Comedy
Veronica Lee
What a year that was. Live performance was stopped dead in its tracks for most of 2020, and comedy – as viscerally live as you can get in dark and sweaty enclosed spaces above pubs or in club basements – was particularly hard hit. Never again, I suspect, will comedy fans complain about the privations of broom-cupboard venues at the Edinburgh Fringe.I'm so glad I went to Glasgow in March to see what turned out to be one of the last major gigs of 2020, Steve Martin and Martin Short (pictured below), who were great fun. But while it wasn't a bumper year for comedy overall – how could it be Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Podcasts have got many of us through 2020, starved as we have been for most of it of live comedy to leave the house to see. Here's a selection of some of the best; they are available on all podcast platforms unless stated.Dear Joan & JerichaAfter the spoof agony aunts recently went public with their first in-person appearance (pictured above), they spoil us with a third series of the award-winning podcast. Julia Davis (who plays Joan) and Vicki Pepperdine (Jericha) riff on all matters to do with sex and relationships, so prepare to have your eyes popped with their outrageously graphic Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Edgy comedy runs the risk of discomfiting the audience so much that they can't relax and enjoy the show. But Natalie Palamides, appearing as Nate, her alter ego, in Nate: A One Man Show on Netflix, pulls it off, and then some.The show, which has a large degree of audience participation and which I first saw at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2018, is wonderfully provocative. Here, to British eyes at least, it has an added layer of – perhaps in some way sadistic – enjoyment (if that's the right word) in seeing it performed before a liberal US audience at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, who appear even Read more ...
Veronica Lee
When the world was in lockdown and performers turned to TikTok to keep in touch with their fans, Sarah Cooper started using the online platform for short videos where she lip-synced Donald Trump's speeches, and they quickly went global. Not many people can say they owe worldwide fame to Covid and America's worst-ever president.Now Cooper has a very good special on Netflix, and it shows that there is so much more to the actress and writer than her TikTok fame. But then those short videos showed what a great actor she is, with every twitch of the eye and curl of the lip neatly capturing Trump's Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The Dear Joan & Jericha podcast began in 2018, and quickly became a cult hit. That was no surprise as the spoof's creators, Julia Davis (Joan) and Vicki Pepperdine (Jericha), have impressive comedy CVs behind them; Davis created and starred in Nighty Night, Camping and Hunderby, while Pepperdine co-wrote and starred in Getting On.Joan and Jericha are agony aunts, women of uncertain age (“trained in psycho-genital counselling”), who give appalling relationship advice in jaw-droppingly graphic and unPC terms: “We don't beat about the bush. Apparently you're not allowed to say that any more Read more ...
Veronica Lee
What a pleasure it was to step inside a West End theatre again, and what a different experience it was – temperature checks at the door, a one-way system through to the seats and an app to order drinks. While markedly smaller audiences are terrible for theatres' bottom line, this Covid-secure environment – with no foyer crush or queue at the bar, and better air conditioning – makes for a reassuringly safe night at the theatre.Actually the Apollo last night was one of the safest places in all of London anyway, as Nimax (to which all those who love live performance will be enormously grateful) Read more ...
Veronica Lee
After a successful – and very welcome - summer season of gigs in its outdoor courtyard, Battersea Arts Centre has come indoors for its autumn season of comedy from the Grand Hall; it started with this strong mixed bill curated by the promoters Berk's Nest. BAC was using, for the first time, technology similar to that which has been used for a little while now by BBC One's Question Time and Radio 4's The News Quiz – an interactive experience in which presenters and performers can converse directly with the audience at home, and can hear their applause.Sarah Keyworth, MC for the night, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Of all the outdoor spaces being utilised to keep live performance going in this maddest of years, Warwick Castle is surely among the most striking. Its Picnic at the Castle series has the building as an imposing backdrop to events, the stage reached by a wooden bridge across the River Avon.The Covid-secure audience are arranged in twos, fours and sixes around a table within its own little wooden pergola, decorated with ivy (plastic, but who cares) and fairylights, adding to a rather magical Midsummer Night's Dream feel. Even the hog roast available seems fitting. The pergolas' transparent Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Comedy is all about timing, and the owners of the UK's newest comedy club should know. Just days after they obtained the final licences they needed to open, the national lockdown was announced in March. Now the brave souls are opening 21Soho at a third of capacity; thankfully audiences are keen to see live performances after being starved of them for so long, and the first of regular comedy nights – 21Soho presents – had a fantastic line-up.The club (which can hold live music events as well as comedy), is in a listed building in the heart of London's West End and has a pleasing Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The Warren is normally to be found in Brighton city centre, where it stages shows during the Brighton Fringe. But there's nothing normal about 2020, so its organisers are now producing The Warren Outdoor Season at a pop-up space on Brighton beach, in sight of the Pier and the Brighton Zip, and it's reassuringly Covid-secure.There's an obvious attention to detail: the well-spaced bench tables seat up to six and each has its own speaker, there's table service from the bar, plenty of loos and hand sanitisers, with a strictly (but politely) enforced one-way system in operation. And the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
We live in strange times, so it's appropriate that a socially distanced pop-up arts festival – of theatre, comedy, improv, music and magic – calls itself The New Normal. I went to the first comedy night of its August run, curated by Good Ship Comedy, a great comedy club which is normally located at a pub in north London, but is decamping to south London for a couple of dates here.And what a here: The New Normal is taking place at a gem of a location, the baronial gothic Royal Victoria Patriotic Building in Wandsworth, once an asylum for girls (for which read workhouse), later an MI5 Read more ...
Veronica Lee
At the age of 80, John Cleese probably doesn't care what people think of him. But then, when you were one-sixth of Monty Python and co-creator of one of TV's funniest sitcoms, you can afford not to play to the gallery as the royalties from Flying Circus and Fawlty Towers still roll in (even if, as he never tires of telling his audiences, a fair chunk goes in alimony).A cynic might say that explains why his new show, Why There Is No Hope, has so few laughs – but, to be fair, it was livestreamed from an empty Cadogan Hall, which killed many of his jokes stone dead. He began, though, with a Read more ...