Comedy
Veronica Lee
Lou Sanders has named her latest show (which debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe) Say Hello to Your New Step-Mummy. But, as she tells us in her opening comments, she's not a mother or stepmother, and hasn't yet met a father she likes, but “by the end of the year, God willing…”Much of the show is taken up with Sanders describing the whys and wherefores of her 12th-month “man ban” – something suggested by her healer Jill in the Pyrenees, who does her healing via Skype, and told her she needs to “reset her patterns”.This state of affairs was in some part prompted by trolling that Sanders received Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It has been 15 years since Ben Elton, known as Motormouth in his 1980s heyday – last toured. A decade-and-a-half ago, one of the instigators of alternative comedy tells us at the top of the show, he could have still passed muster as young or cool. Now, at the age of 60 and the father of grown-up children, he’s having something of an existential crisis.He admits he’s in danger of sounding past it as he lists the things about the modern world that confuse or depress him, but this is no grumpy old git rant (although he cleverly plays with that trope a few times in his two-and-a-half-hour show). Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It’s a long time since Lenny Henry performed live comedy, and a lot has happened in that interval. He has reinvented himself as a serious actor on stage and screen, become a spokesman for the black British experience, was knighted in 2015 and is now a national treasure. Oh, he has also written the first volume of his autobiography, which has just been published.So it was good to welcome him back with An Evening With Lenny Henry: Who Am I, Again?, even if it is an unashamed exercise in shifting more copies of his book of the same title, which covers the years 1958-1980 – or “birth to Tiswas”, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's a wonderful thing when a talented comic goes from niche performer to international star almost overnight, and that's what happened to Australian stand-up Hannah Gadsby. In 2017, she announced that her award-winning Edinburgh Fringe show, Nanette, was to be her last as she felt ground down after a decade in a misogynistic and homophobic industry.The show, which recounted her experiences of sexism and homophobia, and of being raped several years ago, was a searing, emotional, heart-rending experience, as well as a call to arms against the patriarchy. And what a swansong. But then...Nanette Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Elf Lyons’ new show, Love Songs To Guinea Pigs, has moved away from her usual slapstick and absurdist mimicry into new realms of traditional stand up. She cites the reason as being unable to do mime on the radio, but there’s a more serious reason for the switch.After ChifChaff, her Edinburgh show last year, and a string of shows involving ballet, hula hooping and ice skating, the comic found herself in bed, paralysed from the waist down. What came next was corrective spinal surgery, adoption of two guinea pigs, a bout of depression, a break up, and a return to the stage.Her personal Read more ...
Owen Richards
There’s been no avoiding Rob Beckett in recent years. His high beam smile and infectious personality have made him a mainstay of comedy shows. Now he’s back on the road with what he calls the best job in the world, stand up. You can tell he means it, with a show that thrives on enthusiasm if not consistency.“Wallop” is a show of two halves, quite literally. There’s no tour support, instead favouring a cheap selection of inappropriate songs to introduce two 45-minute sets from Beckett. He uses this time to zip through a mass of topics, including cookware, soft play, family weddings and Kinky Read more ...
graham.rickson
Both first broadcast in 1967, Do Not Adjust Your Set and At Last the 1948 Show were collectively written and performed by the future Monty Python team. More written about and discussed than actually seen, many episodes were wiped or lost, and these two three-disc DVD sets from the BFI offer as much as is likely to survive of both series. A significant amount of the footage included has been sourced from foreign broadcasters and private collections, including that of David Frost, who was executive producer on At Last the 1948 Show, a late-night successor to The Frost Report.Do Not Adjust Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Eddie Izzard is dressed in a killer outfit of black leather jacket, tartan mini-kilt, thigh-length stiletto boots – and false boobs. “I got them at IKEA,” he deadpans. He’s in jovial form for Wunderbar, his farewell tour before he hopes to enter politics.Izzard starts with some light political chat as he explains his ambition; he has always been an outsider, so knows how being an underdog feels. He wants to address some big issues such as our current political leaders on both sides of the Atlantic trying on 1930s rhetoric for size, trans rights and equality, to name a few. But mostly Read more ...
Owen Richards
It’s been two years since Russell Howard last performed stand-up. That’s a long gap for such an established fixture of British comedy. As he points out, the world has changed, something reflected in his new show Respite. There are still the whimsical anecdotes that made him a star, but he now has bigger foils than his own family.Outrage culture doesn’t seem like an obvious subject for Howard’s ire – compared to some acts he’s never been particularly controversial – so there’s some tension when his opening gambit is how you can’t tell a joke these days. Has he joined the PC-gone-mad brigade? Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Ed Byrne's new show takes a philosophical bent as he muses on middle age and fatherhood. But don't worry, he's not getting soft at the age of 47 – he's as sarcastic, caustic and self-deprecating as ever in If I'm Honest...He starts by telling us how vital comedy is to him, but this isn't about how it works as therapy for some stand-ups; in truth it's because it gets him out of the house and to places where people actually listen to him. Not for the first time in the evening, Byrne neatly upends our expectations of where a joke is going.He thought fatherhood might give his life more Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Count Arthur Strong, the character created by Steve Delaney, started life in the late 1990s and became a cult figure at the Edinburgh Fringe over several years. Radio shows and three series of a television sitcom (written with Graham Linehan) followed and now he’s taking the character back on the road with Is There Anybody Out There?The Count is a meticulously constructed character, a cantankerous, pedantic, mostly out of work former variety artist whose world view - of his talent, his intellect - is gloriously wide of the mark, and whose hopelessly confused syntax and malapropisms are Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Rob Brydon, Lee Mack and David Mitchell are the host and team captains respectively of Would I Lie to You?, the long-running BBC One panel game. Now they are touring together in Town to Town, which is family-friendly fun (with occasional naughtiness from the delightfully sweary Mack).Brydon takes the stage first and nicely guys the audience with his trademark insincere flattery of them and the town, and does it while running through a few of his excellent impressions, including Hugh Grant and Mick Jagger. Then Mack and Mitchell join him for a quiz based on how much they know or can guess Read more ...