You knew it was coming – but Thursday May 31st saw The Velvet Onion put on our very first live night, at the incredible new Shepherd’s Bush venue, The Vandella.

With a smattering of stars in the audience, and a VIP lounge so filled with comedy legends several people’s heads may have exploded, it was always going to be a special night – and the challenge for us was cramming so many fabulous names onto one bill.

Now, we’re a little biased, but we have to admit, it went rather well indeed – and judging by the post-show reaction everyone such a great time by the time Team TVO left the building we’d discussed coming back to do another, several times over!

The night was such an intimate affair that we knew deep down the vast majority of our Peelers would never be able to be there – but rest assured, we recorded the entire show in glorious high definition, multi camera action, and we’ll be cutting it together over the summer for a potential Autumn release – all online, all free, and for a limited period only – so stay peeled to be kept in the loop on that one.

In the meantime, we’ll be bringing you teaser footage as soon as we can, and we have a huge array of photographs of the evening for you to savour too.  The first batch are all included below, so enjoy them safe in the knowledge that, all being well, their teasing nature will be fulfilled later this year.

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We’d like to extend our huge thanks to everyone involved with putting on the night – especially to the sheer wonderment of Bob Pipe for his technical expertise and the living legend that is James Wren for all of his support throughout this whole process.  We’d also like to thank Sian Salsbury and everyone at The Vandella who have been the most accommodating team we could have ever hoped to have worked with – and our very hard working camera crew: Michael Bull, Jon Burgess, Michael Glynn!  Not to mention everyone who helped out on the day as friends of us all.

And of course, we really must thank our glorious guests, who all worked hard, played hard, and made us love them even more than we did before.  In order of appearance, our deepest, and more sincere thanks to: Mike Fielding, Dave Brown, Antony Elvin, Will Summers, Gareth Tunley, Alex Kirk, Dolly Wells, Laura Patch, Richard Glover, Stephen Evans, Holly Jane Shears, Suzy Evelyn-Hall, Alice Lowe, Steve Oram, Tom Meeten, David McNeill, Dan Tetsell, Waen Shepherd, Rachel Stubbings, Richard Sandling and James Cook.

We’d also like to extend our thanks to those who couldn’t make it in the end, but we know wanted to be there – in particular Joey Page for trying to the very last moment to get there, and both James Bachman and Lucy Montgomery whose enormous workloads stood in their way.  Extra special thanks must also go to the legendary Rich Fulcher, who was drawn away for a charity event but still found the time to record incredible last minute voice overs to introduce each artist.

Finally, we’d like to thank everyone who came along to support us and the artists on the bill.  You are the reason we’re able to keep doing what we’re doing to help the people you admire, and we’ll go on for as long as you’ll all have us.  Until the next time… keep peeling!