By all accounts Chris McCausland had to be persuaded to take part in the most recent series of Strictly Come Dancing, which he won with his professional partner Diane Buswell. It would be a commendable achievement for any non-dancer, but for a blind man it was remarkable, and made a huge emotional impact with viewers who warmed not just to his efforts but also his cheerful demeanour. Now, McCausland is back to the day job as a comic.
He starts by referencing the BBC programme, telling us it interrupted the tour of Yonks!, his latest show: “I developed a rather unnatural interest in ballroom dancing.” He has been in comedy 21 years, he tells us, but now he's known to most people for his dancing.
Yonks! is more of the everyman that BBC audiences loved on Strictly; modest, delighted to be there and remaining true to his cheerfully cynical self. In the last respect, one suspects that McCausland's mates down the pub, who all have names with a noun or adjective preceding them – Fat Pete, for example – might put the Liverpudlian right in the unlikely event that he should get too big for his boots.
McCausland talks about the story of his life; the “useless” computing degree he got after an undistinguished record at school – where he was a terror for one of his teachers in particular – the nostalgia he feels for his 1980s childhood and why he thinks if Shakespeare could create hundreds of new words, then so can he. And so he does, very well.
He talks about some high points of his career – there's a great anecdote about appearing on the Royal Variety Show and TV executives sucking the life out of one of his jokes – and why naming a children's programme Me Too! might turn out some years later be a bad move. (McCausland appeared on the CBeebies show which ran from 2006 to 2008.) It's in this section that McCausland shows off some impressive impersonations, including Arnold Schwarzenegger and Brian Conley.
There's a lengthy section about the humiliation of having your nether regions examined by a doctor, made more intimate for some reason by the practitioner not knowing that McCausland is blind.
This is a well-crafted show from a comic with great storytelling skills, and it has a few nifty callbacks. One of them, a story about those pub mates, ends the show on a high.
