Long Live Comedy’s Fifth Birthday

Pictured: Long Live Comedy’s ‘Churchill Night’.

Long Live Comedy celebrates its birthday next week; the Tuesday night comedy club upstairs at The Dog and Parrot has been plugging away for five years, and for many of those years it was plugging a big gap.

Newcastle is now teeming with comedy – hence why it’s worth having a site like Giggle Beats devoted to North East comedy – but it wasn’t always that way.

Five years ago, when a young(ish) man came back to Newcastle and fancied trying comedy, there wasn’t much out there.

The Hyena was going, but a newbie with five minutes of dodgy material wasn’t given a warm welcome there.

A few tentative emails found John Scott and Gavin Webster, both now considered elder statesmen of Northern comedy. They were trying to keep new comedy alive with virgin friendly gigs at The Chillingham Arms.

As John said, “There were two things I loved about the Chilly. One was watching Gav build up a following in the year we were there and produce some of the best comedy I’ve ever seen him do, and the other was that it was generally complete anarchy.

“Sometimes we’d only have 3 acts and at other times 13. And we definitely had a policy of encouraging nutters, both on stage and in the audience.

“I’ll never forget the night I was MCing and looked up to see the Squadies – As they were affectionately known – having a punch each other in the head competition.”

However, John And Gavin were soon busy gigging themselves, and therefore couldn’t devote much time to promoting new acts in the city.

An emergency meeting was called to find a new home for new comedy; present were myself, John Scott, Sarah Millican, Steffen Peddie, Christian Steel, Callum Cramb and Al Dawes.

As the only people who didn’t already have promising comedy/acting careers, myself, Callum and Al became the founder members of Long Live Comedy.

We’re still not sure about the name by the way – York comic James Christopher, who’s been coming from the start, still says Long Live – rhymes with 5 – comedy- as if we’re on all night.

The venue we’d found was upstairs at The Dog and Parrot, not the most glamorous location in the world but a great little room for comedy. On a bad night with 12 people in it feels cosy and intimate, with 30 it’s full and when there’s 50 and people standing at the back, it’s like you’ve sold out the Albert Hall.

The early days of LLC were pretty experimental.

Worried that the three main guys would be providing most of the entertainment, we split the night into 3 sections and compered a bit each.

At the time some people suggested we just hire a proper compere for the whole show.  But our philosophy was to be different. Different sometimes failed, but we did things other comedy shows just don’t do.

When the new acts started to roll in and we didn’t have to worry so much about just holding the show together, instead we’d sometimes make the whole middle half hour a show in itself.

Inspired by Mark Steel’s lecture comedy we had a night on Churchill [pictured], culminating in a stand up stand-off between Churchill, Hitler and Stalin; we introduced audience competitions with a bottle of plonk as a prize and somehow the cloth that concealed it became Grey Hairy Booze Ghost, a bizarre puppet who would riff with the crowd before emanating their prize from his ectoplasm.

The competitions themselves could get quite inventive too:

“The competition, which we admit was knicked from an Eddie Izzard routine, was new settings for phasers- why is it always kill or stun? Al read ’em and Pete – as an enraged Klingon – acted ’em. Alternatives for Kirk suggested by the LLC crowd included; ice cream van nearby; orgasm; the squits; tourettes and need for minstrels (the medieval wandering singers not the chocolate.) The surprise winner was ‘ginger’ which saw a bemused Pete briefly stop his charge to say ‘Ooh, I’m ginger.” (Review from longlivecomedy.com)

Other traditions have emerged at LLC, such as our version of Radio 4’s Just a Minute, and our Christmas covers night when comics get to rip o…-pay tribute to famous acts.

On that night you can see anything from word perfect re-creations of Woody Allen, to Al Dawes (the whitest man in Christendom) performing the material of Richard Prior, or the words of Peter Cooke performed in the style of Morrissey.

The up and coming acts are the mainstay of LLC, and we’ve seen some who’ve just hit the ground running: Sarah Millican, Chris Ramsey, Kai Humphries and Carl Hutchinson all cut their teeth with us.

As Carl said: “Long Live Comedy was my first ever comedy gig. It gave me the feedback I needed to have the confidence to pursue a stand-up comedy career. I will always remember and be grateful for it.”

We’ve also seen acts that have died on their arse but stuck at it.  Lee Kyle now has his brilliant flags act, but when he first appeared at Long Live Comedy he put his shoes on his hands and waited for it to be funny.  How many clubs would give that a second chance?

As well as newcomers we’ve been blessed by established acts that will grace our stage to try out new stuff, test an Edinburgh show, or just to do us a favour: Steffen Peddie, John Scott, Gavin Webster, Simon Donald and Vladimir McTavish must all receive honourable mentions; and Dan Willis, too, has become semi resident compere, even though he has his own club in The Grinning Idiot.

And in 2007 we actually won the Chortle award for Best Comedy Venue in the North.

Is this little room over a pub the best comedy venue in the North?   Probably not; but we asked our friends to vote for us and enough happy customers and grateful acts chipped in and we won.

Since then XS Malarkey Manchester have kept their guard up and it probably won’t happen again, but it was nice for a while; though we never got invited to the ceremony – shame on you, Steve Bennett.

The following year we took the best of Long Live Comedy to Edinburgh for a sell-out show.  Actually it was the Free Fringe, so we didn’t ‘sell’ anything, but it was full every day.

But comedy is a young man’s game.  Or at least a game for a childless man who doesn’t now work in London with an on / off drink problem.

So the founders of Long Live have taken a back seat as a new collective of young bloods comes through – George Zach (our resident Greek) is the current leader of the pack, but at its best Long Live is a collective.

The night belongs to anyone who has the energy and enthusiasm to get involved.

As Kai Humphries notes, “Long Live Comedy has become the staff room of North East comedy where comics of every level congregate to spawn new jokes, creating a lovely sense of camaraderie on the local scene.”

So why not come down and help us celebrate our fifth birthday next week?

The official bash is on Tuesday 22nd March and we have for you a fantastic line-up, with Andy Clark, Michael Shields, Andy Fury, Kai Humphries, John Scott and Gavin Webster.