fri 29/03/2024

Micky Flanagan, touring | reviews, news & interviews

Micky Flanagan, touring

Micky Flanagan, touring

Deliciously sweary comic riffs on everything from Kit Kats to Kierkegaard

Micky Flanagan was a jobbing club comic for a few years before he shot to stardom with his first full-length Edinburgh Fringe show in 2007, for which he was nominated for a newcomer award at the grand age of 42. The show, What Chance Change?, charted his move from working-class herbert (or ’erbert in Flanagan’s deliciously cockney pronunciation) into middle-class ponce, now living in leafy suburbia and au fait with all things delicatessen, including sundried tomatoes and £5 loaves of bread.

Flanagan left school at 15, drifted from one dead-end job to another (including a spell as a Billingsgate porter), went to university as a mature student, briefly tried teaching and, at his wife’s behest, ended up in comedy. We should thank her, as Flanagan is a natural comic, gifted with a lovely turn of phrase, and is an instantly likeable stage presence.

The 2007 show also described Flanagan’s years as a player, when his life was one long party of women, booze and Class-A drugs. His relationships material is wonderfully filthy but never offensive - this is a man who clearly respects women but feels no need to be po-faced enough to preface his jokes with a statement of intent. And what’s not to like about a comic who blames the rise in teenage pregnancies on the demise of “fingering” as a form of sexual release?

This show, Out Out, is a sort of 10-year career overview and includes some of his greatest bits among new material. Normally I’d baulk at such repetition because it suggests a degree of laziness in the comic, but such is the quality of Flanagan’s writing and performing that some of his routines never get old. His audience expects them too - I heard a few people on the way out saying, “He didn’t do the ketchup sketch,” or, “That one about the telly normally goes on longer.”

The title, by the way, refers to the difference between going out, popping out and going out out. Maybe you have to be working class to understand the difference, but Flanagan manages to celebrate his background without straying into “It was so much better in my day” territory. Admittedly some of it was - the joys of delayed sexual gratification that fingering and “titting her up” offered, for example - but Flanagan also relishes the comforts of his current middle-class existence; “We dip bread in oil... Not Mazola or Crisp ’n Dry, proper oil.” He did the “fucking Royal Variety Performance!” - he swears copiously and inventively - last year, so knows he has arrived, and his degree means he can argue with his wife by quoting Kierkegaard to support his argument.

Elsewhere he riffs on fussy eaters, being ripped off on Virgin trains - “80p for a Kit Kat... Is Branson going through a tough year then?” - bad wigs, the perils of drink and the comedic possibilities of diarrhoea. Flanagan is an observational comic with an acute eye for the oddities of human behaviour and one who can create surreal invention from everyday actions as well as slipping in subtle social comment.

Flanagan sometimes has some interaction with the audience but wisely didn’t engage much with his fans at the Brighton Dome, where some had spent too long in the sun and were overly refreshed. But no matter - the 90 minutes sped by and the full house, including me, would have happily stayed a lot longer.

Watch a clip of Micky Flanagan


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