COMEDY CAN be expensive to catch but with careful list-scanning you can find affordable quality among the many wannabes and neverwillmakeits.
Loving Dalston here proves the point with a few shows that potentially represent excellent value. Before promoters of the many hundreds of other funny nights in northeast London ask why they’ve been overlooked, the answer is that what follows is a simply made choice.
The least wallet-hurting is probably Bridget Christie, supplied publicity pic, above, on Wednesday 17 June 2015: £4 a ticket booked online. The Hackney resident has a sharp tongue, acute observational powers and a steadfastly leftish viewpoint.
Sofie Hagen, a Dane who is also on the bill, has been described as “charismatic”. Both appear at a new venue, the basement of Farr’s School of Dancing, the hipster heaven next to the Dalston Lane mural.
It’s part of a new series, Lolston Junction, starting tomorrow Wednesday 3 June 2015 and ending on Wednesday 29 July 2015, bravely claiming to be an alternative to the Edinburgh Festival. Huh!
A detailed analysis in The Sunday Times Magazine of Russell Brand made him sound elusive, so the Proud Archivist, the privately owned arts venue on the, uhm, Haggerston Riviera, pictured at top, has done well to pin him down to appear there every Friday for £10.
Trouble is, the reporter made it clear the show was a bit too long to be anything less than an ordeal. Still, the would-be working-class hero has an agile mind, a whopping ego and a fine line in provocation.
The Friday gigs ends this week, on 5 June 2015: check Mondays at the Proud Archivist site for further gigs.
Hamish Scott 020615
* Farr’s School of Dancing, 17 Dalston Lane, Hackney E8 3DF; Proud Archivist, 2-10 Hertford Road (actually on the Regent’s Canal just west of Kingsland Road), Hackney N1 5ET
* Backstory: Russell Brand upstages Hackney; Haggy restaurant holds out helping hand; Why Haggerston eateries are happy
* Emboldened underscored words in most cases indicate a hyperlink, a reader service rare among websites. If a link does not work, it is probably because the site to which the URL refers has not been maintained. Most photographs can be visually enlarged by pressing on them.