The banshee

Do you know how hard it is to get onto the open mic circuit? .... shouldn’t the idea be the mic is open? As in wait for it... open mic? But NOOOOO ,

“do you sing?”

No I don’t

“do you play an instrument?”

Na!

“do you have a small and insignificant appendage?”

Sorry what?

So yeah it should be easy but most don’t want comedians .. so I searched and searched ..I found gay bars.. singing contests and that pen id lost behind the cooker but no open mic slots for me.

I began sending off emails to any one that might even slightly be able to help. I got a few nice replies and somewhere not so nice but one of the nice ones was Terri Krueger (that’s not a joke) at the banshee labyrinth , she was nice , she was helpful and she was quite willing to give me a spot.. so off I trotted over to Eden burger (Edinburgh to you) and I walked in to the banshee for the first time.. surprisingly it’s a nice little venue with a maybe 25 seat theatre down in the catacombs of the city. I was up first and so got up and did a 10 min set , I added some new stuff and enjoyed it but I’m starting to think that at least some of it needs to go , I’m not sure why but I’m finding it too rehearsed ok this is a good thing and a bad thing but I genuinely think that there is at least 10 mins of material in my 5 min set and I rush it to try and get as many jokes in as possible . I think my set worked fine for my stand up course but not so good in real life.

my publicity flyer

Anyway after my gig I was asked to compare the next week as Terri was away on holiday. Seemed like a bit of fun so I said yes, I wrote the material I rehearsed it in my head and set off the next week to do my first compeering night, I got there and it was dead... totally dead we had a mind reader, a magician, an acrobat and 3 musicians on the bill . so the time came for me to start the gig and the building was empty.. totally. Not a sign of anyone.. the acrobats and two of the musicians hadn’t even shown up. My rehearsed and almost well written show went out the window and I ended up just talking to the 4 people in the room who hadn’t come with one of the acts.

I even ended up doing my 10 min set again just to fill in time.

The night wasn’t a disaster my bit went ok and some of the acts where good but I went home feeling that it had been a giant waste of my time especially as I had to travel 100 miles to do it. Oh well live and learn eh?

A week later I spoke to Terri and she informed me that as she was away no-one had bothered to do any kind of advertising and so no-one knew it was even on....bugger!