Why is nobody talking about Cheesy Tuesdays?

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When did everyone become laugh-tose intolerant?

Let me set the scene. It’s Tuesday night. You’ve battled through two early morning starts, you don’t have any lectures until Wednesday afternoon, and your stomach is lined to the max with pesto pasta. In short – there couldn’t be any more practical reasons to enjoy a night out. However. Should you dream of even suggesting heading out to Unit 1’s finest evening of entertainment you will undoubtedly be met with the same depressingly familiar groans, and a whining cacophony of “I’m so over Cheesy Tuesdays”.

It’s always the same spiel, circulated amongst disillusioned freshers and final year students alike.

To set the record straight: nobody is too cool for Cheesy Tuesdays. In fact, claiming to somehow be ‘over’ Cheesy’s represents what can only be described as the Exeter student’s equivalent of a mid-life crisis. When the bassline of the ‘Grease’ mega mix can be heard pulsing across town from Summerland Street, who really wants to sit at home in their slipper socks …?

In my (extensive) experience, I’ve found that three particular criticisms arise time and time again in the anti-Cheesy’s discourse. To the laugh-tose intolerant, Unit 1 on a Tuesday is predictable, overcrowded, and only enjoyable if you are so drunk that completing ‘The Cha-cha Slide’ without falling flat on your face becomes an achievement worthy of a shout-out from the DJ. These excuses are all, quite frankly, invalid.

If you didn’t have to be drunk to find joy in singing every single lyric of ‘Year 3000’ back when you were seven, you absolutely don’t have to be now that you’re twenty.

Firstly, we love Exeter’s nightlife because it is pretty predictable – you essentially know how any evening at a particular club on a particular night will pan out. I admit that Cheesy Tuesdays are perhaps the most predictable nights of the week – I often hear my friends bemoaning that ‘they just play the same songs every time’, and you can’t really argue with that. However, to moan about this is to miss the point. The utter joy of the typical Cheesy’s playlist is that you come to know all of the lyrics to most of the songs, and for those with limited dancing abilities (ahem), this is the perfect scenario. Rather than relying on your sense of rhythm, Cheesy’s is very possibly the only club night of the week where it is completely acceptable to depend entirely on your tone deaf singing.

Secondly, Cheesy Tuesdays can get rather busy, yes; but on the other hand, who hasn’t experienced the cringing awkwardness of a sparsely populated dance floor? Also, the fact that it’s predominantly students attracted to Cheesy’s, means that when you’re lapping Unit 1 to find your friends (inevitable), the chances of bumping into someone you can talk to before you finally find the others are pretty good.

And lastly, the idea that Cheesy’s cannot even slightly fun unless you’ve necked innumerable tequila shots is shameless slander. If you didn’t have to be drunk to find joy in singing every single lyric of ‘Year 3000’ back when you were seven, you absolutely don’t have to be now that you’re twenty.

My finalist friends often talk about a sort of Cheesy’s Renaissance in third and fourth year, and for me, that’s the enduring hope in this frankly dire situation. If there is one silver lining I can hope for in leaving university for the adult world, it’s that the sheer panic it can create immediately sends everybody flocking to Unit 1 to dance terribly to ‘Mr Brightside’.