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Sex Appeal

Thursday 19th January 2012

Bizarrely, the luckiest I have been this year was last Friday 13th when I performed at the Sex Appeal gig at the Bloomsbury Theatre.

This was the first time I had ever performed at the Bloomsbury and I was feeling extremely nervous. Not least because the rest of the line up was incredibly intimidating, comprising of comedy heavy weights such as Al Murray, Shappi Khorsandi, David Baddiel and more.

Walking onto the stage to face the 500 or so people was unreal, but luckily 'Dr Theatre' (or whatever we're calling that bit of you inside that really doesn't want you to mess up too much when it's actually important) kicked in, and I acted like a cool professional. If you don't count the bit where it felt like my leg was shaking, but I don't know if it was actually shaking, it just felt like it was.

I knew the gig would be OK when my first mini-punchline hit, and it turned out to be one of those beautiful, exhilarating  gigs where the audience is lovely. Also, because of the size of the venue, you get those amazing 'rolling laughs' that you only get at the bigger venues, where you have to actually slightly wait for the audience to stop laughing before you tell your next joke, or they won't be able to hear it. Most fun on stage ever. At least since Edinburgh. But maybe ever.

I don't know what the 15 year old me that loved comedy would make of this. The scale of her ambition was reached in 2009 when I did 5 minutes on a Thursday at The Comedy Store and took a picture of her name on the running order. She had no idea that these theatre gigs existed. She learnt everything from TV and hadn't even heard of the Edinburgh Festival until she was in her 20's. How embarrassing. I'm glad I'm not her, oh wait.

I've got off the point. The point is the gig was amazing and Brook are a great charity who give free and confidential advice about sex to young people. One of the reasons I love comedy is that it's a chance to talk about the dirty, naked truth about ourselves. It's important to talk about sex, and to have good information about it available. If you want to, I think you can still donate if you text 'BRCK00' then ￡1, ￡5, or ￡10 to 70070.

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