Tonight I was in Kelham for the Funhouse comedy night. If my mum and dad hadn’t been on holiday, then they’d have been here, too. In fact, my mum was a bit put out, as she’s never been here and fair wanted to come. It’s a magnificent venue. It’s more or less built on the lines of a stately home and is grand in scale. The performance room is roughly the size of a cathedral, can sit 300 people, but has the highest ceiling of any room seen comedy in, which isn’t ideal for the acoustics.
Stood in front of a new Funhouse banner, celebrating 20 years of promoting, Spiky Mike had a few hundred people to talk to, including Anthony Williams who was also present at the gig, with his sons. Mike had a lot of fun with this largely new to comedy audience and was able to tie in material to their comments. Before long, we were ready for our opening act.
Dan Evans
Evans built upon Mike’s compering, working jokes into things that his compering had discovered. I was quite impressed by just how receptive Evans was to the audience. He wasn’t shy about stepping away from the direction he was heading and working with chance events that came from the audience. This gave a very pleasant feeling of live and now to his performance. Of his material, dressed as and the topper to this were standouts, as was the beach game. This was a performance that was easily accessible to the whole audience and contained nothing that no one would enjoy.
Peter Brush
The vagaries of comedy; you can go a year without seeing an act, then you see them twice in nearly a week. If they’re as talented as Brush, then that is no bad thing at all. Tonight Brush added plenty of material that was different to the set I saw last week and that helped to keep things fresh for me. The room liked him a lot; he received consistent big laughs throughout his set and really deserved applause for large parts of it. Brush is an incredible writer and every joke was a belter.
Alan Hudson
I was particularly looking forward to seeing Hudson. Not just for myself, but also for my friend who really, really, really loves magic and I think she’d been excited all day about this. It was great watching her reactions to every trick. Hudson had a fantastic night and I’m really glad that he’s now based back in the North. He performed with his sleeves pulled up, so you could see he wasn’t making things appear or vanish up them. The tricks were all fantastic and I’ve no idea how he did any of them. The whole room was going nuts when he pulled them off. Hudson had plenty of fun with his volunteers, including Alex who had questionable skills with cling film and the lady whose ring he vanished – her mouth just dropped in surprise. The final trick, involving calculators was a real showstopper. This was a champion performance that ended the night on a massive high.
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