Just A Little Bit Of History - From Kj Bradshaw
I’ve always had a fascination with stand up comedy. It started at a young age, I had VHS tapes of Joe Pasquale and saw him a few times at The Royal & Derngate as a kid (Don’t judge, I was young). This lead me on a path of wanting to discover all types of comedy over the years, getting my hands on anything from Lee Evans to Richard Pryor. I also had an old recording of Lenny Bruce who paved the way for free speech in comedy in the 50s and 60s. Even the history of it was something I wanted to dive into. I read Rik Mayall’s autobiography when I was 16, still to this day it has the best self indulgent book title, it’s a brilliant read. But I digress!
Before we started running comedy events, I had compiled a collection of over 400 stand up comedy DVD’s. It’s a world record, not one of those cool Guiness World Records, but an online one on Record Setter…not sure if that counts. I stopped at 426 when DVD’s were becoming obsolete and Youtube, Netflix and Amazon were taking over with their own comedy specials.
This obsession with watching stand up in 2015 made me want to discover even more comics through the crazy world of the internet. I even searched for mobile apps that might be around at the time and realised there wasn’t many options. I did find this American app that was free to download and all it was, was a list of Youtube links you could click to watch snippets of American comics. It was very basic, yet it had over a million downloads, and that’s when the lightbulb went off…
Later that year I started working on my own app, with no knowledge or experience with coding, I put together something that I called The Comedy Crate. I’m not going to blow smoke up my own ass, it wasn’t great. But essentially what it did was create a mini database where people could look up their favourite comics through an A-Z page of hundreds of acts, look at Youtube clips, find their website, social media pages and also find out where their gigging etc.
In 2016 I made the decision to go up to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival with a couple of friends for the first time. I also thought it would be the perfect opportunity to try and sell this app to like minded people. I went up with flyers, t-shirts, I paid out of my own pocket to get this app on the Play Store and Apple Store. I stood out in the crowds and handed out flyers and I dumped plenty in various venues. Spoiler alert, it didn’t work, however what it did was open a door I didn’t know existed….
Going back a few months prior to the Fringe Festival, I got a call from an old friend Conor. He’d noticed the app through my Facebook page and wanted to chat comedy, said him and a guy called Mike were thinking of starting a comedy night in Northampton and asked if I’d be interested in getting involved… it was a no brainer.
I didn’t think much of at it the time but we all met up at The Comedy Cow Festival and talked about this idea. I met Mike Chase who we quickly established was the business head of the operation. The one big thing we all had in common was we loved watching comedy, we were all just fans who wanted to put on a night we’d all like to go to and we all brought different things to the table.
After the inevitable lesson learned from the app, I wanted to dive into something that scratched that comedy itch. After a few meetings, we had decided to use the name of the app, but change the logo. Rightly so, Conor was quick to say my initial logo for the app looked like a guy holding a… well take a look below and you’ll see for yourself, it could be misconstrued.
That was when Crate face was born.
