Dilemma

Some of you will know of the comedy night at the Fox and Grapes in Preston on the first Tuesday of every month - if not, see earlier posts. Caroline, Stuart and I put a lot of work into the publicity for the last event with new posters, fliers and a blog and we were rewarded by a noticeably larger crowd. Unfortunately the headliner, Dave Twentyman, had to cry off at very short notice as his wife was taken ill (hopefully she is ok now). Alan managed to get a friend to replace him with only a couple of hours notice. The evening was not a great success, however. Alan seemed to be off song - probably due to the stress of having to frantically make calls to save the evening and also the larger crowd - and the two comedians had mixed fortunes. One did quite well but the other was trying out new material and appeared to misjudge the audience, even veering rather close to racism at one point. There was also a young lad in the audience whose girlfriend made the mistake of letting it slip he was a copper and he provided an easy get-out for the performers when things weren't going well - just get an easy laugh by pointing at the poor lad and making a comment about the police. Too cheap in my opinion.

My dilemma is this: when reporting the evening on the blog I don't want to put people off coming by being too negative about the event but I also want to make clear to the newcomers that this was not typical of the comedy night and that things are usually much better. I need to give this some thought.