On a wet and breezy summers evening, I found myself outside the Bloomsbury Theatre in London to see the final two episodes of Edinburgh and Beyond being recorded. The six shows have been recorded in pairs on Monday to Wednesday and will be appearing on Pay TV for Paramount. The theatre seats about 400 people and, as is normal practice, they give 500 tickets out, so getting there early and standing in the queue is imperative.
The host of the shows (as he was for last year) was Al Murray the Pub Landlord, and after all these years, his banter with the audience has been honed to something approaching high-art. He gave us a quick intro to the format and warmed the crowd up before the recording began and they loved him.
The first act in show one (or five for the series) was Dan Antopolski who started out with a couple of passable one liners, but then he got a white board out and started doing jokey mathematical stuff, which completely lost the audience for the second half of his act. Maybe he was having an off night, but he just wasn’t paying attention to the response his schtick was getting and the finale felt like a relief to much of his audience.
The second act was small, thin and blond haired Paul Foot, who kept moving across the stage and jiggling about throughout his routine, although this may be part of his act. His jokes were fairly accomplished and most of the audience were enjoying his observational one liners, especially about inappropriate bumper stickers.
After this we got the giant Greg Davis (six foot eight inches) who talked a little about the horrors of his teaching experiences, and then moved on to the rich vein of his slightly mental family and his completely mental dad. He has a father who has decided to become completely eccentric, including hiding out in the yard in the middle of the night wearing a sheet, waiting for his 30 year old son come home from the pub. This was the best act of the first show by a long margin.
Stewart Lee was the closing act. Stewart did some new material which consisted of a laborious telling of a joke that his mum found hilarious, and Stewart trying to play with the punch line. Those familiar with his “Ang Lee” routine will recognise similarities between it and his “Are you a sardine” references here. Stewart is an intelligent and funny performer, but he does tend to use routines that employ tedium, which may not grab some audience members.
After a twenty minute interval we had a request from Al for the front four rows to swap around so that it looked like a different audience on TV, and to give Mr Murray a new set of victims for his banter.
The first act on the second (sixth) show was Paul Sinha, who is a gay Bengali Hindi from Birmingham. His act revolved around stereotypes and acceptance. There was little here that was original comedically and I felt he spent much of this time going through the motions.
The second act, Micky Flanagan, presented the image of a sick and demented man who started off with a couple of jokes about checking out people on the tube, looking for ‘the bomber’. He moved on to ‘safer’ ground by reminiscing about sex in the 70’s (when women had hair down there) and had the audience in stitches.
The third act for the second show was the ‘acclaimed German comedian Henning Venn’. Henning gave an excellent example of a German perspective on the British and some of his observations were coming dangerously close to getting him lynched. I loved it, but then I’m a foreigner too.
After Henning we had a complete contrast in Lydia Benjamin who is large, black, with dyed ginger hair and playing the dumb chav character. I felt she was trying a bit too hard sometimes and her character was getting in the way of anything funny she might have had. However, the rest of the audience enjoyed her use of profanity.
The final act of the evening was Craig Campbell who is a Canadian. He delivered some material about living in the UK and how weird Brits are and then moved on to his best stuff in which he slagged off his fellow Canadians as being wussier than the Swedes (even to ringing Sweden up to find out what safety feature should be adopted next). He then finished by tying up the two strands of his act and how the British were being forced to adopt health and safety measures kicking and screaming. This was a nicely delivered routine which provided a good finish to the evening.
So it was a mixed bag of comics, some of whom don’t appear to be going to Edinburgh. My recommendations go to Greg Davis and Henning Venn (only to see if he survives Edinburgh). It should be appearing on Pay TV screens some time in the next six weeks.