About a month ago, a friend I'd made at Latitude last year messaged me kinda out of the blue. Apparently, she'd seen some of the blogs and twittering myself and Linzy have done at other gigs and wanted this kinda set up along with some skype and live streaming connections for a special comedy and music gig on election night.
Now this sounded like a lot of work, but also sounded great fun, as there were already some great names booked up, and I'd rather be spending the night with people I know than crying into a beer by myself.
So after about 100 e-mails between myself, Becky, Linz and a few people who work at the Working Men's Club we had a rough idea of what was going on, so to London I went.
After meeting up with Linzy and eventually finding Becky, we started on one of the most tech heavy shows I've ever been involved in. Room 1 we had the main stage that should have plenty of acts such as comedians, speakers, possibly a musician or two. Also we had two screens set up, one that would contain a twitter feed with the #electiongiggle where anyone could post a message, thus keeping the people at home happy. The other screen was showing the BBC results with subtitles so people could do commentary on the results if they so wished. Room 2 we had a massive screen TV showing the Sky News election and a selection of newspapers to vomit over (Did you all see The Sun Thursday, I could have puked up in the shop). We wanted this to be a room where people can go rage at all the results and have a quiet pint without all the activities going on upstairs.
We had the usual few problems with not having the right cables or having them pointed in the right direction to make everything happen instantly, and the live feed went out after about 10 minutes of shaking our head in dismay, but the main problem we seemed to suffer from was lack of people on things. Their tech set up is such that the microphones have to be controlled from the back of the theatre, whilst the music from the box at the side of the stage, thats two right away. Luckily we didn't have to have anyone on twitter (apart from the couple of times it decided not to, and the couple of times someone twiddled with it) and the feed to people the other side of the world was only gonna happen once. Even so I found myself DJ-ing the whole night.
Anyhoo, the night kicked off well with Thom Tuck and Terry Saunders having a bit of banter and introducing a handful of comics like the wonderful Robin Ince and the musically great Martin White composing a song on the spot (I apologise greatly, but there's a few that have escaped my memory, remember how much sleep I didn't have) we eventually settled into a routine of comics, banter and a jive song every hour on the hour to make sure people were still awake. The only other change to this was us getting in contact with Josie Long, currently in New Zealand, Via Skype.
I can't say she is very amusing normally, but on this occasion, she just sat there and ate an apple. Which considering it was 4AM our time, I think people wanted something a little bit more interesting. Unfortunately, Josie couldn't hear the crowd heckling her off, so we just said a hurried goodbye and got rid of her. Oh dear.
So, the reason we were all there. Election.
I'm not one really to go on about politics, once their in power there's not a great deal to do other than shake your fist at the television every time they raise taxes. However, partially because of this gig and partially because this is my first general election I wanted to take more of a note and really make an educated vote.
And I really don't want the Tories in.
I don't mind telling you, I voted Lib Dem nationally and Labour locally.
I do feel a bit like I wasted my vote nationally, even before the results started to flood in for everyone else, I really didn't feel the Libs would get very far. Locally, however, I really don't feel like anyone other than our Labour Candidate, Bob Blizzard, should be in charge of Waveney. The Lib Dem guy currently lives in Stanstead, which is 112 miles away and the Tory twat is about 12 and shouldn't even get the keys to a car let alone to the county.
I'm reasonably sure I was surrounded by a staunch Labour crowd, what with the whooping and cheering every time they won a seat and booing when anything blue popped onto the screen.
Other highlights included the immense booing of the BNP, and the hysterics when they didn't even get a seat (Ditto for UKIP) the brilliance of the Green Party getting a seat in Brighton (The poor woman was crying when she gave her speech, I don't think she expected to get in at all) and last but not least, this guy:
Apparently he's a comedian by the name of Deek Jackson, and not a very good one at that. But it would be hard to be worse than his turnout. He got a grand total of 57 votes to Gordon Browns 29,559. I'm sure I have more friends than that.
Having said that, my sunglasses are nowhere near as cool.
This is my... 