Xmas dinner at the Glee Club: Dec 11

There’s a difference between a city and a big town (or in the case of Cambridge, a big village). We all know what it is instinctively but sometimes it’s difficult to set down what the precise criteria are. But one of them is perhaps that cities have comedy clubs, big towns don’t.

I say this because yesterday I went to the Glee Club in Birmingham. It’s a comedy club. In fact there are others in Birmingham and the Glee Club itself is a chain with other clubs in Nottingham, Cardiff and Oxford. Click here for its web-site. As I sat in the audience I just couldn’t imagine a similar venue in Cambridge. And it’s not a university thing. My friends from Shrewsbury, Telford and Ludlow couldn’t imagine those towns having comedy clubs either.

There’s an implication here of course viz Cambridge is a big town (or village if you prefer) and Oxford is a small city. I’ll go with that. Cambridge is more dominated by the university than is Oxford and is, I explain to people, much nicer to visit. It’s more compact and the river is more intimately a part of the city. You can walk around it.

I was at the Glee Club with a bunch of people from Shropshire and Herefordshire because we all work at Labfax and this was our Xmas party. We’ve just finished the first quarter of our financial year and it’s been pretty good so we could relax a little and celebrate. But we also know it’s going to be tough to continue being successful into 2012.

I hadn’t wanted to go but the lady who is one of my co-directors insisted. A 3 line whip and the threat of a slapped wrist and I felt obliged to go so on Friday afternoon I caught the cross-country train to Birmingham. I like cross-country trains, they do what it says on the can, they take you cross-country so you don’t just go to Birmingham. First of all you head east to Ely; then it’s north via Peterborough to Leicester; and finally it’s west to Birmingham.

Our evening at the Glee Club included dinner. It was self-service and since it was the first Xmas dinner of the year it meant turkey. Turkey can be tasteless and this was. Curiously it was sitting in what looked like turkey consome which I guess was there to keep it moist. But if you think of turkey as a platform for more tasty fare, rather like steam-baked white bread, it was well complemented by sausage and bacon, stuffing, veggies which were not over-cooked and quite acceptable gravy. And for those who didn’t want turkey there was meat. I think it was beef but it might have been something else; it looked like the toughest, driest, most well-done meat I’ve ever seen.

There was also desert: protiferoles, cheese cake and cheese and biscuits. My cheese cake was fine, Colin’s cheeses were first class, especially the Stilton. And we had a half way decent Merlot to drink so not a disaster. Anyone who’d grown up with school dinners in the 50s and 60s would find it quite palatable.

But back to the main event: I’ve seen bits of comedy clubs on the TV. Some of the acts are very professional and clearly well rehearsed but I’ve always been suspicious of the shots of the audience in fits. Yesterday I got to see how it really works in the flesh.

MC on the night was Mark Olver and he was very good. I guess comedians like him have basic routines which they stitch around people they pick out in the audience but he seemed to do it spontaneously and rather well. And yes we were sometimes in stitches. There were two others whose names escape me but were also fine entertainment.

The big surprise though was the headline act: Sam Wills ‘the boy with tape on his face’ who is a mime. Click here for Sam’s web-site. Sam got just as much laughter as the others and without saying a word. He involved several members of the audience but gently. None was humiliated and the show ended with a good feeling all round.

Live at the Apollo it was not and Mark is hardly Michael McIntyre but it was a good evening. After that there was little left for Colin and I (the more mature members of our party) to do but to pop into Los Iguanas and do a little light posing. We drank rum cocktails out of martini glasses and feel that we had just a little in common with Birmingham’s night life.