PLUS ÇA CHANGE

Over the eight years that we've done Rats many things have changed, the venues, the staff, the entrance fee, the format but the one thing throughout this period has remained constant is the quality of acts performing and Tuesday was no different. As the show becomes more commercially successful even a hardened purist like me can be swayed to compromise on his principles. Originally the idea was to over book the night on purpose to subject the audience to the show equivalent of death by a thousand cuts so just when you thought you'd seen the worst comedian of all time another seven even worse acts would hit you and then there would be an interval before the same thing happened again.

Times and attention spans have changed and quality of acts has considerably worsened, which means in 2025 you can achieve the effect with four comedians that you could have done with fifteen. This was achieved easily on Tuesday to the point that a woman in the audience fell asleep, she had such a serene look on her face that we then tried to encourage the rest of the audience to do the same but instead of doing that we only succeeded in waking up the woman who had been asleep.

The second half is now a live podcast where we discuss with the acts and aucdience what we've just seen. To give you an idea of how bad the quality of the acts was this week an audience member who got up and talked about polymers for ten minutes got the biggest laugh of the night.