Had tickets to watch Have I Got News for You being recorded last night and it was a fairly good recording with lots of mirth to work with. However, last night was notable more for the audience than for the recording, at least as far as I was concerned.

It started off outside. I arrived early, and yet not early enough as even turning up at 5pm (for a 6:45 entry) meant not being that close to the front of the queue. The days of turning up at 5:30pm and getting an excellent seat seem to be over. For various reasons, the queue was split in half, and my group was right at the front of the second queue – and we were later joined back together. During the rejoining process, a woman on a phone managed to push ahead of us and growled most aggressively as we moved forward. Now I am not going to argue over a single position in a queue, and we spent most of the waiting time in mild amusement at her aggressive behaviour.

Got inside, got reasonably decent seats and things started as usual.

Now, as a member of the audience, although the tickets are free and we are there for a good time, there is expected to be a modicum of audience participation.

As has been explained in the past by the warm up act, the worst sort of audience for the show is one full of people who laugh quietly to themselves when something funny is said. We are required to laugh out loud, and then engage in totally natural and spontaneous rounds of applause when clever witticism is  made. Yes, just like you clap and applaud at home when watching the TV. What, you don’t do that?

So, a bad member of the audience is a quiet chuckler and a good member is one who laughs at a reasonable volume level.

There is however an unmentioned horror that can infest a TV studio – someone never mentioned by warm up acts for it strikes terror into an audience and the sound recorders.

The banshee laughing woman. She has an exceptionally loud, high pitched shrill laugh that cuts through the ambient laughter and comes to dominate the environment.

Last night, not only was one of these horrors in the studio – but she sat right behind me.

To add to the horror, not only did this harbinger of doom screech out loud, but she managed to find EVERY SINGLE joke to be the height of hysterics. It is one thing to be genetically cursed with a horrific laugh, but please don’t extenuate the problem by laughing at absolutely everything.

Being British, most of us variously turned around and glared sternly at her, but she carried on regardless.

I was strongly reminded of the awful laugh that Mozart had in the movie Amadeus. Last night, I sat in front of Mozart, and it was not nice.

Had tickets last night to watch Have I Got News for You being recorded with two comedians I can’t honestly say I have ever heard of (Lee Mack and Kevin Bridges), along with the bombastic leader of the UKIP party, Nigel Farage.

Described as “half man, half foghorn”, I wasn’t sure if this was going to be a classic HIGNFY car-crash type programme where he was strung up for ritual sacrifice, or if he would come out fairly well.

For the record, standing in a queue outside the TV studio for 90 minutes in the bitterly freezing cold wind was not fun.

Anyhow, for a politician to appear on the show can quite literally make or break a career, and I suspect that Nigel Farage will come out of this fairly well – subject to the editing suite gods being nice to him.

For someone who comes across on TV as being quite rude, he was genially self-deprecating on the show and took the mocking in good humour. However, he only ever seemed to join in when politics was mentioned. As soon as anything non-political was talked about he effectively vanished from the set.

I suspect he might be the sort of political person I have met on occasions – whose entire life is driven by their political cause. Which actually makes them quite dull for casual conversation over a pint.

A slight misunderstanding about a the “Tory’s secret weapon” did lead to the idea that Boris Johnson might be pregnant. A horrific idea! There was also a long-running joke about Ian Hislop being gay which may or may not make the edits as there was another running joke, aptly about laughing hyenas which might be better.

The recording itself was slower than usual and was a bit like a car constantly stuttering along – never quite getting up to normal speed, but getting you to the end eventually. Fortunately, there was plenty of comic material, so the end result should be quite good.

The recording is normally done on a Thursday night for a broadcast on Friday, but this series has been bumped off the Friday night slot for some TV drama show. Horrors!

A final oddity last night was the size of the audience. There are typically two blocks of seats either side of the stage, and another block directly in front – all of which can be seen on the show during the credits, but two blocks of “crap” seats to either side were missing last night. Odd that.

More tickets for later in the series will be released on the Hatrick website – details about booking tickets here.

P.S. When UKIP was founded, I initially thought it was pronounced as You Kay Eye Pee. Opps!

Note: This blog posting is a tidy up of several previous older postings with details of recent changes to procedures.

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As a regular attendee of the recordings of HIGNFY, I am quite often asked how to get tickets, so I have on occasions written up the details – but over time, the pages end up inaccurate thanks to changes made by Hattrick TV, so here is the updated version.

The key point to note is that getting tickets is both very easy, and yet also a matter of some luck – and even if you get a ticket, you are then going to face standing in a long queue for at least an hour on the night.

OK – here goes:

There are two series per year, in the spring and winter, with tickets released in March and September. They are also seeming to release tickets in two batches per series.

To apply for tickets, you first have to open a (free) account on the Hattrick website, and it is worth doing that before the ticket booking date as on the day, their website can slow down alarmingly.

If you don’t get tickets for the first few shows of a series, a second batch of tickets is released a few weeks later for the second half of the series.

Having registered, you will probably get an email closer to the date that the tickets are released, but I also track their website through an automated system and always note the date on my events calendar.

On the day, log in to the website and you will then be able to select up to four tickets for one show. Once you book your tickets, you will be blocked from requesting any other dates. Having made a reservation, you have to wait for an email to confirm your request was accepted – just occasionally it isn’t.

Also note that the website slows down as few million people (only a slight exaggeration) try to book tickets at the same time!

Anyhow – presuming you got the confirmation email, print out a copy and wait until the night in question.

Due to people booking tickets then deciding not to bother turning up on the night – the show always overbooks and if you turn up late, then there is a chance you wont get in, although anecdotal chatter suggests you will be offered tickets for another date.

The doors open roughly around 6:45pm, but keen fans will be in the queue from 5:30pm to get the best seats.

There are no toilets outside, but if caught short, then go to the top of the queue and the security staff will usually let you inside to use the toilet.

As you go in, the staff will take control and they tell you where to sit – the earlier you arrive the better the seats you get. Even if you arrive late and end up with an obscured view, there are loads of TV screens dotted around the place, so in the very worst case, you will still get a 2-hour TV show.

A warm-up act will try to wake the audience up – sometime very good (Jo Caulfield) or less good (seemingly, everyone else).

The guests, host and regulars, Ian Hislop and Paul Merton are brought on – a bit of fiddling with microphones and the like occurs, and then the recording starts.

The show is generally recorded in one continuous take and edited later. At the end of the recording, they do a few reruns of comments where the editors think they need to change how a sentence ends (or starts) as they have already decided what to cut or keep. Weirdly, that last bit is some times the funniest bit of the evening as the presenters relax a bit, and it is a bit surreal to hear the jokes a second time round.

Then that’s it – off you go while the staff start dismantling the set.

Typically, finishes around 10pm.

The key details!

The next release date is 1st April 2010 at 11am

Register for Your Account

Have I Got News for You Tickets Page

The BBC’s Have I Got News for You is one of those television shows, which largely thanks to its rotating guests and the topicality of the news is a programme that has many highs, and some lows. Quite often the presence of a key guest or host will make or break the show.

Anyone who watches the show regularly will probably still be grinning after they had Brian Blessed on last year. At last nights recording, the potential for an outstanding episode existed as the villainous leader of the RMT, one Bob Crow was invited on as a guest. In addition, to add proverbial sauce to the gander, they had the usually highly sarcastic Alexander Armstrong as host and the currently somewhat controversial Jimmy Carr as the opposing guest.

All was set for a battle of wits such as has rarely been seen.

The show actually started quite well, as when the guests walk onto the stage one at a time, the clapping turned to boos and hisses as Bob Crow appeared. You could tell it was largely a London based audience! The introduction that was recorded for broadcast had some booing, but far less than the prerecorded segment.

Also, slightly unusually based on recent shows, the comedian was partnered with Ian Hislop, and the political guest was partnered with Paul Merton. However, as the recording progressed, it was clear that there was absolutely no chemistry between Paul and Bob as would normally be exhibited within the show.

All told, we got a very mixed programme that seemed to have had much of the life drained out of it on one side, while most of the action came from Ian Hislop and Jimmy Carr, who were on very good form.

There were the expected jibes at Bob Crow and his penchant for calling strikes at the drop of a hat, and a joke was made where they stopped recording for a negotiated tea break. However, the expected biting satire seemed very muted. There have guests on the show before who have been practically shredded by the regulars, but they seemed to be wearing kid gloves last night – and Paul Merton seemed utterly disinterested in the whole proceedings.

There was however a good section where they have a mock up of a tube train animation to introduce several picture based questions. The view of a lobster driving a tube train was alarming – although I bet they wouldn’t go on strike as often. Hmmm!

Bob Crow though was a surprising disappointment.

Considering that he is an elected leader of a union, you would expect him to be reasonably articulate and able to hold a good debate. Actually, he spent much of the evening either one a one-track diatribe about capitalism and Europe, or talking in a garbled manner that was so difficult to understand that you could almost see the question marks popping into existence over peoples heads as they listened to him.

There was a bit of sniping about Ian Hislop’s background and education and it was difficult to be sure if it was jocular banter, or genuine nastiness. That Ian Hislop slightly snapped back at one time suggested, sadly, the latter.

His one track mind on the issue of Europe and some bizarre conspiracy theories he came out with reminded me very much of a former Tory MP, Teddy Taylor – who also appeared on HIGNFY some years ago and spent most of the evening on a one-track diatribe about Europe. As then, so last night – in that the audience was laughing at Bob Crow, not with him.

To be fair, he got some genuine laughs, but they were rare and often prompted by comments by the other panelists.

The show is typically about two hours of recording then compressed down to the 25 minutes used on TV. Normally, a lot of outstanding material is discarded in the editing, although I have been to a few recordings, where one guest was noticeably poor and the editing has been very sympathetic to make them look a lot better than they really were.

That we had a fairly boring Bob Crow sitting next to an almost invisible Paul Merton lead to a very one-sided episode, and it will be very interesting to see how the editors are able to create an interesting, and even handed TV show. I suspect either an average show, or a “classic” where they leave in the worst ramblings of Bob Crow and make him look a complete fool.

Look forward to it tonight on BBC1, or the slightly longer version on BBC2 tomorrow.

Update: Jimmy Carr was taking photos during the early part – one of the guests here. I also spelt Bob Crow with an E throughout the entire blog posting. No idea why! (he says, quickly blaming late night typing).

Update: The procedure has changed since the below was written. Click on the link for the latest details of how to request tickets to see Have I Got News for You being recorded

Regular readers will be aware of my near obsessive love of the Have I Got News for You TV show – and the regular rush to get tickets to watch it being recorded live.

As the tickets are made available on their website just twice a year, there is a mad rush to book tickets before they “sell out”, often within just a few minutes. Last time, the flood of traffic to all intents, crashed their website, and they advised that a new procedure for booking tickets would be launched for the next series.

While not sure yet quite how it will work, I noticed this morning that part of the new website is live, and if you want to book tickets in future, you will need to register an account with them.

In case the site wobbles and falls over again when the next batch of HIGNFY tickets is made available, might be wise to register early – maybe today even.

The tickets for the winter series are usually released around the 20th September, based on the past few years – and naturally, I will flag it on the blog and/or events guide.

One annoying aside though – their address system is demanding that I enter a county. I live in London – there is no county to enter! You’d think a London based company would know that. </rant> And breathes.

Update: The next batch of tickets will be put on to their website on the 21st Sept 2009. Woo!