Celebrating the small and near

One year ago, Joanna Yates, 29, a business consultant from London, hit upon the idea of a storytelling club. Ordinary people would take to the stage and relate a significant event from their life; members of the public would pay to listen. That's it.

So simple, yet on last night's evidence, her Spark Club ( is at the avant-garde of a new post-celebrity culture. And Miss Yates can use that on her press releases if she wants, though Spark Club doesn't really need any such hot air.

Held at the Canal Café Theatre in Little Venice on the first Monday of each month, it has attracted a cult following largely through word of mouth, appealing to people's very basic desire to connect. The feel is somewhere between a stand-up night without the jokes and an AA meeting without the alcoholics - though both are theoretically welcome.

Last night the theme was Virtual Reality. One Catherine Semark appeared and told us about an apparently benign spirit who, she assured us, haunted her old shared flat in Edinburgh. It used to turn the TV on full blast when no one was watching, then one day snuck into her room and pounded her very bed as she slept.

Then Judith Kosko-Billingham, a middle-aged English teacher from Louisiana, described her friendship with a former inmate of Angola State Penitentiary. And then Richard Graham of South Yorkshire told a story on the theme of Union.

Eleven years ago, he had worked his way up in his trade union, becoming lesbian gay and bisexual rep in order that he could go and get pissed at the annual conference in Llandudno. Here, amid Che Guevara flags and the sense that post-Thatcher, the union had lost all impetus, he met the love of his life in a red-checked shirt. They were joined in civil union last year.

This is my favourite story of the night - the least embellished or "the purest", as Miss Yates has it; heart-warming in its genuineness, yet artful as only life can be in the way the union motif was sewn into it.

Spark is part of a marked shift towards the small and near, away from the starstruck bitterness of much Noughties culture. It's of a mind with the delightful Karen magazine (, which conducts totally un-scandalous interviews with ordinary people. "Ours must be the only house in Britain where you can get a mince pie any time of the year!" runs a quote from one article.

Who wouldn't want to read such a story? Or hear about Spark storyteller Conor Malone's quandary faced with a ticket machine? What the hell did any celebrity ever do for you anyway?