Lloyd Langford

I presumed I would give her my number and then she would just text me and go, this is me.

But she didn't.

I had to contact the comedian that was on before me, Dave Thornton, and ask him if he would be so kind to let my tech know that I would be arriving later than is probably comfortable for her.

There's no way of also no way of me getting backstage without just walking through this audience and onto the stage.

But I said to her, look, I reckon you can let the audience in and I'll I can just walk on from the

tech booth just through the audience just high-fiving people like an Anthony Robbins personal power motivation seminar one time I was at the board show in London and they had a secret guest on the show Lenny Henry yeah and when you normally you did the board show in London you would come out from behind the curtain at the back of the stage

Got it.

Okay.

And you would normally come out from behind the curtain and Lenny Henry, who was like the surprise guest, he came out from the back of the room to like an absolutely ecstatic, like he was high-fiving people and he was walking through the audience.

Now, the other thing that I had heard and had not believed is that at that time, Lenny Henry was performing stand-up comedy with an autocue machine.

which i just kind of discounted was like that's a preposterous and bad idea that would never work so lenny henry walks through the audience to like a standing ovation he's high-fiving people they can't believe he's there he gets up on the stage he takes the microphone out of the stand and then a person comes out from behind the curtain behind him with an autocue machine

and wheels it up in front of him and then he proceeds to read his jokes from the autocue machine and any goodwill in the room just instantly evaporates i've never seen anything like it he had like a standing ovation at the start and then by the end just fucking crickets like they couldn't believe it

He was trying out material, I think monologues for a TV show.

I don't think he cared about the live audience.

And that feeling was palpable.

So does Ian Smith do this at his gig?

I turned up, I thought I was going to be late for Ian's gig, but I turned up when he was at the back of the room chatting with his technician.

So I had a chat with him for like 10 minutes before his show started.

And I said, look, I'm going to sit at the very back and I'll just duck away right at the end because I have to get to my venue.

And yeah, it was all fine.