A comedy group will perform a completely improvised show at The Potters Arms in Winchmore Hill on Thursday.

The Noise Next Door, made up of Charlie Granville, Tom Livingstone, Matt Grant, Tom Houghton and Sam Pacelli have been performing together since meeting at The University of Canterbury.

“We met at university studying drama and theatre studies,” Sam tells me. “There was a spot at a festival going and one of the boys was like ‘hey let’s put on some Whose Line Is It Anyway? stuff’ just to fill in a slot somebody had pulled out of.

“We got together and did a couple of rehearsals for a one-off show, then thought let’s do this on campus and when that was successful we did it in town and now it’s a job, which is pretty nice.”

Their shows are completely improvised, which I imagine is quite a feat to pull off.

“In terms of material there isn’t any, the audience provide the suggestions which fuel what we do. We sort of write structures, we’re not just running blindly into a show. We have short form games so we all know a premise.

“It doesn’t go wrong very often. The beauty of it is when you’re doing stand-up – and I’ve been a stand-up – if you do something wrong like forget a line or muck up a joke the audience know that you’ve written it and it’s your stuff and you’re on the back foot. If you do it again that’s it, they’ve totally lost confidence in you.

“Whereas there’s five of us in the group, if one of you does something wrong the rest of you become the voice of the audience, you can say ‘that was rubbish mate’ and they go ‘yeah it was’ and then everyone’s in on it and you laugh about it.”

Sam assures me that in the 10 years they have been together he can count the number of times it has gone wrong on one hand, however there was one occasion where it went very wrong indeed.

“Once one of the boys was playing Genghis Khan’s wife or some really odd suggestion. He was doing this thing where he had decapitated himself and was doing a slow motion roll and landed on this table in the front row of the audience because there was cabaret seating so it had candles on.

“Charlie wears a lot of product in his hair and he landed on the candle and his head caught fire. He stood up and hadn’t realised, but he was a flaming torch head.”

I can tell from the slight chuckle in his voice that Sam still finds the memory amusing. He adds: “Things go wrong like that but it’s funny and you incorporate it into what you’re doing. In fact, the funniest part on our new DVD is a mistake someone makes in the middle of the show.”

If you want a little flavour of the group before their show in Winchmore Hill you can watch their miniseries on YouTube.

“SUPERCOPS is a slightly different thing we thought we’d do. We this idea for television, we originally wrote something because a TV channel wanted us to write short sitcoms to be interspersed throughout a sketch show. In the end it didn’t get made so we just thought ‘this is really funny’ and it was our first foray into proper writing, we thought ‘we’ll just make it ourselves’.

“The idea is that the whole world, for some reason and you don’t know why, has got superpowers. It’s ridiculous stuff like someone vomits milk, the premise is we follow two policemen who have to deal with crimes inflicted by people with ludicrous superpowers. It’s a kind of mumbling, mini-sitcom that’s follows these two really adorable police officers.”

The Potters Arms, Fagnall Lane, Winchmore Hill, Thursday, June 30, ticket price includes food during the interval. Details: 01494 726222