And that was just as well, as only a couple of weeks later The Big Caper was performing again – this time making its UK debut at the Wallingford Bunkfest. During the day on Saturday (2nd Sept) we were performing as BB, and enjoyed ourselves as always at what is turning into an excellent part of the Festival calendar. Then in the early evening, we put on a one hour Big Caper show on the main Kinecroft stage. For this we used our Belgian experiences to piece together the best bits of our shows over there, but with more patter and stunts to link some of the items than had been possible with a non English speaking audience. Once again all those watching seemed to enjoy the variety of material on offer, which included a guest appearance as an animal character from Stephen Rowley, and another audience participative Shepherd Hey. And once again the big finale worked out OK – and somehow we just kept within our one hour time slot. It was also rewarding to perform to a morris-friendly English audience who seemed to enjoy seeing something a little different. We are looking forward to being able to build further on this in 2007!
Meanwhile some other things in life don’t really change very much, like our enjoyable annual night out with Basingclog and Hook Eagle at The Plough, Little London, on Tuesday 5th September. After this, there was something of a break for BB in performing until our now traditional Bunfight / Wokingham Winter Carnival weekend on 25th/26th November. This year’s Bunfight theme was ‘Carry On Up The Bunfight’ which brought the customary array of weird and wonderful outfits – even more so this year as there is almost certainly some ‘Carry On’ film which has a connection with any fancy dress outfit anyone could think of. Amongst this year’s offerings were a mix of Caesar-themed Romans (emperors and centurions), several Campers, a Cleo, some Cowboys and Cowgirls, someone up the Khyber, Constables, Spies, and many more. Music as always was supplied by the ubiquitous Phungus, this year with Saul on drums, and with Hugh Crabtree calling (once he had escaped from the bar at Twickenham where he had taken refuge after the afternoon’s rugby international). In between the well called and well played dances, BB performed their ‘Knees Up’ dance as a first spot, and then after the traditional and suitably bizarre ‘Irish Bingo’ and more dances came on for their second spot.
By use of just a few clothing props and a lot of imagination the audience were transported to the little town of Herrebski (you have to think about that), just a few steppes from Russia, and entertained by a Russian style dance to the ‘Hopak’ tune, featuring various cartwheels and acrobatics of sorts, lots of ‘Hoi-s’ and this year fully incorporating the dancing skills of Sue and Bob as Russian girls. Again this seemed to go down well, and the audience as is now traditional demanded an encore, helped as ever by Hugh telling them to. And in the encore we almost got the dance right much to our surprise.
Next day was the Wokingham Winter Carnival. After a thoroughly unpromising start to the day with much rain, when BB came out to strut their stuff the rain almost disappeared and we finished up having a very good day. Well, you know what they say, I-N-R-O-B-B (only on T-B-C).