A late write up of a very enjoyable show, so please forgive the fragmented recollections as the near-distant past retreats into the fog of hearsay and memory.

Something very unusual happened at the April NLS: most of our audience didn’t show up. Ticket sales were very healthy indeed, and I told all and sundry – Luke Rollason, the two members of Soft Play, a passing stranger – to expect a lively night. So at ten past eight and with only 16 people in the room, I did find myself wondering what on earth had happened. Ritual cult suicide? Mass forgetfulness? A scam? The latter I’ve now ruled out, as we have their money.

Fortunately the audience that we DID have were very up for it, and after a slightly laborious opening joke by yours truly about Popemobile drivers being buried with the pontiff due to a tradition going back “thousands of years”, we welcomed Soft Play to the stage.

Soft Play Area is an excellent alternative comedy night run by two excellent young lads [1],Vidya Divakaran and Maria Telnikoff.

They are also yer classic double act, and to celebrate they did a bit of their impending Edinburgh set, which consists entirely of famous double acts from across history. All of them, as far as I can tell. In an hour.

We’ve had Vidya on at NLS before in her “Slug in the Club” persona, and it was a joy to finally get Maria up on stage too. As with all the best double acts (Little and Large, Hale and Pace etc) they have that near-unquantifiable chemistry of two people who have spent far too much time with each other, but in a good way.

By the end they could quite easily have convinced us the earth is flat, and then led us willingly off the side. But it’s not and they didn’t. They were very funny, though.

Next up was Next Level Sketch, the lads who run the show you all know and love. We had two new writers contributing for the first time, and one entire whole new human cast member too, in the shape of Diana, an associate of Rebecca Diez’, who was not here, as she is often on the Iberian peninsula.

Of the new sketches, I particularly enjoyed Kate’s one about young influencer podcasters, winningly played by Dan and Josephine, spouting Yankee wellness nonsense of an increasingly preposterous nature. We’re trying to get a bit more confident with editing the sketches we’re sent in rehearsal – time willing – and the cut-off here was perfectly timed, imo.

My own entirely Scooby Doo-themed sketch this month was an absolute shambles in the tech rehearsal – no one remembering their lines, or even which member of the Scooby Gang they were. But it all came together on stage, with Ben the perfect Shaggy and Josephine and myself as the Scrappy-doo and Scoobies who are horrified by their own sentience and yearn, rightly, for death.

After a quick interval and a pint of confidence juice, I was back on stage introducing the second half and returning-returning champion Mr Luke Rollason, who needed to film some material and we… were very happy for him to do that at our night. Because Luke is never less than hilarious. His eyebrows are funny before he even moves them. He was doing sort-of stand-up, in a lab coat. It was messy, it was silly. We will always be a pro-Luke Rollason alternative comedy night.

Last up: The Awkward Silence. I have written about these two oddballs plenty of times before, but their sheer craft never ceases to amaze me. Sometimes I wonder if they’re vaudeville time travellers, who fell through some wormhole in a music hall in 1857, only to appear in the present day and to carry on as if nothing had happened. And then I remember that irony and the sense of sinister absurd that they bring is far too sophisticated for 1857, a year I know well from my own time-travel adventures.

Next Level Sketch are taking an enforced break for May, but will be back stronger than ever in June. Please come to our show, it’ll be good.

[1] By lads, I mean “queers”. I am reclaiming lads for the people.