In 2005 Jack Dee had filmed his DVD special (Jack Dee – Live Again) on July 8^th, the day after the London 7/7 bombings and 10 years later Jimmy had a similar jinx on his Funny Business record.

Please note that I’m just re-telling a story about a tricky comedy show and not trying to compare it to being caught up in a terror attack. Violence is never the answer and especially not when innocent people are murdered and maimed.

November 2015 and Jimmy was booked to play the Eventim Apollo (aka the Hammersmith Apollo) on both Friday the 13^th and Saturday 14^th and the venue’s Facebook account shows the timings (for both evenings) as being roughly:

• 6.30pm – doors open
• 8pm – show starts
• 9.10pm – interval
• 9.30pm – second half
• 10.30pm – approximate finish

Jimmy says in his book, Before and Laughter, that the 13^th was a run through (rehearsal) with the 14^th being the show that was scheduled to be filmed for Netflix.

He said the 1^st half (on the 13th) was great but then, during the interval, people looked at their phones…

This was the night of the awful terrorist attacks across Paris. For anyone that doesn’t know about that terrible night – there is a full timeline on History Sphere, here.

The audience were, understandably, more tense for the 2^nd half and Jimmy said “the heckles didn’t make sense, it was hard to get laughs to catch”.

On the evening of the 14^th (the night that they filmed) only 80% of the audience turned up and Jimmy says in his book:

…they drank too fast and way too much. They were bawdy interfering hecklers. I would say the difficulty rating that night was ten out of ten. I had to be on my game the whole time, It took me nearly three hours to perform two hours of material.

He finishes the chapter with the thought that, “if we stop laughing the terrorists win”.

I can’t believe the trailer, below, has only had 38k views. I feel like I’ve viewed it 100s of times!