#oneaday Day 228: Shambolic Entertainment

So, Digitiser Live then!

It was a great show. Everything I hoped for. Authentically shambolic in the style of the YouTube show, paying homage to the things people loved about the Teletext pages, and doing things that only really "worked" in the live arena.

Rewind a moment for those unfamiliar. Digitiser was a daily games magazine that ran on the UK's Teletext service from 1993 until 2003. If you want to know a bit more about its history, I wrote a piece about it back when Digitiser: The Show was first a thing last year. Check it out here.

The show opened with "Pac-Man for Real", featuring several of the cast members charging around the hall attempting to recover balls that had been strategically scattered around the audience. It was a hilarious piece of visual comedy, but it was almost as amusing to see how exhausted everyone involved was once they got on stage properly — especially once host Paul "Mr Biffo" Rose started admonishing them for peaking too early.

Once the show got underway, there was plenty of the usual banter between the main cast Biffo, Larry Bundy Jr, Octav1us and Paul Gannon. (Original cast member GameplayJenny departed amicably at some point in the last year; there was apparently no bad blood, she just didn't want to do it any more!) Biffo took a moment to address the fact that people have repeatedly been accusing him of looking like a "fat, old Charlie Brooker" in his comment section for a while now. There were visual aids and everything.

The show featured a mix of on-stage action and prerecorded material appearing on a big screen; transitions between sections featured one of these latter components, and several of them incorporated audience participation. A particular highlight among these was what initially appeared to be a respectful retrospective on the life and works of David Braben, creator of Elite and the Raspberry Pi, but this devolved into short order into the song "David Braben Did a Poo", sung to the tune of Camptown Races. It was a seriously bizarre feeling to be in a theatre of 400+ people all singing "Did a poo all night! Did a poo all day! David Braben did a poo, doo-dah-doo-dah-day!"

Biffo brought back a few sequences from Digitiser: The Show including quiz Mockety Moc!, which was just as shambolic as when it was on video — and the best thing about sections like this was the fact that Biffo and co have set such an expectation of everything they do going wrong somehow that any mistakes they might happen to make just feel like part of the act. It was the same when the videos playing in the background between sections locked up, froze or just flat-out didn't play; it was honestly impossible to tell whether it was an actual mistake, or if the whole thing was planned that way. And it was wonderful.

One particularly entertaining segment opened with a terrifying slideshow of Sonic vore fanart that someone (Biffo) had had to collect from around the Internet, and this was then followed by a pair of contestants having to identify which pieces of Sonic fanfiction that were being read out were real (spoiler: they all were).

Another involved Cheap Show's Eli Silverman dressed as Mario (occasionally going "eeee!" in an apparently unsuccessful attempt to channel Charles Martinet) inviting Paul Gannon and Larry Bundy Jr to smell the contents of various pipes. Because it wouldn't be Digitiser without Gannon getting some grief and Bundy retching.

The whole thing is such a chaotic, surreal blur in my mind that it's honestly difficult to pick out highlights… but it was a wonderful end to what, as I discussed yesterday, was a fantastic day. Everyone involved — whether cast, crew or audience — seemed to have a fantastic time, and I'm so happy it was a big success. As shambolic as their end products might often seem to be, Biffo and co all really work hard on producing brilliantly entertaining work for people to enjoy — and they don't always get the credit and appreciation they deserve.

I hope they all feel great about yesterday, though, because it was as sure a sign as I've ever seen that Digitiser is here to stay, and Biffo and his friends have fans who genuinely love them.