ADVERTISING FEATURE Gary Delaney
Happy 20th birthday
T he Stand has come a very long way since founders Tommy Sheppard and Jane Mackay i rst put on a comedy night in a pub basement just off Edinburgh’s Grassmarket in 1995. Now The Stand has establishments in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Newcastle putting on comedy seven days a week, regularly attracting big names, unearthing new talent and winning awards and acclaim as one of the i nest spaces in the world to do and see comedy.
Of course, keeping such a well-oiled machine on track doesn’t just happen by itself. It takes hard work and dedication, with the likes of operations manager Kenny O’Brien and press ofi cer Jen Lavery having seen and done it all within these walls. ‘We’re a small crew so everybody chips in to do stuff,’ says Jen. ‘I handle press and general admin, and it’s usually me who phones to coni rm acts for their dates. But it’s the case that if something needs done then you just do it. My auntie was scandalised once because I was over at Stand Towers changing beds, but nobody is above anything and you don’t ask somebody to do something that you wouldn’t be happy to do yourself.’
While Jen describes Kenny as someone who is ‘your i rst port of call if you wake up handcuffed to a dead person’, he views himself as a safety net and sounding board without being too in-
your-face. ‘By and large, I’ll help out if people have problems but I try not to stick my oar in if it’s not needed. Before Tommy left, a lot of the time he would feel that he had to appear to be knowledgeable and involved in every aspect, but I don’t: I know nothing about how Facebook works or how you get a story into the papers, so by and large I trust that everybody knows their job and wants to do it.’
Booking the top touring acts and having the likes of Dylan Moran and Frankie Boyle pop along to try out new material are clearly massive feathers in The Stand’s cap, but in decades to come its true lasting legacy may well be the Red Raw nights. This weekly showcase for new acts who are given i ve minutes to display their worth has been a platform from which the likes of Kevin Bridges and Daniel Sloss have leapt on to bigger things, while current hot prospects such as Christopher MacArthur-Boyd, Lauren Pattison, Liam Withnail and Ashley Storrie have also successfully come through their Red Raw rite of passage. ‘For years we plugged away at Red Raw, getting audiences of two dozen and whatnot and now it’s sold out week-in week-out across all three clubs,’ notes Kenny. ‘We get hundreds of applicants every time we go through a booking cycle: there are complete newbies who want to get booked plus folk trying to work their way
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34 THE LIST 1 Apr–31 May 2018