Swings and Roundabouts

Friday is officially the first day of the fringe and if Clash of the Tight Tens was anything to go by (pictured) this was indeed true. Forty or so people crammed in for a jam packed hour of comedy where all who stood on stage got a good response and a strange experience of telling jokes to two audiences at right angles to each other. More on that later.

Come the end of the show the donations were good and someone even patiently waited as I watched my new card reader constantly pick up and then lose its bluetooth connection to my phone. 3 minutes later it finally hung on long enough to tap out £5. Could be an issue in the weeks to come, though it so far appears to be that people still carry cash. Even euros. Cheers whoever put that one in.

First World Problems was harder. Initially I thought we had 5 in but a further 13 had come up through the other entrance so there were healthy numbers when we kicked off. This is when the right-angle issue became really apparent. Our performance was strong but things simply weren't landing as they should. It's hard to hit a punchline and make it work without actually looking at your audience and due to the room setup this meant half the crowd always had this.

Three songs in and we'd lost a number of people on the left side of the room, taking with them much of the energy we had managed to create. Before a minor leak became big enough to sink us we encouraged the remaining audience on that side to join the others and pushed on. It wasn't perfect but with everyone in our line of sight it worked a lot better. 

Towards the end a random group of people wandered in and stood at the back of this side in preference to sitting on the other seats and gave us the final push we needed to make it over the finish line in one piece. Was it our best show? No. But will it make our next show stronger? Definitely.