Blog: A Tour Of Reading

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Wednesday evening found myself and Mr S Hewitt getting one over on THE MAN, this time in his guise as TRAIN TICKET PRICES. We were heading for Reading and all the tickets for direct, fast trains were over 30 quid. You could get a cheaper one for about half the price BUT it took over twice as long... except for a couple of exceptions that only took 10 minutes more than the fast trains, but were at the lower price. HA! We felt QUITE the insider rebels when we spotted and USED this information - who says PUNK ROCK is dead?

We were in Reading to perform Still Valid at The Reading Fringe. Our venue, The Milk Bar, was very close to the station and, once we'd arrived, it took about 2 minutes to say hello to the organisers and have a quick look round. As a result of this efficienty we ended up having plenty of time to Explore Reading. By "explore Reading" I mean, of course, "Go to some pubs", so we popped into The Ale House (exactly what you'd expect from the name, including beer mats on the ceiling and walls, and as Steve said "more ponytails than women"), The Monk's Retreat (basically a Weatherspoons but not actually a Weatherspoons) and The Bugle. This last one was a GLORIOUSLY old-fashioned pub that was old-fashioned in that it was like old pubs ACTUALLY WERE, rather than what marketeers would like us to think i.e. it was, to quote TripAdvisor, "a bit rough" with people swearing loudly and happily at each other across the bar, beermats that had seen better days, and regulars mumbling to themselves in corners. To PARAPHRASE the philosopher D Emery, it was awful but I liked it.

Our tour complete we returned to The Milk Bar where we found a gentleman gloriously attired in a Keith Top Of The Pops t-shirt, who would make up just over 10 percent of our audience. Steve, our nine audience members, and myself were all ready to get going at 8:50pm but we politely waited until the alloted hour to start the show, and once we did it all went pretty well. The first ten minutes were strangely similar to when we did the Leicester Comedy Festival, in that it felt like nobody AT ALL was laughing, but once we all got settled in the LARFS became audible. They were a lovely audience, and we were VERY excited to get to 100% PER CENT AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION for the "Air Punching" section of (You Make Me Feel) Soft Rock. It was BEAUTIFUL!

Job done we finished our drinks, consulted our timetables, and headed off back to That London. The next show is in CROYDON (where I appear to do ALL my gigs these days) at The Spreadeagle. You can book tickets in advance if you fancy coming to that one. It should be a good old do, not only are Jenny Lockyer and Gavin Osborn playing, but on the evidence of last night it would seem that Steve and I have a SHOW to show you!

posted 20/7/2017 by MJ Hibbett

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Comments:

Try The Butler next time. Thanks for a great show!
posted 21/7/2017 by Toby Howcroft

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