Dalston

I headed to the Duke of Wellington in Dalston last night for my second gig of the year, to be greeted by 15 women who had almost all come to see Joel Dommett. Regrettably, Joel had pulled out to go to Norway. Fortunately, they all agreed to stay and were rewarded for doing so with a strong show, with assured performances from Tony Dunn, Stephanie Laing and Jay Cowle. I had to dash during Richard Todd's headline set in the hope of getting home before the morning, but he'd gotten off to a strong start too. The night was ably hosted by Stephen Bailey who got the whole audience up on stage for a photo to send to Dommett at the interval.

 I did a little bit shy of 15 minutes for the first time in a while. I think the niceness of the audience led me to experiment a little with mixed results, not least by divulging the contents of some of my online dating messages. Throwing some new material into the mix seemed to have about a 50% success rate which isn't bad but there were a couple of lulls with older material. I had the scope to perform a 10-15 minute set and wonder in retrospect whether I would have been better off doing a tighter ten minutes rather than a flabbier set to accommodate new material. But having said that, there are a couple of new ideas in there that may have some potential.

Listening back to the recording afterwards, it was a solid set but probably not a great deal more than that. Every now and then I have the nagging doubt that I'm not as good a comedian as I should be and yesterday brought that to the fore. The audience were a delight throughout and taking that into account, I could have done better. But it's important to get back into the swing of things nonetheless.

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