It was an evening in late August when I found myself taking part in a live, interactive game show.
Throughout the city the final vestiges of the Fringe were in full clamour and flow, and inside the Bongo Club was no different. An air of barely restrained hysteria flooded the normal club space, festooned with balloons and dominated by what resembled a glittery Generation Game set. Groups huddled around tables, occasionally over-refreshed and boisterous, as ushers and stagehands known as Greencoats escorted any stray audience members towards potential teams. This was where the boundaries between pub quiz and It’s A Knockout melted down.
Our hosts for the evening were the genial Wilson, a manic Bruce Forsyth caricature with Eraserhead hair, with his sidekick, the lovely Betty, keeping scores, tallies and occasionally arbitrating in tie-breakers. As they sang the Funtime theme, (“It’s Funtime! It’s Funtime!” Join in at home) I could feel the audience preparing themselves for who-knew-what?
Every Funtime night has a theme and tonight the fun was of a sci-fi bent. While every Funtime has quiz-type rounds, tonight involving questions based around video clips from classic SF films, it is the activity rounds in which the evening becomes a fairly unique night out. So it was, that I came to find myself covered top to tail in long curly balloons along with other audience members while the lovely Betty mused over which of us made for the most plausible space alien.
Later on that evening I also found myself one of a chorus of kazoos as we offered up our carefully orchestrated renditions of the themes from Doctor Who and Star Wars as well as Joe Meek’s “Telstar”, in keeping with the sci-fi feel. Other feats of bravery and endurance include the Tower of Strength, in which one of your team-mates must prove their muscular might by attempting to hold a pint glass full of pennies for the longest time (not as easy as it sounds) and navigating the skills of fearsome robots utilising lettered blocks in order to spell out, well, it’s easy, FUNTIME!
For the winning team, there is always a trophy as well as some odd goodies (sadly, some of these on the night I attended were pilfered by a particularly annoying team of drunk young things who seemingly had a wildly overblown sense of their own entitlements and privileges and felt they ought to have won. Bad sportsmanship, what?), but really it is the taking part that counts. Now Funtime is returning, ready to put the frighteners up you.
It’s Monster Time Funtime. The Bongo Club, Saturday 13 November. 7.pm