Just A Minute

On Wed, Aug 9, 2017 at 10:34 AM, mhood@... [just-a-minute] <just-a-minute@... > wrote:

Thanks Dave.

By formidable persistence I managed to get a ticket to the first JAM recording at the Edinburgh Festival and by amazing serendipity I also got to see the second show as well!

Dean told me that there are always some tickets available at he venue and this was indeed true, however, getting them required effort. The tickets were given away on a first come first served basis at 11am on the morning of the recording. For fairness, there was a maximum of two tickets per person and they could be for only one of the two shows. 

I arrived promptly at 9am when the gates to the George Herriot School opened, was scanned for sharps and any other contraband by the friendly security staff and found I was already 7th in the line that would grow to about 100 people by 11am. The two hours passed quickly chatting with the other hopefuls and at least it wasn't raining. The kind BBC staff also brought out chairs and rugs for a couple of the more infirm members of the queue.

By 11:02 I had my prized ticket for the early show but this was not the end of the queuing for the day. An hour before each show starts, all tickets must be 'validated' where a sequence number is attached to your ticket and this determines the order you get to enter the venue. To be sure of getting a good seat it is necessary to queue again from about an hour before validation starts. At 3:30pm I was number 9 in the queue that would eventually grow to more than 300. At 4:30pm on the dot, the validation numbers were issued and at last I could relax for an hour secure in the knowledge that I had a confirmed seat for the first show at 5:30pm.

The show itself was a great experience. Panel members were:

Paul Merton and Fred Macaulay on the right and James Acaster and Josie Lawrence on the left.

The cast for the second show was Paul Merton and Janey Godley on the right and Mark Watson and Paul Sinha on the left.

James Acaster and Mark Watson were both first time players, 'virgins' as Nicholas referred to them in the warm up, and both had the usual first-timer difficulties with keeping going and not saying 'er'.

The serindipity that saw me get into see the second show as well occurred after all the validated ticket holders had been admitted, followed by the 20 odd hopefuls in the standby queue, 4 at a time. The ushers looked around and then strolled over to the large outdoor TV screen where I had resigned myself to watching the show from outside. 'Anyone keen to see the second show?' they inquired. Had the whole area not been covered with artificial turf, you would not have seen my heels for dust as I ran to the big blue tent to ensure I nabbed that last seat.

The studio in the big blue tent has seating for about 350 and I'd guess that about 300 of those seats were allocated by the random ballot. Nicholas revealed that there had been 12,000 applications for tickets for the roughly 600 seats available. 'Just letting you know how lucky you are!' said Nicholas, or in my case doggedly persistent and incredibly lucky. 

Martin

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James R Curry

scratchy@...