In a world where live performance has all but disappeared for the moment, Robin Ince and those clever people at The Cosmic Shambles Network have come up with Stay At Home Festival, an ingenious plan to banish our housebound boredom and keep us all entertained. They’ve been in touch with some of our best-loved performers and household name scientists and they are very pleased to announce that from Monday, 23rd March (previews from 19th March) you will be able to go online to watch your favourite entertainers live via the internet enabled device of your choice.
Each show will be free to watch but with a pay what you can option with any profits going to help performers and venues that are in the most need in these difficult times.
The list of events and guests will be updated regularly at cosmicshambles.com/stayathome
Robin Ince says –  It is stating the obvious to say that strange days have got a hell of a lot stranger with many people facing confusion and anxiety. Artists have nowhere to play and audiences have nowhere to go to be distracted. Trent Burton, Cosmic Shambles Network producer is a bit of a technical whizz, so he has managed to work out a way that we can do shows from our home and people can watch them in theirs as they wipe their brows in their toilet paper castles.
Every day, sometimes twice per day, Josie Long and Robin Ince will host shows mixing the best of what would have been at the Melbourne Comedy festival as well as the best comedians, writers, scientists and artists around. We’ll be mixing music, poetry, science, comedy and conversation with Astronaut, Chris Hadfiled, Stephen Merchant, Ian Rankin, Bec Hill, Mark Gatiss, Katy Brand, Brian Cox (the professor one), Angela Barnes, Kiri Pritchard-McLean, Alex Horne, Andy Zaltzman, Lucy Porter, Russell Kane, Ed Byrne, Jo Brand, Stewart Lee, Tanita Tikaram, Sara Pascoe and Natalie Haynes plus cooking demos from George Egg and lots more to be announced. It will be free to access but you can pay something towards it if you want to and any profits made will go to acts and artists who have been hit hardest by having their livelihood taken away.
It’s harder to “only connect” when we are all in quarantine, but hopefully this will go some way to bringing some happiness and helping out artists too.
