So.
A couple of weekends back, I attended Barcamp Media City, hosted by the BBC at Quay House. It was a brilliant Barcamp, despite a small hiccup with sleeping arrangements. I made lots of connections, got some great ideas for my dissertation and even appeared on an internal flyer promoting the event;
Click on it for the full size image.
The most exciting part of the entire weekend for me (perhaps second to the home made Yorkshire puddings on Sunday actually) was my attempt at a bit of stand up comedy! As part of a “mid-night surprise” the event organisers had booked a young comedian from Blackburn, who I’m not sure if anyone caught the name of?
However, he arrived late which was not a great start as far as the audience were concerned, and due to the change in sleeping arrangements many people had to leave by the time he arrived. I digress. So he had prepared a bit of material, none of which I thought was very topical but I chuckled a few times, but unfortunately felt disappointed by the over all performance. To be fair, most of the audience were drunk and he did get a few heckles, which went a bit too far and I think that toppled his confidence somewhat.
After the booked act finished, the “compere” (read: guy with the mic) asked if anyone else wanted to try there hand at a bit of stand up, and Dom (The Hodge) being the guy he is was cajoled into doing a 5 minute routine. By this point, I was on my 3rd bottle of Peroni and was feeling a bit brave, so started writing a bit of material whilst Dom was chatting away.
When Dom finished, nobody put themselves forward to go next, so I sheepishly put my hand up and on I went. I started with a joke which was a true story about my niece and what happened when my sister took her shopping for Tiger Balm. I told it because it really made me laugh when I heard it, and it was one of those “from the mouths of babes” type stories. To my utter surprise, other people found it funny too. That really spurred me on, so I just started talking about my life, and different observations that I’ve made about my 7 year old niece and the way she interacts with her friends. From there I got talking about my boyfriend and his obsession with his Mac-book Air and that seemed to resonate with the people in the room, about how attached they were to their computers and how hard it was to prize them away from just one more line of code. So I carried on with the geeky stuff, and talked a bit about how the Apple store sucks you in and you end up spending all your money on shiny stuff that you end up having to take to free events, because you’ve spent all your money in the Apple store!
I finished after what I think was about 5 or 10 minutes of material, but I got lots of laughs and an awesome round of applause at the end. I’ve never felt so high as I did when the adrenaline pulsed through my body after my mini-set.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem as though anyone recorded, or took pictures of me doing it, so I’m not sure whether I imagined it all in a sleep deprived stupor, but I sincerely hope not! The next day a few people commented on how funny they’d found me, which was really kind of them. So for me, Barcamp Media City was where I made my debut as a model and a comedienne and that’s something I’ll never forget. So thanks for the beers BBC!
Lally.