Blog: Museums Show Off

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I don't know how it's happened, but I seem to have become ADDICTED to doing gigs at The Camden Head - I seem to be have been there more than any nearly other venue over the past couple of years, and I was back there again last night to meet Mr S Hewitt before our performance at Museums Showoff.

The idea of the evening is to get people who work in (or, I think AROUND) Museums to come and talk about aspects of their WORK - it's a Slightly More Specific spin-off of Science Show Off, and this was their first, or PILOT, show. We'd got on board because, like, Museums have Dinosaurs in them?

After dropping off our gear and saying "We won't need the PA thanks" we hopped over the road to The Maharani where we were soon joined by The Spice In My Balti for a DELICIOUS curry. MAN but that place is good - maybe THAT is why i am so drawn to the Camden Head? I don't think ANYWHERE else has SUCH a nice curry house directly opposite!

We got back to the venue just after things had started, to find the room PACKED OUT. As it was the first show I'd thought it might, at best, be half full, but I forgot: this is the world of COMEDY, where gigs GET FULL! Pretty much ALWAYS!

The format of the evening was that each person got nine minutes to talk about their topic, and of course Academics being Academics nearly everyone got OVER-EXCITED and had to RUSH their last few slides - when I used to run conferences many years ago this ALWAYS happened and it's rather CHARMING to see it still goes on in a NEW GENERATION. I used to think it was bad planning but now I realise it's because these people LOVE what they do and are THRILLED to have the opportunity to tell everyone else about it, it's LOVELY.

There were all sorts of FASCINATING things talked about, with an audience who HUNG on every word. I can think of no more impressive demonstration of how KEEN everyone was than the following: towards the end of a GRATE talk about a Collection of TATOOED, PRESERVED, HUMAN SKIN the presenter showed a recently discovered picture of the original "owner" of the skin. He was totally in the NUDE and you could see his PENIS. VERY CLEARLY. And did anyone LARF? Did anyone POINT or mention it AT ALL? My friends, they did not. I was EXCESSIVELY impressed!

Someone, however, had to bring down the tone and this was OUR job as we went on at the very end of the evening and did THIS:

Theme From Dinosaur Planet (overture)

The Theory Of A Dinosaur Planet

A Little Bit

Literature Search

Dinosaurs Talk Like Pirates

After everyone else had been so LEARNED and PROPER I thought we might struggle a bit, but BY GOLLY it went REALLY well! We were both a) quite surprised b) very pleased! I guess we should have expected playing A Little Bit for a crowd made up almost ENTIRELY of people who work in research MIGHT go down quite well, but the whole thing seemed to work out well. I did most of the talking, Steve did most of the singing, and the FACT that we'd actually THORT about it beforehand and worked out the setlist didn't half help. Of the many shows we've done of Dinosaur Planet (and, indeed, Moon Horse) excerpts, this was far and away the BEST. HOORAH!

Afterwards we sat around for a bit and had a chat to even MORE interesting people, including a group of paleontolgists who were very polite about me saying "Like Ross from Friends?", and then headed out into the night, full of the joys of RESEARCH. A bloody lovely evening!

posted 26/4/2012 by MJ Hibbett

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Comments:

Brilliant gig - and thanks for the CDs :-)
posted 26/4/2012 by Terence Eden

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