Bright Club at the UCL Bloomsbury

The UCL Bloomsbury Theatre will play host to Bright Club, the thinking person's variety night, on 26 October.

Steve Cross of the UCL Public Engagement Unit, explains the concept and history of this unique series of events.

"It's coming home…

Every month since September 2009 UCL staff have been taking to the stage at the Wilmington Arms comedy club in Clerkenwell to perform stand-up comedy about their areas of expertise.

We were keeping it a little bit of a secret from the UCL community, because we wanted to make sure that PhD students, professors and everyone in between really did make good stand-up comedians. It turns out that they do, and we've been selling out the Wilmington Arms regularly, so we're bringing Bright Club, the thinking person's variety night, back home to UCL this month.

On 26 October Bright Club is joining forces with the UCL Bloomsbury Theatre and UCL Museums to create a whole evening of comedy and entertainment, starring a mixture of professionals and UCL staff.

Bright Club was invented as a way to share UCL research with members of the public who wouldn't normally hear from us, and as a first step into public engagement for staff.

Past events have been sponsored by the Science and Technology Facilities Council and the Wellcome Trust, and we also record weekly podcasts supported by these two funders.

Performers on the 26 October include:

• Simon Munnery (compere)
• Robin Ince
• Steve Hall
• Dr Joe Flatman, UCL Institute of Archaeology
• Dr Anne Welsh, UCL Information Studies
• Dr Chiara Ambrosio, UCL Science and Technology Studies
• Ruth Fillery Travis, UCL Institute of Archaeology
• Mark Carnall, UCL Grant Museum of Zoology
• Debbie Challis, UCL Petrie Museum of Egyptology
• Subhadra Das, UCL Museums

...and two-girl, two-bass cabaret band Strawberry and Cream.

That's an awful lot of entertainment, in London's best comedy theatre, for just £5 a ticket.  

Some things we've learned in more than a year of Bright Club:

• The European Noise At Work regulations mean that you can listen to less than 30 seconds of a heavy metal concert before you should stop for the sake of your hearing.
• It's difficult to be clandestine where a horse is involved.
• Viking poets were really just rappers with beards.
• The quickest way to clean a plate is to get a dog to lick it clean. Or just to turn it over.
• Ants get lost when they wear stilts.

To book tickets for Bright Club at the Bloomsbury, follow the link above, call +44 (0)20 7388 8822 or drop into the theatre box office."

Image: Bright Club audience by Hilary Jackson