Saw Stewart Lee, MJ Hibbett and An Audience With Jimmy Savile this day, all amazing.
Big queue for Stewart Lee at the Assembly. We were lucky enough to get freebies for this one, on the guest list via popbitch, so picked up our tickets then went for a drink, then came back again. Everyone had arrived by this point, queued around the block, though there's really no problem getting in most places and getting good seats, particular in a venue of this size.
As with the last few times we saw him it was sort of a "work in progress", honing his material for the new series of his Comedy Vehicle TV show. The show's split in two, each half being approximately one episode of the show. One of them we'd seen, when we were in Brighton, but still very funny. I love the aggression at the audience, the supposed interlopers, the friends of fans, who should not be there. I wonder if there's ever a time this material is performed in front of his actual audience, his real fans, who should be there. Who are these people? We saw him at Edinburgh and it wasn't us then, we saw the same thing in Brighton and at Leicester Square Theatre and the friends were still there. This show is not for you!
Still the same themes of repeating stuff until it just gets funnier, and it does. Really enjoyed this one.
Next we saw MJ Hibbett and Steve with their Hey Hey 16k show at Sneaky Pete's, also very good. Definitely aimed at people like me, my age, computer background, wondering about time travel. There were songs. Obviously the title song, though it was not really the theme of the show. The show was about time travel and meeting your younger or older self. Some of the songs were familiar to me, older songs of Marks that had been fitted into the show, but some were new. The hula-hooping was definitely new.
Sneaky Pete's is a real venue, with a permanent stage, guess they put on gigs there normally. The bar was not up to much, it's not a place I'd like to hang out in normally.
Later that day was one of the shows we'd booked in advance as I expected it to sell out, I'm sure it did. An Audience With Jimmy Savile was a show set partly during an actual "An Audience With" but with flashes to other characters and incidents. I thought it was going to be a one man show, Alistair McGowan was fantastic in it, but there were four other actors, some of them playing multiple parts. This was really really good, a bit funnier than I expected though, I thought it was only going to be creepy. It was also creepy. I recommend this if you get the chance.
We tried to meet up with Mark later that day but it didn't work out. We went to The Worlds End for drinks and listened to some live music, someone playing covers seemingly in the style of Stereophonics. Had some good beer there too, a nice night.
Paul Clarke's weblog - I live in A small town, Kent. Married to Clare + dad to two, I'm a full stack web developr, + I do js / nodejs, some ruby, other languages ect ect. I like pubs, running, eating, home-automation and other diy stuff, history, tree stuff, Television, squirrels, pirates, lego, and TIME TRAVEL.