Alternative comedy group Consignia on their Unforgettable 5 gigs

Alternative comedy collective Consignia are celebrating their ten-year anniversary with a one-off gig at London’s Museum of Comedy on July 11. Here they recall five of their most memorable gigs…

First gig

Our first gig as Consignia featured Phil Jarvis, Andy Barr and Nathan Willcock along with Jason Bridge – all of whom will be performing together again for the first time in years at our 10-year anniversary gig next month. Apart from Jason Bridge, who is missing, presumed dead.

It took place at a bar in Dalston, we had a concept of our first Edinburgh show The Abridged Dapper Eleven Hour Monochrome Dream Show but zero material. Just half-baked, genuinely unfunny ideas, and a lot of improv that went nowhere. There were only two audience members, neither of whom seemed to enjoy it.

Some cynics may say that's pretty much what all subsequent Consignia gigs were like. I couldn't possibly comment.

Best gig

Our 2022 show The Flatterers was inspired, in part, because we felt the audience who came to see our shows were too ‘in on the joke’ and that we weren't the fringe act we once were.

 Insofar as we'd developed a bit of a ‘cult’ following so a lot of people who came to see us knew roughly what to expect from one of our gigs, so the frisson and excitement of performing those early gigs had gone.

Our response was to go back to our roots and try to create a show that would be deliberately alienating to the audience, and to make something genuinely transgressive. The show ended up being a gross-out tale of two crew members who clean up billionaires' waste in outer space following the destruction of Earth. It was a critique of late-stage capitalism, the commercialisation of the Fringe and the inability of the Left to effectively organise against the monied elite. But it also featured a man pretending to eat shit on stage and sick it back up, then eat it again.

It caused at least two audience members (that we know of) to be physically sick because of watching the show. In that respect, it was our best gig, as we achieved creating a truly visceral piece of performance art that elicited physical reactions from audience members.

You don’t get that at The Pleasance. 

Strangest audience member

Our 2017 show Panopticon was attended by someone who ill-advisedly decided to drop acid before seeing our show.

The show's premise posited the question ‘What if New Labour was a Maoist cabal of authoritarian floating atoms that enslaved the British public?’

 The centrepiece of this show was a seven-minute bit where a man gets repeatedly hit in the face with two mops shouting ‘no’ while disembodied lips sing along to a slowed-down version of Emilia's Big, Big World. This apparently caused the tripping audience member to freak out, have a minor breakdown and leave Edinburgh that very same night.

Don't take drugs, kids.

Most disappointed audience member 

In one of our Christmas shows entitled ‘Or’, we gave the audience a choice as they walked in: Would they like to watch the show or do arts and crafts in the lobby? Those that chose arts and crafts, genuinely went and did an arts and craft session for the whole show. They could hear laughter from the show but weren't allowed to come in. They'd made their choice.

I think it was meant to highlight the atomisation of, and divisions within, society but that broader point was lost on the people who had paid to watch a comedy show but instead ended up making felt cards or some shit.

Most exotic gig

We were asked to do a gig in Berlin. We wrote and performed a show called The Maastricht Reloaded, a time-travelling fantasy about the signing of the Maastricht Treaty. The gig was in 2019, when Covid was just a twinkle in a not yet dead bat's eye. 

However, the gig in retrospect was quite prescient. It was essentially about Brexit and the UK’s relationship to the EU, but true to form we thought it would be funny to base the ‘story’ largely around obscure figures and events from the John Major government (we thought It'd be funny to do this to an audience of young German based hipsters, who would have no idea who or what we were talking about). I think it also featured a time travelling cow because there was a plot point about BSE but my memories are hazy.

What I do remember is that we erected a ​cellophane banner between us and the audience (weirdly Covid-coded before Covid was a thing) and kept sucking ‘British air’ out of balloons as we didn't want to breathe foreign air’  a version of which sort of got proposed during Covid.

We originally insisted there would be no interval under any circumstances, but that came under strain and we could feel the audience's patience running out. After the begrudgingly allowed interval we eventually got them onside with a skit which involved Nathan and Phil shouting ‘Up Yours, Delors at each other for 10 mins.

It was really cool to gig in Berlin.

• Consignia will be performing their one-off 10-year anniversary show Have a Good One, Yeah? at the Museum of Comedy on Saturday July 11. Tickets here 

Published: 15 Jun 2026