The Alternative Comedy Experience

I remember voraciously consuming this, via DVD (because who can get Comedy Central?), around when this show appeared. It's a snapshot of the mid-level UK comedy scene at the time, a breathless whirligig of familiar faces recorded over several sweltering summer nights over 2013-2014 in the tiny Stand comedy club in Edinburgh. Stew Lee had a very specific vision for a show reflecting the old variety stand-up specials of his youth, deeply unvarnished, quickly flipping from joke to joke, shuffling up acts and breaking up routines with fragments of interview. Somewhat like his own Comedy Vehicle on the BBC, and with the deft eye of his long-term collaborator Tim Kirkby, this strange format does work.

It certainly works for me, anyway, as I've the attention span of a kitten or a small child. Watching it again in the year 2021, it feels like a precious picture of friends you used to know, at a place you used to go, but haven't been for years. Every face that pops up brings a wave of familiarity. Some have gone onto be huge, some have drifted out of the art form, most are currently not working - a lot of them I saw contemporaneously so it has this deeply cathartic nostalgic vibe to it aided by the fortune of being filmed "before" - before the incident, before the sickness, before the silence, before now.