Ok, so just over a year in country and I've secured my first weekend gig as the headline act for a major club chain - Jongleurs. R David MC, Trevor Crook opening with Kai Humphries in the middle section. Birmingham Jongleurs runs out of Oceana club on Hurst street and has played host to a variety of live entertainment since the early seventies. Mostly music gigs but now is running spoken word shows. This presents some problems as anyone who has ever tried to produce a comedy gig in a music venue will be aware. High ceilings and the crowd jammed into a dance floor area, surrounded by speakers set up for heavy bass music coupled with a stage that is already over a metre tall all lends itself to creating a less than intimate feel in the room. Tough, when trying to build a connection with an audience.
To overcome this, the best response I have found is to keep everything high energy, lots of movement and mime (following the old acting adage that the word mimics the action and the action mimics the word!) and to be ever conscious of microphone technique and vocal inflexion. Subtle use of NLP techniques to provide visual signals or cue punchlines to a crowd easily distracted by noise bleed from other rooms running other events can help maintain the audiences focus and attention on what you're doing, even if they can't hear exactly what it is that you have said.
Being from another country and having an accent that the audiences are not typically familiar with brings with it it's own particular pro's and con's. It took me almost 4 months to realise when I mentioned 'pants' in a gag the audience thought I
  was talking about underwear, while I thought I was talking about trousers!

Friday nights show had maybe 160 people in, the show went pretty well with everyone doing a good job of keeping the crowd rolling, Saturday nights show had 260 in and with more people, comes more atmosphere and it was considerably easier to bring the house down. The Saturday show was interrupted by a fire alarm just as I was launching into my Steve Irwin impersonation (as the only true Aussie Legend ever) and despite having to cut that particular bit short, soon had the audience rolling again and the haka at the end of the gig following on from my girlfriend turns into Gollum routine, was enough to get them cheering wildly. All told, very happy with the performances and the responses, handed out a few business cards and asked them to keep an eye out for me in Edinburgh next year. Also, with it now being September, thoughts have crossed my mind to start dusting off my Christmas material!!