Comedy
Veronica Lee
Jen Brister loves her five-year-old twin boys, she is at pains to tell us, even when they have a major meltdown and, like Little Lord Fauntleroys, refuse to eat broken biscuits. Stories like these are sprinkled throughout her new show, Under Privilege, in which she describes trying to instil proper values in children who, she hopes, will probably never know any life struggles, and the broader issue of what privilege is.There’s a lot of domestic detail in the show, and Brister is disarmingly honest about the irritations of parenting – although, she says drily, she dodged a bullet by not being Read more ...
Veronica Lee
David Baddiel is a keen Twitter user, commenting on matters of the day, making witty observations about this and that, or simply chatting to his 650,000 followers. But he does seem to attract trolls, whose idiocy he frequently confronts – and his new show, Trolls: Not the Dolls, was inspired by some of those interactions.In a laugh-filled show that's a PowerPoint presentation cum TED talk, the comic seeks to explain the various types of troll on the social platform – the hard of thinking, those who don't get irony, the soulless killjoys, the out-and-out anti-Semites – and how to avoid them. Read more ...
Veronica Lee
No more glitzy and glam musical shows for Jayde Adams, the comic tells us at the top of the hour. Now, after a few years in the business, she wants to be taken seriously (or seriously enough to host Crazy Delicious on Channel 4), so the sequinned Spandex has gone into storage – “no more camel toes” – and she's popped on jeans and a black turtleneck. In The Ballad of Kylie Jenner's Old Face she has something serious to say, and people will listen because of that black jumper, as previously modelled by Angelina Jolie. It screams earnestness. Actually, Adams does have something serious to Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Matt Forde sets out his stall in Brexit: Pursued by a Bear from the first line: “We meet in diabolical circumstances.” These aren't good times, he says, with two major leaders in the Western world whose relationship with the truth is merely that of passing acquaintance. Add in the UK's continuing divisions over Brexit, and diabolical seems apt.We know where Forde is coming from. He's a proud Remainer and Blairite, a former adviser to the Labour Party and a vehement critic of Jeremy Corbyn – who gets it in the neck just as much as Boris Johnson does. Forde sees little difference between Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Musical comedy siblings Nicola and Rosie Dempsey (Flo and Joan were their grandmother and great-aunt's names) get along very well – even being mistaken for lovers by one Paris hotel who gave them a double bed – and certainly their chat between songs, where they politely interrupt each other and finish each other's sentences, is testimony to that. So the inspiration for their new show, Before the Screaming Starts – in which they consider the possibility that their professional partnership might end in personal bitterness – was, they say, the now infamous Bros documentary After the Screaming Read more ...
Veronica Lee
When Frank Skinner did a London run of new material last year, the show was billed as a taster of a longer touring version. I wrote then that the show whetted my appetite for more, and I'm glad to say that the updated version, Showbiz, which now has a West End residency, has delivered.Showbiz comes after Skinner has chalked up more than 30 years in comedy and is a pleasing mix of reflections on parenting, the ageing process and fame. He starts the show by cheekily using Bruce Forsyth's famous phrase “Nice to see you, to see you nice” when he walks on stage. As he says drily: “No one else is Read more ...
Veronica Lee
A mixed bill rarely pleases all comedy tastes – whether in style or content – and so it proved at the launch of the Leicester Comedy Festival, which starts next month. In a line-up of eight comics that had few star names, the best came last – but more of that later.The gala was presented by the hugely likeable Charlie Baker, a Devonian who gets great mileage from his home county, approaching middle age, being married for nearly 20 years and liking his food too much. And while there was a lot of cheeky interaction with the front row along those lines, he was always the butt of the joke; Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It was a year in which we welcomed some big, big names back on stage, including Ben Elton, Clive Anderson and Jack Dee.Elton was back on sparkling form after 15 years away and, if you still need to know how bad a state we're in in the UK, suffice to say that he almost – almost – misses his old nemesis Margaret Thatcher. But in Brexit old Motormouth has found another big target for some pinpoint insights, and his show also delivered some more personal comedy by way of contrast.Anderson had been even longer away from the stage – since his days in Cambridge Footlights a few decades ago – but his Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Medic-turned-comic Adam Kay had been performing for some years before he wrote his 2016 Edinburgh Fringe show Fingering a Minor at the Piano. It had a personal addendum – about why he left medicine – and was a call to arms to save the NHS. It hit a nerve with audiences and in 2017 he published his waspish memoir, This Is Going to Hurt, which has been on bestseller lists ever since.Now he has some festive fare with Twas the Nightshift Before Christmas, the tour supporting his second book of the same title, in which he reads entries from the diaries he wrote during the six consecutive Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Andy Parsons is a comic known to like a good old rant, particularly on a political issue. But in Healing the Nation he takes a calmer, more conversational approach as he tries to do what it says on the tin in a show that he fully expected to be performing after the UK left the EU – but more of Brexit later.In trying to dig down into what it means to be British in 2019, he starts with seemingly more mundane stuff about issues that may divide us in theory but in practice don't lead to us gouging each other's eyes out, such as transgender issues or the badger cull, and how easy it is to make Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Jack Whitehall is hardly ever off the telly, appearing on gameshows or jollying around with his father, Michael, presenting the BRIT Awards and proving to be a decent actor in dramas such as Decline and Fall. But now he's gone back to live comedy with his new show Stood Up.Whitehall, as befits his stadium-tour status, goes full Hollywood with his entrance through the audience as a group of spangly-clad dancers gyrate on stage. But the material – littered with wanking and diarrhoea references and an extended fart gag – is often rather less sparkling. He delivers mostly mundane Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Ivo Graham's latest show The Game of Life follows on from his previous hour, in which he talked about passing a milestone in life and the prospect of starting a family. Now he is a dad, and uses domestic detail as the starting point for some fine observational comedy about fatherhood, class and politics.There are teasing glimpses into his background. Graham comes from a “family of squares with me the occasional rhombus” and while he may describe himself as weak and pathetic in one routine, his comedy gets meatier with each show. He is usually the fall-guy, as when he recounts the toe- Read more ...