Know thy audience

Last night Andrew Watts and I did a London preview of our show about Test Cricket.

I find the idea of previewing an Edinburgh show in London counterintuitive. The American showbiz tradition has it that you do your out-of-town tryouts before taking a show to Broadway. This acts as a sort of extended dress rehearsal, a last chance to iron out the kinks before the final assault on ubercritical New York.

Yet in Britain every July this logic is reversed as the metropolis is flooded with underrehearsed shows frantically preparing for a provincial debut.

Andrew and I staged the cricket show as the 'second half' of a regular comedy night where we both perform regularly. Because the promoters really know what they're doing the room was jam-packed.

This was a mixed blessing for a show as specific as Watts & McCure Know the Score. Given the breadth of variety of shows on at the festival Edinburgh audiences are self-selecting. A hour listening to an Englishman and an Australian bang on about cricket certainly isn't everyone's cup of tea but if it is then we're the show for you. If not then there's about another fifty shows on synchronously with ours.

Last night's audience wasn't given that choice. They had paid their money to watch stand-up comedy and that offer was changed halfway through the night. The 10% of punters who love cricket thought that this was great. The 90% who either hated or in some cases had never even heard of the game were understandably underwhelmed.

Without discussing it beforehand on stage we each reverted to quite a lot of more general (ie non-cricket) material and I think most of the audience went away happy. So the show was a success but as a preview I fear that we learnt precious little as to whether the cricket-specific stuff works.

At least the 10% said they loved us.