The Drive-in Club, Brent Cross Shopping Centre, review: the best you can expect from watching comedy in a car park in the rain
The stand-up comedy world is used to thinking on its feet. Now the Cinderella of the performing arts – barely mentioned in pleas for government support – has gone the extra mile to get comics revved-up again and audiences rolling in the aisles.
The Drive-In Club, situated in a car park near to Brent Cross Shopping Centre, just off the North Circular, is an unglamorous far cry from the capital’s once-rammed Comedy Store but it’s still a seismic event in live comedy 2020. For the first time since lockdown, household names that once barnstormed the circuit and even conquered arenas (future line-ups include Jason Manford and Bill Bailey) are strutting their stuff within earshot and eyesight of fans.
All in a safe and secure manner, of course. Banished is the sweaty, beery bonhomie of yore. The rigmarole for this modified version of a movie drive-in (which the site also provides) is about as antiseptic as possible. Up to 400 vehicles, checked upon entry with a meticulousness usually reserved for those wishing to meet the US president (sniffer dogs, and human nosing into car-boots and bags), are guided into positions that allow for the right social distancing between punters.
Nosh and booze, rustled-up on the spot, can be booked via an app, to be delivered by staff in golf-buggies. In theory you could – weather allowing – set up a few deckchairs, make it a bit Glyndebourne. But to hear the comic rambling (the physical ambling of the performer is relayed via a big-screen), you have to tune in to a special FM frequency on your car radio, which makes sitting inside, much as if you were waiting to board a ferry, a fairly inescapable part of the ‘experience’. A short hike to one of the detergent-soaked portable loos ranks as a major diversion.
On launch night, the pioneering done first by Dom Joly and then (with support from Kai Humphries) Daniel Sloss, wound-up windows, gusts of wind and pelting rain conspired to stop the transmission of infectious howls of laughter. Amid this new definition of a tough crowd, the main means of expressing mirth was via the car-horn – a case of honk if you’re having a gas. Most abstained for the most part, unless something really registered on the gag-o-meter. Perhaps they could institute a protocol: beep twice if you’ve having a hoot, flash your headlights to heckle.
Was this the future of comedy, or its funeral? Short of a gig on the Titanic, you couldn’t picture a bleaker scene. Visiting this retail hellscape – a vision out of Dante crossed with Mad Max – on my own, like a latter-day Gary Numan (prices rise from £40, depending on how many occupants there are), crying with laughter looked to be off the menu, weeping buckets very much on. Yet whether it was the restricted airflow, the lightheadedness that comes with sitting for ages, or sheer patriotism at the sight of Brits madly-pluckily battling on, I moved up the gears, from despair past anthropological fascination to admiration, amusement and finally enjoyment.
It helped that the comics saw the funny side of the nightmare-surreal scenario. His jolliness in question, Joly – conducting a wind-battered whistle-stop tour of his globally acquired anecdotes (a glorified slide-slow) – suffered a tech meltdown and seemed near-breakdown, likening the ordeal to one of his ‘dark tourist’ visits to North Korea. “This is still the best evening I’ve had in four months,” he added.
A shivering Sloss, droll about the impact of Covid-19 on all comedy material (“‘I was at a wedding the other day’, ‘No you weren’t’”!) put the better-than-nothing fact of the matter bluntly: “I drove 10 hours today down to the epicentre [of the virus]… And after 15 weeks of nobody giving me attention, I’ll do it for free!”).
What better things did we have to do, what were we driving back to? As if to reinforce that evaluation, I realised at the end that the use of the radio had drained my car battery. Mercifully, there was trained help on hand to resolve that deflating punchline. It felt like a take-home metaphor thrown in for free: if this bizarre carry-on (car-ee-jokey?) is what it takes to apply jump-leads to British comedy, so be it.
Tickets available from Drive-in Club