“It’s true,” declares Tom Sandham. “We are living the dream. We drink and dance around campfires in our underpants with girls on a daily basis.” Today, however, is a day off for Sandham and business partner Ben McFarland. Ensconced in the elegant Booking Office Bar at St Pancras, London, they are fully clothed and there is no dancing, no campfire and no girls. When we order, they request water.

It’s all very restrained for two friends who have forged a career as respected booze writers and stand-up comedians. They spend a significant slice of their professional lives sampling drinks and making people laugh. It sounds great, yet their ambitions don’t end there. “I always wanted to be a professional footballer and still will be,” deadpans McFarland. “QPR.”

If it all sounds too good to be true, you may be relieved to hear that life for McFarland and Sandham isn’t all beer and skittles. Indeed, their baptism into the world of professional comedy has so far proved a rollercoaster ride of media outrage, stagefright, audience walkouts and suspected trenchfoot. Furthermore, being professionals, they couldn’t even let off steam and get properly pissed. Or so they say.

So who are these comedians? They both had a background in local newspapers and trade magazines before getting into book publishing. “We first worked together on the CAMRA Good Beer Guide USA in 2007,” says McFarland. “We spent ten weeks driving around America, visiting more than 500 places. We knackered two hire cars driving into things. It was fun at times but not nearly as much fun as we’d hoped it would be. On the plus side, if you spend ten weeks in a very small and rather camp hire car with someone and get on, you know you have the foundations of a good working relationship.”

“It’s getting to the stage where the drinks industry is saying ‘Hang on, we’re doing all we can to comply with our health messages but there is a limit'”

And so they continued to collaborate and now work together under the name of Dwink. Their website is a smart and amusing campaign to ‘broaden drinking horizons’, and they both write for a wide variety of newspapers and industry publications, pooling their income equally, Lennon/McCartney style. Sandham specialises in spirits, McFarland in beer. “We don’t really do wine,” he says. “Personally, I think it’s a fad. It’s never going to last.” For further reading, McFarland’s World’s Best Beers is highly recommended; and Sandham’s World’s Best Cocktails is published in October.

It was, however, their experience as comedy entertainers at last summer’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe — and subsequent performances around the UK with their show The Thinking Drinker’s Guide to Alcohol — that brought them to the attention of a much wider audience.

The idea sprang from doing tastings and talks at food festivals. Concerned that the talks could seem stilted and serious, they lobbed in a few jokes and received a favourable response. Then, during a trip to Edinburgh, they saw some comedy shows at the Fringe. “Some of them were great, and some of them were terrible,” says McFarland. “It occurred to us that we could do something in-between.”

The idea was to focus on the history of a few specific drinks, weave in some comedy (ranging from bone dry to brazenly slapstick) and provide samples of drinks to the audience as the show progressed. What could go wrong?

“We did a show at the Acton Comedy Club to try out our material,” says Sandham. “We died. Quite a lot of people walked out. It was awful. And that was a week before Edinburgh, where we were booked to perform every day for the entire three weeks of the Fringe.”

“We were going to be performing next door to Stephen Berkoff,” adds McFarland. “People would be paying for tickets and expecting to see something good. We seriously had to up our game.”

It was therefore with some trepidation that the pair set off for Edinburgh. And no sooner had they crossed the border than they found themselves in the eye of a media storm. Newspapers seized on the fact that McFarland and Sandham would be offering each member of the audience six samples of spirits over the course of the one-hour show. How, asked the newspapers, did this sit with the Scottish Government’s campaign against alcohol abuse? Headlines suggested that McFarland and Sandham were irresponsibly fuelling Scotland’s
alcohol crisis.

Naturally, these headlines ignored the true content of the three shows —the slogan of McFarland and Sandham’s show was ‘Drink less, drink better’. However, with dreary predictability, anti-alcohol campaigners were goaded into complaints. McFarland and Sandham had barely arrived at their digs in Edinburgh when a reporter from BBC Radio Four arrived to grill them about their booze-fuelled comedy shame.

Rehearsals must have seemed like a relief and by now they had a director to guide them. However, when they ran through the performance on the eve of their festival debut, everything fell apart again. “It was an utter shambles,” says McFarland. “He gave us a firm talking to and said, ‘Guys you really cannot screw up like that tomorrow’. We went to bed that night feeling very nervous.”

The next day arrived and, by happy coincidence, the entire publishing team of Hot Rum Cow was in the audience for their Fringe premiere. The team has no connection with McFarland and Sandham, we just wanted to watch a booze-themed comedy show.

How, asked the newspapers, did this sit with the Scottish Government’s campaign against alcohol abuse? Headlines suggested that McFarland and Sandham were irresponsibly fuelling Scotland’s alcohol crisis

So how did it go? Well, we cannot lie. The Thinking Drinker’s Guide to Alcohol sank like a lead balloon brimming with bargain-basement brandy. They bombed. Joke after joke was met with hostile silence by the audience. Tumbleweed drifted gently across the stage. A church bell pealed across the distant fields. A parliament of rooks stirred in a far-off country copse.

Or at least, that’s the nightmare that McFarland and Sandham may have entertained in their troubled sleep. The reality was very different. The Thinking Drinker’s Guide to Alcohol was a huge success. McFarland and Sandham, seemingly full of confidence, proved natural comedians as they trawled through the story of gin, rum, tequila, absinthe and vodka. It was highly interesting. And yes, there were free drinks. What a marvellous idea. After an aperitif of Deuchars IPA, everyone had the opportunity to sample two vodkas, a rum, tequila, gin and absinthe.

All the drinks were donated by brands that McFarland and Sandham were happy to promote because of their quality — they included The Kraken Black Spiced Rum, Tanqueray No. 10 gin and Zubrowka Bison Grass Vodka. Not bad for a show that started at 12 noon. The audience clearly enjoyed being guided through the drinks and many waited afterwards to ask questions about them.

With that first performance under their belts, the pair soon got into their stride. “Once we knew what we were doing, it was great fun and we got to mix with all the proper comedians,” says McFarland. “It was like Stella Street. People were theatrical and fun and we weren’t involved in the politics. It didn’t half rain though. We were cycling to and from the venue and ended up with trenchfoot.”

Throughout McFarland and Sandham’s show, they take healthy swipes against the politically correct battering of Britain’s drinks industry and the knee-jerk media coverage typified by their own treatment by the press. Their website also takes a well-aimed kick at misguided government intervention such as the Small Beer Duty Law.

“Drinking in moderation isn’t bad for your health whereas you can’t really say that smoking in moderation is,” says McFarland. “The dark forces of neo-prohibition are gathering around an industry and heritage that we should be hugely proud of. It’s getting to the stage where the drinks industry is saying, ‘Hang on, we’re doing all we can to comply with your health messages but there is a limit’.”

And with that table-thumping finale, it’s time for photographs. But they can’t pose with water. What shall it be? When the photographer gamely suggests a Cosmopolitan, their expressions are priceless. “A Cosmopolitan? Are you having a laugh?”

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The Thinking Drinker’s Guide to Alcohol plays at The Assembly Rooms, 2–26 August as part of The Edinburgh Fringe Festival. You can follow Ben and Tom on Twitter @thinkingdrinks.

 

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