Live comedy finds its way back to West Sussex

Live comedy returns to Worthing with Patrick Monahan bringing his new show Started From The Bottom, Now I’m Here to the Pavilion Theatre on Thursday, October 1 at 8pm.
Patrick MonahanPatrick Monahan
Patrick Monahan

As he jokes, it has now become his big end-of-year show – on a tour with just two dates, just Worthing and Millom in Cumbria.

But the point is that he is back; live comedy is actually going to happen in Worthing.

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And while it certainly doesn’t signal our emergence from all the awfulness of this year, perhaps it’s a start at least: “It has been a crazy time,” Patrick says. “The worst thing was that nobody was expecting anything like this. Everybody was doing their own thing, and then suddenly it was like a complete reboot. It reset everything.

“For anybody doing this kind of thing, in the live entertainment industry, actors, musicians, whatever, back in the day, in 2019, it was just like being in your dream job. You just turned up, you could hug people, you could chat to strangers… and then this. I think our industry has probably been more affected than any other industry.

“And then at the start, everybody just thought it would be a couple of weeks, and then people were thinking it would be six weeks and then a couple of months, and it has just gone on and on. I was just starting my tour in February going all the way through to June. We just thought we would move it to the autumn and now not even that can happen. That has gone, and we are moving it to 2021… except for these two dates.

“I think with the Worthing, it is happening because they have got quite a few venues, and the Pavilion, where I did panto a few years ago, is a brilliant venue. For comedy it is perfect. You can have only a quarter of the people in there (because of social distancing), but you can still get 100-150 people.”

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Looking back, Patrick is happy to say he has put lockdown and the subsequent months to good use: “It has meant that I could focus on other things, other projects, writing and so on. Being a stand-up, people only ever see the tip of the iceberg. People come to see the show but they don’t realise that it has been two years’ work, that it has been 16 months of writing.

“Usually 60-70 per cent of your time is spent travelling, but during lockdown I had the time to work on other things, on writing, on online content, on sketches. I have also been doing Zoom shows and Facebook Live shows. They were brilliant. At first I spoke to some of the comics, like my peers and people that have been in the industry a long time, and they were saying ‘You can’t do comedy online.’ They were saying it would be like being a canoeist and doing it in the bath. I haven’t been around that long in the business, and people who have been in the business for years were saying that you just couldn’t do it. And I was thinking maybe they are right, but I did it and it worked.”

You have just got to adapt. Obviously on Zoom, you have got to have most people muted – and you get the laugh response from watching their faces rather them hearing them guffaw. Similarly, on Facebook Live you get your response from the comments appearing on screen in real time.

Patrick has been doing a Zoom show every Wednesday at 7.30pm and a Facebook Live show every Saturday at 7pm – and he suspect he will continue with both, even when we are fully out of lockdown.

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In fact, he timed the Saturday one at 7pm right from the start so that he would still be able to do it and then do a real gig afterwards when the time comes.

“I just think people have been starved of live entertainment.”

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