I wrote the prequel to this a few weeks ago now, but I've finally got round to part 2.
So 2018 was a fun year for me, I mean compared to the start of 2017 where I was a homeless pregnant mess. (Skip back to this blog if you didn't know me at the time.)
I did my second hour long show and I was really proud of it. I'm actually going to release it on youtube soon. I wasn't going to originally because I was booked to do it at 3 other comedy festivals, but that got canceled due to covid and now too much time has passed for me to go back to that material now. I decided after the show to spend a year taking as many opportunities as I could in comedy, traveling everywhere and doing everything for a year. My goal was to do some paid work by the end of the year, and I reached that goal after about 4 months. The other bit of my goal was to run my own night...
Early Risers Comedy Club
Over 100 people had come to my show and so I thought if I put on a night with some other comedians with my demographic as the target audience it could do well. I quickly realised it's a lot harder to get people to come to a regular thing than a one off thing.
I wanted to make my night different to other comedy nights, friendlier, quirkier, high quality, in a nice venue and most importantly with a definite early end time. My demographic (parents in their 30's) would rather pay to have a nice venue than have a free night with horrible toilets, like the night I learned to do comedy at. I never liked not knowing how long a night would go on for, especially when I was still breast feeding. But I found most men in their 20s that put on comedy nights didn't at all think about this. Surely everyone would want to stay out as late as possible?
What I realised after a few months of doing Early Risers was that everyone liked the early end time, not just parents. Anyone with a 9 to 5 job wanted to know they weren't going to be back to late and acts who had traveled far wanted to finish early too.
I started off trying to market the night specifically to parents. I even said you can bring babies, which someone did to the first one and it did not go well. The baby cried and it was pretty distracting. I should have specified sleeping babies only. But yeah after a while I was conscious of trying not to alienate the people who weren't parents, so then I tried to drop the parent thing.
Early Risers has had 3 venues (4 if you count the one off Christmas special.) We started in Blackburne house and then 7 months in had to find a new venue an hour before the show started! Our headliner that month had come all the way from Surrey and the night had just been mentioned in the Echo, so I knew people were coming. Every month for the past 7 months it had been in Blackburne house but in August I arrived to a sign on the door saying this venue closes at 4pm in August. Cheers for the heads up guys. So me and the guest MC literally walked the streets pleading with any venue to let us in, and that's when he managed to get us into the basement of Grilla which was such a perfect venue. It was too late to tell people about the venue change on social media, so I had to just stand outside the old venue and redirect people. And it actually turned out to be such a brilliant night. Quite a big crowd and the venue change really put people in a good mood. I managed to negotiate us being there every month, and the night really started going well there and I began to feel a bit more confident MCing it.
There were two pretty terrible ones (July 2019 and November 2019) and two people (Hannah Sloan and Harriet Gilmore) that just went to one of the terrible ones and I still feel awkward that you went to a bad one. Conversely my friend Sean Mullins went to two of the best ones and has a much higher opinion of my night than he should do.
Some of the best bits were the headliners genius musical comedians Jollyboat, Kate Mccabe, Sian Davies, and comedy rapper MC Hammersmith. I really enjoyed the awkward moment when Grilla no longer wanted us in their venue anymore and I decided to make it even more awkward by writing an Adele parody and singing it to this poor guy who wasn't really responsible for that decision. (See that here) And the Christmas special that was very special.
It was sort of like an offensive nativity play where me and Dan were MCing the show in character as Mary and Joseph . The premise was that we'd travelled to the venue by donkey and I was allowed to stay the night and give birth there if we hosted a comedy show. Very believable. The show was actually like a competition between two teams of comedians: the Shepherds and the Angels. Every comedian got 5 minutes to do their best set and then we voted for a winner. It was so much fun, but so much stress. I actually cried on the morning of it because there was so much to do. I had 10 acts to communicate with and a load of stall holders to communicate with because I decided to add a Christmas craft fair into the mix. The stall holders were continually dropping out all over the place and then I kept replacing them. I couldn't keep up with the messages and I was a full time parent to a toddler at the stage, so it's not like I had a relaxing time in the day to organise this stuff. I remember my friend Steve coming to my house on the day to stuff a million little stickers (which were used for voting) into tiny crackers while I was going a bit mad.
Anyway it was any amazing night and such a good laugh. All the acts were brilliant and I got to live an unrealised dream of being Mary in a nativity. The finale was giving birth to Jesus, who I'd been wearing up my top the whole time, and then giving birth to the placenta shortly afterwards. Because that's what's missing from all nativity plays everywhere: placentas. I made mine from red jelly and pomegranate in a zip lock bag and yes I did eat it, that was part of the script.
We moved venues again to Allerton and had our first show on 13th March 2020. We were all having a good old joke about covid and we gave away toilet roll as a prize. A week later people stopped joking and stopped going out to anything and we didn't return until September 2021. I enjoyed doing my last 3 shows there, but only because I knew it was coming to an end. After the big break of covid I realised how much comedy I had been doing, how exhausted I was and how much I hadn't seen Dan. And although I'm really sad to be giving it all up soon, I don't think I could have carried on forever.
The Circuit
As well as my own night I did a lot of open spots on other people nights, on an average night this involved driving about an hour, doing 10 minutes of stand up in a pub to strangers for no money, which normally went fine. It's a weird thing to do with your life though if you think about it.
So mostly it was fine, not that exciting but not terrible. But I'll tell you about some memorable ones.
The good ones
Beat The Frog is a big competition that happens every Monday in Manchester in a venue that's been doing comedy for 25 years or something. It's a gong show, so it means that 3 people in the audience hold up cards when they don't like you If no one hold up a card you get to do a whole 5 minutes. If you win you get to come back again and open the show with 8 minutes at your own expense, and you get into the end of year final. And maybe if they really like you, you get offered a 15 minute spot on a Thursday for £20. If you think comedy is an easy way to earn money you are wrong. So I turned up, it was I think my second ever gig outside of Liverpool. I was really nervous, I didn't really understand the format, it seemed scary, but I won and it felt amazing!
Other great gig's were the Comedy Store Manchester, which I did very early into my year of doing everything. It felt like a really big deal. There was a dressing room with a mirror with lights going round it. It's where I first met Anna Thomas. We were both very new (unless you count my secret years) she was just great and also one of the loveliest people in comedy. I got her to do my night when it started and then begged her to headline when she had enough material. She headlined on the terrible night when there was hardly any audience and the sound equipment was playing up and she still smashed it. She has just won the BBC New Comedian of the Year award and I am super chuffed for her.
I did a fair few nice gigs at Hot Water. They always get a great crowd and sometimes I was on with semi famous people from the telly. It's very blokey, run by man, virtually never a female MC and in my opinion they don't really try and get women on. But having said that, people have always been very welcoming, and a male MC persuaded me to do some of my breastfeeding material, which actually went really well and a random male audience member said he liked my set at the end so that was pretty nice to hear.
One of the gigs I'm proudest of doing is when I did tour support for Harriet Kemsley, she was so lovely to me and it was just a really fun friendly night.
One of my favourite nights was when I did something like a 6 hour round trip for 2 minutes of stage time at a gong show. It sounds like it should be on the bad list right? But it was just a fun road trip with nice people, and a really big gong show, in a proper theatre. but the banta on the road trip was the best part.
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The Bad/ Weird Ones
The worst one by far was a gig in Burnley where it was a trial for more paid work. The audience was nearly all men, a few women and a dog. The acts were all men. As I got up I was immediately heckled, and after I was done a man came up to me and just said "you were shit" and walked off. And then I got an email confirming that I would never get more work from them.
Other bad ones were just more annoying, like leaving a barbecue with friends, to travel over an hour for no money, to go to a gig in a pub where no one was there to see comedy and the mic didn't work.
A pretty weird one that ended up good in the end was when I headlined a gig in an upstairs room of a pub in Nottingham. I was getting paid £50, roughly the cost of petrol to Nottingham. It was a super long drive but having Alex (the girl who's taken over Early Risers) in the car with me made it a lot more fun. We arrived and all the other comedians were men. We all sort of said hi and some of the guys did that classic thing that comedians do when they big themselves up and say about all their achievements. (I would say 5% of people and 20% of comedians haven't yet learnt that listing your achievements when you first meet someone is not the way to make people like you.)
The gig started and the audience were awful, they were very drunk and heckley. Then in the break they all left which was a relief for some, but a bit of a worry for me. I knew that if the gig got cancelled I would not get paid and I could not afford that £50 of petrol. So before the woman in charge had a chance to cancel it I went to the pub downstairs and persuaded as many people as I could to come upstairs for the gig. It was mainly older ladies but they made for a better audience. I did my set and actually I did a really good gig. It's the best feeling in the world to know that you've made people laugh and you can afford to drive home.
If you want to book me for gigs I'm still here! The France thing is taking forever, the earliest we will be leaving now is easter but we may not leave till the summer.
