Si Hawkins, BCG's stand-up columnist, has this month been writing about his first attempt at performing. In Part 1 he discussed how preparing for your first comedy gig can really mess with your ego, and in this second part he tells us about the actual gig...

So, to recap, my first ever stand-up set at the mammoth Dave-sponsored Leicester Comedy Fest is rapidly approaching but I've decided against any further sessions with my appointed tutor; I've flipped up my targeting computer and will be firing freestyle down the metaphorical thermal exhaust port. And that isn't just a random Star Wars reference, as in my head it has now pretty much become the Death Star Comedy Festival.

That said, Dave's people have now booked me in to meet a separate 'comedy mentor', slightly confusingly, a current stand-up who'll help me rehearse my material, which could be a bit embarrassing given the half-arsed notes I've got so far. This turns out to be the rapper-turned-comic Doc Brown, which is quite handy given my overall theme, and I'm particularly interested in getting his views on whether I'm aiming at the right targets.

The stuff about big American rappers is fine - the butt of the joke is mostly me, and my less-than-gangsta roots in leafy Hertfordshire - but there's also a bit about the time I briefly joined the So Solid Crew.

Again it's a fish-out-of-water theme - no shit - but I'm concerned that my gags about this whole South London housing estate becoming a UK garage posse and their subsequent rich and varied array of criminal records might shift the emphasis from me taking the piss out of my countryside roots to me taking the piss out of people living on council estates, which would be a bit hypocritical anyway given that I ended up living on one for years.

As it happens, Doc calls off the meeting two minutes beforehand, I call off the next one and end up dropping the So Solid bit altogether. Hey ho. Instead, four days before my gig I arrange to meet up with the versatile comic Tiernan Douieb (pictured), who ends up becoming a sort of Yoda to Marc Blake's Obi-Wan, with Covent Garden's Phoenix pub doubling as the Dagobah System. He sends me a handy five-point plan to ponder beforehand:

1. Observe
2. Plan
3. Practice
4. Breathe and pace
5. What's the worst that can happen?

Our meet-up coincides with Old Rope, Tiffany Stevenson's celeb-packed new-material night, and it's a useful evening all round. Tiernan drums in a few key points in exchange for a couple of beers (the memorable bits of which are basically 'start well, finish well, practise well'). Then I watch several sizeable comics nervously do a new five minutes and prove that, hey, failed jokes and messed-up bits can be funny too. Which is good to know.

By now I've gotten down some stuff I'm at least fairly pleased with, including a slightly knowing section that involves a great/painful (delete as appropriate) pun that then allows me to step out of the rigid routine, mention the actual gag-writing process, shoehorn in an otherwise unrelated anecdote then actually flag up the fact that I've just managed to shoehorn in an otherwise unrelated anecdote. Tiernan seems quite impressed, which is good enough for me.

It strikes me that stand-up is a lot like snooker. It's not just about potting that first ball, which is as far ahead as us amateur players usually manage: it's about using that initial shot to set yourself up for the more satisfying balls to come. But setting up those satisfying balls takes some planning.

Satisfying Balls

Having begun to properly plan a set - step two on the Douieb index - I start to worry about steps three and four, but a bit bloody late. It's Friday morning, a few hours before the show, and I still haven't worked out exactly which bits I'll be doing on the night, how to phrase things, where to hit the punchlines. Still a bit blasé about it all, I allow myself a quiet five minutes to perform my routine as-live, albeit in an empty room... and it's a disaster. I get stuck on a link between sections, stare blankly at the wall and give up, a minute in.

Ouch. Time is pressing on though, so an hour later I give it another go and this time manage to plough through it, agonising as it is hearing myself tell jokes to the sound of nothingness. I'm pleased with some of it, add some extra lines as I go along but - the next problem - am clearly way over my five minutes. I've always prattled and mumbled when nervous too, so my major worry is that I'll end up rushing everything during the show, swallowing punchlines as I desperately try to squeeze it all in.

More bleak, Bergman-esque staring-out-of-windows follows, but with stagetime now hours away I pull myself together, go back to my notes and viciously cull great chunks of material, including most of the stuff I spent ages to-ing and fro-ing with Marc: even the one gag of mine he really liked, which involved a bad British pop star and one of those channels that you must remember not to leave the Sky box still set to when someone else turns the TV on in the morning. Perhaps I'll resurrect it one day.

I'd initially planned to get a bit of a look together - a bit tweedy, to further emphasise how unlikely it was me interviewing rappers - but end up just grabbing whatever doesn't need ironing (any clothes that ever need a rub-over are pretty much dead to me). And off I rush to Leicester, trying to sort out sentence structure during the train trip. I wonder if comics spend all of their spare time doing this - constantly rephrasing routines in their head. No wonder they drink.

A quick read-through at the hotel and I'm at the venue, the basement of a curry house, where it turns out I'm on last. The bad news is that I'm on after a double-act by two former soap actors turned presenters, who'll presumably be fairly polished. The good thing is that they've arranged to do eight minutes, which means that (given that no other acts will be nervously waiting for me to finish) I can take my time too. That calms the nerves considerably, but as the show gets going I become increasingly 'agitato', as the great Kinky Friedman always put it.

First the compère, Ian Stone, unhelpfully announces that our audience includes Kate Copstick, the influential Scotsman reviewer, among other comedy industry luminaries. Then it turns out that the other acts are generally impressively well-honed, having presumably made the most of their mentoring sessions, which make me regret my slightly freeform jazz approach. I try manfully to remember how my set goes as they successfully negotiate theirs, but it's a bit like trying to remember a song while there's another one on the radio: cognitive dysentery.

Finally, Stone introduces me, by which time I'm itching to get on with it due to my last-minute decision to abandon my planned moderation and wolf down most of a pint. Suitably emboldened (and with Tiernan's start-strong tips in mind) I begin by going a bit off-piste, throwing out a couple of off-the-cuff lines about Copstick's ominous presence and how odd it is being in a curry house this early in the day - and it goes fine. Well, I'm not booed off.

Actually I get such a rush from the first few laughs that I start to think I can actually do this, and get a bit cocky, throwing bits back in that I'd earlier cut out, using at least one follow-up punchline idea that Marc had suggested and even adding a completely random anecdote at one point.

Of course, that then throws me off course and I flail around for a while, painfully repeating bits as I struggle to get back on-script. I spot a few negative faces at this point which further buggers the confidence and the second half gets a lot less laughs. Or at least it feels like it. I don't know if it's the material, my telling of it or the audience's sudden lack of confidence in me... probably all of the above.

Still, I get a few late laughs and a hearty round of applause, although this is clearly due to relief that I've finally finished as much as anything else. I had a good five minutes of material: it turns out afterwards that I was up there for eleven.

Still, quite an experience, and - as proper comics often mention - it's fascinating finding out which bits work and which don't; almost impossible to predict, in fact. I take it as a decent sign that everyone who says nice things afterwards seems to prefer a different bit, and one of the Leicester Fest reps who clearly didn't think much of it was even more baffled by Rich Fulcher's extraordinary set later on in the same venue, so I'm not mortally wounded.

I bump into Rich later on and he's very encouraging that I carry on, which is nice of him (mind you, I don't think he actually saw it). Ian Stone also makes some favourable comments about certain gags, although I corner him later on, when the buzz has worn off. What did he really think? He ponders how to put it, then goes for gentle: "You rambled a bit."

He's not wrong. Well, I am from the countryside.

Dave's Leicester Comedy Festival takes place every February. To find out more about the festival visit www.comedy-festival.co.uk