Geoff Whiting, Mr Comedy
Posted in General on January 11th, 2010 by RevStuA significant number of years ago, I and WoSblog associate J Nash used to be regular attenders of the weekly Comedy Cavern comedy club in Bath. Located in the tiny cellar of a popular studenty pub on Sunday nights and able to seat maybe 30 people and cram in another 30 or so standing up, it featured both up-and-coming and established acts at abnormally low prices. Robin Ince, Ross Noble, Brendon Burns and an astonishing, paint-blistering set from Jerry Sadowitz were just a few of the highlights from tickets costing just £3 or £4.
The club kept putting on good acts, but after a few months we both had to stop going, and the reason was the compere. Agonisingly, murderously awful, he would systematically annihilate every last scintilla of atmosphere with dreadful audience “banter” and reading out headlines from the local newspaper for what felt like hours at a time. Combined with the hard wooden seats and the endless intervals (compere-interval-compere-support-interval-compere-interval-headliner wasn’t an uncommon running order), by the time the main act finally went onstage you’d be in such an abysmal mood of barely-suppressed rage that almost nobody could be funny enough to compensate for the previous two hours of torture.
