Zombies and Odysseys

Returning from the Edinburgh Fringe is a weird experience. It takes time to settle back in to the normal pace of normal life… Or so we imagine. Normal life, it seems, is going to have to wait a while for us as in the first few weeks back in this so called ‘reality’ we’ve already spent an evening as dead people surrounded by models and an afternoon adventuring in the wilds of Sussex… Lets explain.

Most of the gigs we do involve us turning up at some venue or another in the trademark ties and doing some improv comedy… It’s certainly what we are used to. But every now and then we get a request that is a bit out of the norm. A wealthy businessman’s son was turning 21 in an undisclosed location in north London and they, totally understandably, decided on a horror theme for the evening. The whole house was decked out in spectacular horror garb and every course of the meal (themed accordingly; eyeball soup, bloody cocktails, spider cake etc.) was served by a bevy of beautiful young things dressed as a sexy modern version of the Adams family. There was magic and a sword juggler and then there were there was us… Not performing improv comedy. No, no. Three of us were employed to “wander about the place dressed as zombies and just look after everyone.” Mental.

Matt and the Toms spent literally hours in make-up with the hilarious French make-up artistes applying freaky contact lenses (we all whinged like girls), putting on full latex head-masks (we all felt like we were in a Mission Impossible film), and getting into our surprisingly budget costumes (we all whinged like girls again… You can afford latex head masks but not a decent zombie robe?). The majority of the evening was spent wandering the car park freaking out guests as they arrived and rocking some pretty excellent (atrocious) gags. “You’re not late… You’re DEAD on time!”… and so on. In other highlights Big Tom had to wrangle a Britain’s Got Talent Michael Jackson impersonator off a stage mid Thriller dance and Little Tom and Matt very nearly dropped the cake in the middle of the dance floor. An odd night but a good one… Even if the atmosphere was a bit DEAD! Boom!

In another unrelated and an altogether far less paid event, Sam and Big Tom were asked to go on an adventure by the good folk of Twitter. Messrs Red and Yellow ended up catching a train to the tiny village of Balcombe and aimed to complete various tasks as suggested by various tweeters… There was laughter, there was salami and there were Christmas trees… The results of this, the first Improv Adventure, will be appearing on this very website in the coming weeks in the form of a video… So stay tuned for that.

Keep it loose people.