Drive-ins are now firmly establishing themselves as the only method by which culture fans can see live arts in person for the future. Hot on the heels of The Drive-In Club comes @TheDriveIn, sponsored by Suzuki and produced by Jericho Comedy.
The producers are staging two kinds of drive-in shows; those mainly about comedy, and others mainly about film, the latter with a broader entertainment vibe. On the evening I went, a couple of comics and a turntablist were the warm-up acts for the main event, a screening of Grease.
Ivo Graham kicked off proceedings and instead of doing a truncated version of the show he should have been touring about now, he did some lockdown humour “my Dominic Cummings bantz” and then conducted a quiz about himself. Where did the shirt he was wearing come from? Where was his first snog with a girl?
He offered a prize for the most correct answers and was a nice form of interaction with the audience, who were of course in their cars – or at least most were. Some had brought along picnic chairs or sat on the grass on this sunny evening, taking in the view of the grand houses that surround Blackheath (the proximity of which explained why punters were asked not to show their appreciation by honking their horns). Graham's set was daft, but worked its own kind of gentle magic.
Next up was Andrew Maxwell, who normally can talk the hind leg off the proverbial donkey, but sounded less sure of himself in this new world of comedy. He made several references to it feeling weird not to have any feedback from the audience as he told his stories, but he nonetheless made a decent fist of it – even if he did occasionally forget himself and swear on an evening firmly targeted towards families. “I'm just delighted to be out of the house,” he confessed, having not gigged in more than three month. “But this is more social experiment than gig.”
He riffed on having lived longer in the UK than his native Ireland, the attraction of an Irish accent, and the fun and games that ensue in airports when he travels with his Muslim wife, or his “random security check, as I call her”. He may have felt weird, but it sounded good to us.
After DJ Yoda (Duncan Beiny) – it really was something for all the family – gave an engaging set of film themes and songs set to movie clips, the film began. Grease is a perfect drive-in movie as the can audience sing along – or what we will now surely be calling caraoke.
