Tag: Brighton

Paul Merton’s Silent Clowns

We went to the last of our comedy events for the festival yesterday – Paul Merton’s Silent Clowns. To be honest, I’d expected more talking about the films, but what we got was three silent films shown in their entirity.

Charlie Chaplin in The Cure, Laurel and Hardy in Big Business and Buster Keaton in Sherlock Jr. All of these were accompanied by Neil Brand whose timing was excellent. A great afternoon of entertainment, and a foray into a genre of films I know very little about not to mention a reminder of just how amused I am by Laurel and Hardy.

Ross Noble and Jo Caulfield

We managed another couple of comedy events as part of the Brighton Comedy Festival. Last Sunday we saw the excellent Ross Noble at the Dome. Very funny, and judging from some of the reviews, he improvises a lot, changing a lot of his material from show to show.

Last night we saw Jo Caulfield at the Pavillion Theatre. Her show is all about things that make you angry and annoyed, allowing for amusing rants about argos, familes and leaving time to take audience suggestions – a lot of people in Brighton seem to be annoyed by cyclists!! She’d done her research about Brighton, being able to name various landmarks and appreciate the difference between Brighton and Hove (actually!) which is always a good sign. I thought her idea for a range of greetings cards were great – “Congratulations on your marriage, remember the gift I bought you for your first wedding? Good” :-).

Both of these have been “laugh out loud funny” for me. This afternoon we’re off to see Paul Merton’s Silent Clowns which includes a full showing of Laurel and Hardy’s Big Business.

We went to see

We went to see Marcus Brigstocke‘s show at the corn Exchange on Monday. A surprisingly flat evening: the performance was fine, there was some good material, but…. meh.

Also annoying was one of his ideas for Atheist Airways, which ended with pun of the pilot not saying what the cruising altitude was because he wouldn’t commit to anything. Which is fine, except it’s confusing atheists with agnostics, and even then an agnostic might actually say that the cruising altitude was something that couldn’t be known. You know what… it’s best not to analyze jokes.

For anyone who’s familiar with his rants on The Now Show, you’ll know about his problems with BT. So it was fun to see two large BT trucks parked right outside the theater at the end of the show, with some burly engineers standing around, maybe waiting for someone…

We joined ski safari

We joined ski safari at Alfresco’s last night for their start of Season party. We’ve been on two excellent trips with them, to BC, Canada and to Colorado over the past couple of years, and so it was good to go and meet the people behind the trips. The evening was sponsored by Vail Resorts, and so I’ve brought my Vail Resorts pen and Vail Resorts post-its into the office, and we managed to have some tasty canapes and beer too. We discussed our next snowboarding trip ideas with them, and also learnt more about their new offerings – weekends in Switzerland! At one point Richard was getting advice (and olympic anecdotes) about Utah from Graham Bell (former British Olympic Skier) which was kind of fun (especially as Richard didn’t realise who he was and wondered why he was so obsessed with the olympics).

After the excitement of looking at ski brochures, trail maps and talking to people about alternative snow trips – like Chile in summer, we headed off to the Black Horse Inn to meet up with the Sussex Geek Dinner. We missed Tristan‘s talk about plone, but did get to meet some interesting people. Nice organisation Simon!.

We went to see

We went to see Horse Country at Komedia last night. It won some prizes at last years Edinburgh Festival, and boy did it deserve them. It’s a fast moving, conversational piece between “Bob” and “Sam”. It’s clever, and must be hard work for the actors. But, and here it comes, it wasn’t as funny as I’d expected it to be from the things I’d read. In fact, it was a bit hard work at times listening to the relentless string of words. Possibly the weirdest thing for us was that the guy who plays “Sam” had the same mannerisms, and words that Jono has, which was somewhat surreal…

In our quest for a good Margarita somewhere that we don’t have to buy food as well (the only criticism of El Mexicano) we popped into Quod, a new place, on our way home. The Margarita’s were ok, but not as good as Sunday‘s. Quod was ok, but it seemed a bit too London for our tastes. Still, I’m sure we’ll eat there one day to check 🙂

Food blog

On Friday evening we decided to treat ourselves to a meal out, and so after a quick look through the Juicy Guide we decided to give Fruit de Mer a try. So we called and booked a table and headed off in the rain. Unfortunately they forgot to tell us that they’d changed their name to “Niche”. Still, we found them eventually, and sat for a G&T in their very relaxing bar area (which you can now visit just for drinks) before going upstairs to our table, or any table, we were the only people there. All in all the experience was a good one, and we’ll be going back, both for food and just to use their bar area.

In comparison, yesterday we went to Curve for lunch and were really dissapointed. The food was good, but the service was appaling, really poor indeed.

But it got better, and last night we headed to El Mexicano for a snack, well, actually we went there because we’d walked passed earlier and seen someone drinking Margaritas which left us with a Margarita craving :-). And the Margaritas were very good indeed, and our snack of Sopes was really good too. I think we’ll be heading back next time our Margarita cravings get too much for us.

Tonight we went to

Tonight we went to see The Two Terries (Terry Jones and Terry Pratchett) on stage at The Dome Concert Hall. We didn’t really know what to expect, and given that the Terries had never met before tonight, I guess they didn’t either.

For us, the worst thing it could have been was very very Literary — but it turned out to be mostly anecdote telling followed by questions at the end. There was a host to keep things moving, so all in all it was sort of like a chat show.
An entertaining chat show. For example: Terry Jones telling us about what life in the 14th century would have been like for a food taster to the Pope; or how the restaurant where the Mr Creosote scene from The Meaning of Life was being used the next day for a wedding; or how Terry Pratchett may or may not stumble around hotel rooms at 5am trying to avoid peeing in the wardrobe.

One of the stranger things: Terry Jones showed us the scar he acquired after being in hospital. Apparently the surgeon took a photo of Terry while they were working on or around his intestines…and then emailed him the photo (warning: that link not for the faint hearted or those eating).

The DVD of Monty Python and the Holy Grail sounds good at least for the subtitles for “people who don’t like the movie”, and we’ll have to go check out some of Terry Jones’ books. Jane already has pretty much all of the Pratchett books already.

Oh, brilliant moment: when it came round to time for questions, the first person stood up and said “This is a question for Terry” 🙂