FESTIVAL DIARY DAY 17 - All good things must come to an end

Okay so the Festival finished a week ago, but regular readers of this blog will know that I have had something of a gigantic backlog of work to clear so I hope you'll forgive me for the lateness of this final diary post.
After such an incredible final Saturday of the festival, I awoke late and rather fuzzy-headed to reluctantly get some much-needed work done, before heading out for the final evening of the festival, which I was to spend downstairs at the Looking Glass, which had become something of a second home to me over the past two and a half weeks.
The Looking Glass, as we now know, has been sadly overlooked in the nominations for Best Small Venue. From a purely practical viewpoint, this is understandable - it's hotter than hell down in that airless basement, if the air-con is on it's so loud as to be a major distraction from the show being performed, the sound system is questionable at best with buzzing, echoey mic and speakers that start to feed back if the performer comes anywhere near the audience, and the stage is small and cramped. But despite all of these things, the venue has earned a special place in my heart, as it has played host to some of the most innovative, challenging and boundary-pushing shows available at the festival. Organised with enormous dedication and seemingly endless energy by the incredible Jo 'Dr' Ettrick-Hogg, the Looking Glass was a fringe festival in its own right, out there on its own on Braunstone Gate with a unique mixture of true alternative heroes such as Phil Kay, Norman Lovett, Charlie Chuck and Bob Slayer, and innovative local oddballs putting on chaotic lo-fi showcases like Barbara Steel's Wheels of Steel, A Finger of Judge and What You Could've Won, which offer a completely different experience to a traditional night of stand-up.
So it was entirely fitting, then, that my last evening in festival land should be spent immersed in this bizarre mixture, with four shows back-to-back, none of them what you would describe as a 'regular' comedy show (whatever the hell 'regular' is in this crazy industry).

Great stories and utter randomness - Phil Kay

First up was Phil Kay, whom I had encountered the previous night at Just The Tonic's late bar, drinking and dancing the night away and engaging in suitably random chat outside over a smoke. It's easy to forget that Kay was absolutely massive for a while in the nineties - being nominated for a Perrier Award, given his own Channel 4 show and winning Best Stand-Up at the 1994 British Comedy Awards. His unique stream-of-consciousness style captivated me as a youngster, being equal parts baffling and hilarious, and after meeting him it's clear that becoming a hard-touring, TV-bothering stand-up was not the right path for him. Instead he has lived, and I mean really lived - and this was the basis for his show. He started off with some typically random and high energy tangential wittering and ad-lib, that serves the purpose of gradually attuning the audience's brains to his constantly-shifting frequency. Eventually he settled down and started to tell some very entertaining and genuinely hilarious stories from his life - storming Edinburgh Castle butt-naked, engaging the local police in the slowest car chase ever, hanging out with Russian gangsters and trying to pretend to be one of them - these were some truly great stories from a life well-lived by someone who is not afraid to leap into the abyss and embrace the chaos in life. Naturally he wasn't just sitting there telling stories Ronnie Corbett-style, rather he would introduce the basics of a story, get distracted and start telling a different one, summarise several stories he was going to tell if we wanted to hear them, then return to the original story as if waking up from a dream. This pattern continued way beyond the hour earmarked for his show, causing the timetable for the rest of the evening's shows to be effectively thrown out of the window.

Enjoyably daft - What You Could Have Won

Next up was What You Could Have Won, a loosely connected parade of silly characters and skits from four of the 'Lions Eat Ice Cream' stable of local comedians, who had been patiently waiting upstairs with a truckload of props for Phil Kay to finally stop talking. The show was enjoyably daft as expected, with Ian Hall showcasing his John Pertwee and Ramon Le Tigre characters to the delight of the knowledgeable audience, and spending a sizeable amount of the show stuck in another comedian's stomach. Neil Johnston resurrected his  popular Elephant Man character from last year's festival hit 'What Have You Done With Denise's 30p?' and Bruce Edhouse and Lyndsey Warnes-Carroll held the whole thing together with the usual mix of downright silliness, unexpected left-turns and pop-culture parody/obscure references that regular Lions attendees have come to expect from this gang. A fun hour then, which I left with a big cheesy grin on my face and the added bonus of a 'Bulbous Peter' name-badge which I wore for the rest of the night.

That drink's gone right to his head - Bob Slayer

And then came hurricane Bob. Some of you may have already read my review of Bob Slayer's show in the Mercury, and I have to point out that I couldn't talk about most of the show's content in that review because it was all a bit risqué for a local family newspaper. It had much the same format as Phil Kay's show, in which a man who embraces life and the chaos therein, mucks about with the audience and bar staff for a bit, then tells some fascinating and funny stories about his colourful life. The difference here, though, was Bob's trademark approach of downing pint after pint of assorted booze on stage and becoming visibly more drunk, distractable and mischievous as the show goes on. This approach may not work with a cold, unfamiliar audience, but Slayer was in familiar surroundings and seemed to know almost everyone in the room on some level, many (including myself) whom he had met only the previous night whilst making merry mischief at Just the Tonic. In fact, much of his set consisted of people actually reminding him of what he'd been up to the night before, and in this sense it did have the feeling of a fun night down the pub, rather than a straight-up comedy gig. In fact it was only his occasional references to the conventions of comedy that he tries so hard to break and the clichés of comedy that he fights to resist using, that you remembered this was a paid gig and not just an entertaining mate in the pub. The line between reality and show were blurred even further when, at the end of his hour, Slayer just kept on talking because there was no actual end to the show and he had drunk enough not to care, so he just carried on talking until people started to leave the room, and then continued talking to them all the way upstairs and carried on drinking and chatting at the bar, as if the show had simply moved upstairs.

Al Grant terrifies and amuses as Cock-Kane the Clown.

It was my intention to head home after Bob's show, with a view to getting a nice early night and putting in a hard day's work the following day. But with just one more show left in the whole festival, I wasn't quite ready to let it all end just yet. Fresh out of money, I was bought one last festival pint by generous gentle giant Joe Harper, and I made my way back downstairs one last time for Al Grant's Don't Poop Your Pants. Al's show was a mixture of stand-up, songs and magic, half of it performed as himself and half as his deranged alter-ego Cock-Kane the Clown. Ably assisted by Lu Lo as the mildly terrifying yet mesmerising Doll-Doll, as well as the aforementioned Ettrick-Hogg who appeared once in a teddybear onesie and again with her trademark giant moustache, Grant's show provided a suitably bonkers ending to an intense two weeks, with Nick Helm-style shouting at audience members, material that flipped between groansome and wickedly sickening, and plenty of audience participation along the way - including dragging a certain blog-writer up on stage to dance like an idiot for several minutes, and repeated interjections by a drunken Mancunian who had a lot to say but nothing valid to contribute.
And before we knew it, it was 1am, and seventeen days of crazy comedy heaven was over in a flash, and those who had experienced the exhilarating and exhausting journey together gradually said their goodbyes and made their way to their homes, never to be seen again...
OK that last bit's not true, it just sounded right.
So that's your last festival diary entry for this year. I'll be back soon with March listings, a report on the Festival Award Ceremony and of course my own personal highlights and reflections on this year's festival (kinda feels like I need to try and sum up my experiences with something a little bit more profound than "and we all went home never to be seen again!") Until then, adios amigos!