It's been a while I know, but those of you who do the facebooks will know that Leicester Comedy Scene has been slowly awakening from its long slumber, like some kind of comedy-starved fairytale giant, ready to feast once again on the efforts of the city's jesters, and regurgitate the odd review onto the heads of the unwitting townsfolk. That's you, that is.
Of course the truth is I have not been starved of comedy at all. Quite the opposite in fact - I've gorged myself, quaffed a whole festival full of it, but this year I chose to see the festival 'from the inside' as part of the not-at-all-shadowy-and-mysterious judging panel, which meant confining my half-baked opinions to a series of secret meetings in hotels, instead of throwing them around willy-nilly on this site for all to see.
Being a judge was fascinating, especially the process of seeing so much comedy but having to remain reasonably guarded about who you talk to and what opinions you give out during the festival. Even now, after the festival has long since finished and all the awards have been given out, I am still sworn to secrecy on certain aspects of the judging process, so will certainly not be going into any detail about that in this post.
Anyone who knows me though, knows I can happily bore the hind legs off a donkey on the subject of comedy, so keeping my mouth shut all the time would have been very tricky. Thankfully, also on the panel were eleven other comedy nuts, who were always happy to chat about about what they'd seen and share their opinions on the acts I had seen. Add to this the 50-odd actual shows I saw and the fact that there was usually some kind of after-show drinking and general merriment going on at the later-opening venues, and it really was like living in an hermetically-sealed comedy bubble at times, in which the only things that mattered in the world were what you had just seen, who you were seeing next, and who's carrying on to Firebug after this?
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| The 2014 judging panel in all their splendour |
So I must take this opportunity to apologise to anyone I bumped into during the period 7-23rd February who doesn't give much of a crap about the festival, because I must have seemed like a man firmly lodged up his own comedy rectum. Then again, if they don't like comedy, they're hardly likely to be reading this are they?
My rectal bubble was burst, however, during the second week of the festival when I heard that my father had gone into hospital with a collapsed lung - and all of a sudden the importance of all this running around seeing shows and having opinions on them was brought sharply into perspective. My dad is 79 and probably hasn't heard of any of the comics I saw during the festival (although he was chuffed to hear I briefly met Ken Dodd the other night), but nonetheless he seemed fairly pleased to see me and hear me witter on about my exploits during the festival, because for a while it distracted him from thinking about his breathing difficulties, the largely unpalatable hospital food, or how uncomfortable he was in the bed which was his entire world for a couple of weeks. And that pleasant distraction, combined with my dad's unfailing ability to take the mickey out of me, my mother and the hospital staff despite his weakened state, ultimately made me feel good about the festival, and the power of comedy in general to lift us, however briefly, out of whatever is troubling us in our day-to-day lives.
Anyway, by now you're probably thinking "I didn't sign up for this introspective, maudlin shite! I thought this site was meant to review comedy" and how right you are. But it's getting late right now, so I shall retire for the evening and start to do some actual reviewing in part 2.
Ta-ta for now,
PB.
