It's Wednesday night at The Vine Cafe on Bolton Road in Irlam's O'Th' Height and there's not a spare seat in the house for what must be Salford's first ever step towards a regular 'clean comedy' night.
As the venue is connected to the local church, there's no alcohol, and there's to be no swearing and definitely no 'knob' jokes. What is there left to comically deconstruct? Plenty, as it happens.
Compere, Chris Tavner, warms up the audience with jokes about posh Monton, while discovering there's people in the house from as far away as New Zealand, Canada and Middlesborough! Loads of material there.
The acts are about as diverse as they come, with Mo Horoon opening; his sardonic delivery underlining some quite brilliant recognition comedy about Asian's role in Brit society, focussing on Uber drivers and such like. Next up is 'zany' Daniel Nicholas, bringing people out from the audience to do 'chicken yoga' amongst other strange feats.
Salford City FC announcer and local lad, Andrew Gordon, then takes to the stage with his first ever stand up set, an accomplished routine centred on getting married and the mad gun-slinging talk with his future father-in-law.
And then, for the church-goers in the audience, comes the Reverend Allan Finnegan, a Baptist Minister, and very, very funny scouser divulging what goes on behind cremation services and other such affairs. Finally, the headline 'professional' comedian, Tony Cowards, brings the house down with quick-fire polished one-liners, puns and quips.
Five comedians, five quid in, and a burstingly full night of clean entertainment that didn't need swearing or knob jokes to make everyone laugh out loud.
"It was clean comedy but as you saw, there was nothing 'squeaky clean' about it; it's just comedy that's suitable for everyone but very funny" explains compere, Chris Tavner, who has his own successful stand up and improv career, as well as booking acts for comedy nights around Greater Manchester via his Fun Time Comedy promotions company*.
"New acts have had the opportunity of performing, as well as Tony Cowards who headlined, and you could see the quality in a nice atmosphere" he adds "What's good about this is that it has a proper community feel, especially with a lot of people from the church. It's been great, especially as it's round the corner from where I live and I can talk about Monton – you can't do that anywhere else; they probably don't even know it exists in Manchester."
For The Vine Cafe itself, it's about trying something new for the community... "We've had acoustic and mixed arts nights before but we want to build it all up, so we tried a bit of comedy and all the comedians were great; there wasn't a seat to be had" says the Vine's Ian Peacock "If we can do it again would be fantastic."
Meanwhile, organiser, Sally Griffiths, definitely thinks it's a goer...
"There's not been much happening around Salford, it's all biased towards Manchester and I don't think Salford gets a good deal" she explains "There's been the odd charity nights here and there but nothing as a regular venue or club.
"So I spoke to Chris, and with it being a church venue it was about what kind of comics could be promoted, it had to be the right kind of act" she adds "It's been great and now we're talking about doing it maybe quarterly."
Watch out for The Vine Comedy Nights. Clean but not squeaky clean. And, stuff the Media City and hipster bars, a top, cheap evening of stand up in Irlams O'Th'Height, with a very Salford, community flavour.
* For more details of Chris Tavner – click here.
Photos by Gareth Lyons
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