
Dave Gorman’s With Great Powerpoint Comes Great Responsibilitypoint tour starts in September.
‘I got locked out with my audience’Bridget Christie
My show was called The Cheese Roll and it climaxed with me re-enacting Gloucester’s famous cheese-rolling competition using a papier-mache model of Cooper’s Hill with two tiny figures and a mini Babybel. It was 2006 and I was on at 12pm in the back room of the Holyrood Tavern. No one came.
One day, though, I managed to get a small crowd together because my supportive sister Eileen had come all the way from Gloucester and I didn’t want her to be the only person in the audience. When we got there, the doors were locked. My audience began to arrive and we all waited on the pavement together for ages – in the rain. It turned out the bar manager had gone clubbing the night before and overslept. So everyone left without seeing the show and Eileen got her train home.
Bridget Christie: What Now? is on a UK tour.
‘After 15 minutes, they all walked out’David O’Doherty
One show marked the bleakest point of my entire comedy career. Five people came and they’d won their tickets off the radio. After 15 minutes, they all walked out together, leaving just me and the tech guy. That was an interesting philosophical dilemma. Was this still a show? Should I just keep on going? Maybe they’ve all gone for a wee and will come back?
When a team goes out of the World Cup, there’s this crouched position players go into where they just stare at a fixed point. I recall doing that. My tech hugged me and we had 45 minutes to kill, so we went for the maximum amount of beer you can drink in that time.
In Edinburgh you always have another show the next night so there isn’t too long to lick your wounds. Some nights the show absolutely flew. There is no such thing as an overnight success in comedy. It takes years to get any good. You’re forged in fire. And Edinburgh is the hottest fire of all.
David O’Doherty: You Have to Laugh is at Assembly George Square theatre.
‘They said: We’re here for Beyoncé!’Luisa Omielan
My first solo show was called What Would Beyoncé Do? and it was life-changing. I was performing above a pub, an incredibly sweaty 60-seater. The first time I showed up, there was a queue. “What are you here for?” I asked. They replied: “The Beyoncé show.” I was like: “Oh, OK! Wait there!” I ended up having to turn away 70 to 80 people a night, if not more. It got ridiculous. When the judges for the comedy awards first came, they couldn’t get in.
Luisa Omielan: Politics for Bitches is at Gilded Balloon Teviot.
The Lunchtime Club lineup included Suzy Ruffell‘You’d smash it one day then die on your arse the next’Suzi Ruffell
It was 2011 and I was in a midday show called The Lunchtime Club. The Tron, where we were performing, was broken into one night so John Kearns – one of my three fellow performers – went on stage the next day and pretended to be a policeman. He interrogated the audience and they loved it.
You’d smash it one day and die on your arse the next. But that’s the best way to learn. I remember being in awe of people who were doing a full hour. I did 15 minutes a day with the Lunchtime Club and we got one review that said: “I’d be astounded if any of these comedians becomes a professional comic.”
Suzi Ruffell: Nocturnal is at the Pleasance Courtyard.
‘It was the most intense thing ever’Felicity Ward
Worryingly, I was given a 120-seat venue. I sold out once in the course of the month and was delighted. Then I got a review so scathing and personal I can almost repeat it word-for-word a decade later. Weirdly, it still gave me three stars.
I remember that first fringe being the most intense thing I’d ever done, but at the end of it people told me I’d had a really good year. I thought: “I don’t want to know what a bad year feels like.” And then the following year I found out.
Felicity Ward: Busting a Nut is at the Pleasance Courtyard.
‘There were 18 of us sleeping on the floor’Tony Slattery
I was reading modern and medieval languages at Cambridge and in 1979 hitchhiked to Edinburgh to perform with the university’s Mummers troupe. I played Jack Dapper in A Roaring Girl, a kind of proto-feminist Jacobean play. There was a kids’ show, too, a duologue by Stephen Fry, and Simon McBurney was there as well. It was a charmed time. We were all young and beautiful, 18 of us sleeping in the same space in a rented flat. We won the Scotsman’s Fringe First award.
Edinburgh is still a joyous and exciting place to be. The fringe programme is now 14ft thick but back then it was very slim indeed. In 1981 I was lucky enough to work with Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry and Emma Thompson when we did the Cellar Tapes revue. It won the inaugural Perrier award. It was televised on BBC2 which was great. What else did we get? A case of Perrier each and a London run in the New End theatre in Hampstead which was a converted morgue with a capacity of about 70. But it was still gorgeous
Tony Slattery’s Crimes Against Improv is at the Stand and Slattery Will Get You Nowhere is at the Stand’s New Town theatre.
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‘The only way was up’ … Lucy Porter. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Guardian‘I sat on the steps and sobbed’Lucy Porter
I was on a mixed bill of rookie comics. After a few days, the reality of the situation dawned on me: I was paying a fortune to sleep in a cupboard and perform to 10 drunks a night in a temporarily repurposed Sea Cadets hut. And that day I’d spent three hours out in the rain, attempting to hand out pictures of myself to impervious tourists.
I snapped. I sat on the steps behind my venue and sobbed. But after that cathartic cry, things started to improve. I realised that having to adapt my act to fluctuations in audience size and sobriety was teaching me resilience, and that being at the bottom of the performing pile meant the only way was up.
Glorious drunken nights followed, including furtive kisses round the back of the Gilded Balloon and many chip suppers. I wept at Waverley station when it was time to go back to Manchester – and I’ve been on the emotional rollercoaster that is the fringe ever since.
Lucy Porter: Pass It On is at Pleasance Courtyard.
‘I got stared at for not being Scottish’David Baddiel
I was doing street theatre with Jez Benstock but I can’t remember a single thing we did. Not a single joke, not even if we wore costumes. The only thing I can say for certain is that it was 1982 and we earned next to no money. I have a tiny, tiny memory of being stared at with a bit more confusion and aggression than Jez, because I wasn’t Scottish. That’s it. But it couldn’t have been that terrible as I’ve been back nearly 20 times.
David Baddiel’s AniMalcolm is at the Gilded Balloon Teviot.
‘I watched them crumple my flyers’Stephen K Amos
I was MC for a London outfit called Screaming Blue Murder. They took comics up to Edinburgh every year for a package show so a bunch of us went up in 1995. The company put us all up. The only thing we had to do was flyer for three hours a day. That was my first experience of flyering and I wouldn’t like to go back. There’s nothing more disheartening than someone taking a flyer, looking at it, looking at your face, then uttering the words: “Are you funny?” Then you have 30 seconds to sell your show before watching them walk off down the Royal Mile, crumpling your flyer and throwing it to the ground.
One year, I was performing at the Gilded Balloon and the entire building had a fire alarm. Like the pied piper, I led my audience out and continued the show standing on a crate. I spotted all the other comics who’d had to abandon their shows. So we just did an impromptu live gig there. Daniel Kitson, John Bishop – everyone did five minutes. That’s the spirit of the festival.
The Stephen K Amos Talk Show is at the Gilded Balloon Teviot and out on Audible this month.
FacebookTwitterPinterest
‘I psyched myself up in a cupboard’ … Helen Lederer. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian‘Ten lagers a night gave me thrush’Helen Lederer
My very first Edinburgh was in a sketch show in 1982. The next year I went up on my own doing standup, sandwiched between Arnold Brown and Norman Lovett. I used to psyche myself up in a cupboard all day just so I could get on stage and do my set about periods and masturbation, two words that apparently sounded very middle class when I said them – which could have been down to timing or because I was middle class. I didn’t win the Perrier award but I did develop a nasty strain of thrush due to drinking 10 lagers a night.
Helen Lederer: I Might As Well Say It is at the Underbelly.
‘I was an x-rated ventriloquist’Nina Conti
Ken Campbell had written me a play. He called it an “x-rated one-woman ventriloquial farce”. I’d done two sold-out shows in London so I was excited. But in Edinburgh, all I can remember is four people and either Ken or my dad in the audience. I was scared of Ken because he was such a formidable intellect and had a fierce temper. I was trying to do my best doing all these voices and would tell him: “You’ve written something that is impossible, what can I do?” He’d say: “I’m not interested in anything less than you doing the impossible. That’s what I want!” Monkey, a puppet I still use, was in that show. Ken had made him be in love with me, which I found disgusting. I felt like I knew what Monkey should say. I did five minutes on my own with Monkey in Nicholas Parsons’ show and got laughs. So the next year I went back and did standup.
Nina Conti is Monkey is at the Underbelly.
‘There was no mic and no toilets’Viv Groskop
I did a show in what was effectively a derelict building. It had seven venues spread over three floors, with hundreds of people coming in and out every hour, but not a single toilet and no running water. For the first few shows, I had no microphone so had to shout. I quickly lost my voice.
The Birthday Girls, a sketch group, were performing in the “room” next door (ie on the other side of a black curtain). They had songs in their act and I had to rewrite my material so that the punchlines came during the quieter bits inbetween.
I bought hundreds of party poppers for the audience to use to drown out the deafening noise from the Edinburgh Tattoo fireworks that went off at the same time every bloody night. So the show basically became a terrible and unintentional piece of performance art.
Viv Groskop: Vivalicious is at the Underbelly.
‘Every night was like New Year’s Eve’Doc Brown
I was running a youth club and working for the BBC as a gag writer. One of the guys I was working with, Danny Robbins, invited me to do five minutes in character within his show. It was in a Portakabin in the Pleasance. Well, I say in the Pleasance – it was like walk through the Pleasance Courtyard where all the fun stuff is, keep walking, past the bins, behind the carpark and the train tracks. And just when you think the Pleasance is completely finished, it was there. People would never find it. The show was terribly promoted. We’d have eight or 10 people a night. Halfway through the run, I wrote a little rap and started promoting it myself around the courtyard.
The festival is like New Year’s Eve every night. It’s very hard to be professional because there’s so much fun to be had. There was a lot of heavy drinking, late nights, a severe lack of sleep. And, because I was only doing five minutes a day, I felt no reason to be disciplined.
Doc Brown stars in Cleaning Up, a new ITV drama with Sheridan Smith.
FacebookTwitterPinterest
‘Trivialising an atrocity’ … Marcus Brigstocke‘I was match fit and loving it’Marcus Brigstocke
There were seven of us in the show and we called ourselves Club Seals. I was doing standup in a double act and doing it solo as well. I ended up winning the BBC New Comedian award – because I was performing every night, twice, as a standup and I’d do other venues, too, like the Bearpit. I was match fit and loving it.
We asked Newcastle Brown Ale to sponsor our show. They saidour name trivialised an atrocity. We thought that was terribly funny so got T-shirts saying: “Club Seals – trivialising an atrocity since 1996.”
Marcus Brigstocke: Devil May Care is at the Pleasance Courtyard.
‘We lived on baked potatoes’Jan Ravens
I remember the smells of Edinburgh – hops, beer, baked potatoes. The tatty shop was just down the road from where we played. We lived on them. It was 1978, the end of my second year at Cambridge, and we were in a Footlights revue directed by Clive Anderson. There were six of us: four blokes and two women in a show called Stagefright. We all had to wear white jeans and white shirts with a different coloured tie, which was more flattering for the men than the women. Clive is very good at comedy and the rhythm of jokes. He’d written a lot of the show. I had a song which was like a parody of Tammy Wynette. I had a bright pink dress and a blonde wig. It was about Margaret Thatcher. I think it was really not very feminist looking back on it.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2018/aug/14/edinburgh-festival-fringe-comedians-first-time