Teching At The Stand

Well that was fun: I've never run a Stand show before, so come with me now on a super-sekret tour of the glamourous backstage world of comedy tech!

The tech cupboard is about the size of a small cupboard, and just about big enough to sit down in. Of course, your knees will hit the sound desk if you try to swivel around to get at the lighting control, so for PART ONE I had everything balanced tentatively on my lap.

You may have noticed a few seconds of excitingly dramatic silence between the house lights going off at the start and the guys coming on stage: this was due to the Technical Director plugging his laptop into the "insert" bits of the sound desk, rather than the "line" bits (end result: no sound comes out). It's dark in there, totally not my fault. But as a trained improviser myself it's all in a day's work to recover gracefully from abject failure and on we went.

PART TWO and PART THREE were slightly easier on my knees - the lighting control box is on a "cable" so I could stand outside the cupboard and actually see most of the stage. Plus, it was slightly cooler in the room heaving with sweating, laughing people than in the cupboard of throbbing electrical components.

All things considered it was a fun evening. Next stop - the larger, more luxurious cupboards of the Pleasance!