Let’s be kind to Eddie Izzard. The guy has not long finished running 43 marathons in 51 days in aid of Sport Relief and the undeniably noble effort would take the puff out of anyone. And just the day before this show, he had run a half marathon further along the South Coast from Eastbourne to his childhood home town of Bexhill-on-Sea to reopen their refurbished museum.
comedy reviews
Veronica Lee
Reginald D Hunter wants us to know from the off that he will be using the “n” word in his show. A lot. Well, there’s a clue in the show’s title, The Only Apple in the Garden of Eden and Niggas, but that’s rather misleading; it’s less a description and more an in-joke from the time an earlier show’s posters (which also included it) were banned on the London Underground. So now he puts a rude word in the title of most of his shows and it pretty much indicates the Southerner’s style: punchy exposition tempered by knowing irony.
gerard.gilbert
“Green Wing, but set in a university” is one of those useful handles that reviewers were always going to grasp when discussing Victoria Pile’s new improvised ensemble comedy, Campus, the opening try-out in Channel 4’s new Comedy Showcase season of sitcom pilots. For once, the handy nut-shell description is spot on. Campus is precisely that: Green Wing, but set in a university – and as a fan of Green Wing I should feel that that is good thing. However I’m not sure the formula has survived the relocation from hospital to campus.
kat.brown
Firstly, no, Tom Wrigglesworth's Open Return Letter to Richard Branson isn’t that letter. His epistle is not to be confused with Oliver Beale’s, whose email to the Virgin boss complaining about the food on a Virgin flight went viral last year.
Veronica Lee
Stephen K Amos, although a mightily talented comic, doesn’t make a critic’s job easy. His new show, The Feelgood Factor, does indeed offer that and leaves everybody in the Churchill Theatre in Bromley in a happy mood (and many of them planning to buy him a pint afterwards), but unless I quoted reams of his delivery I couldn’t actually describe what the show is about, other than making people laugh. A lot.
Veronica Lee
It’s a brave comic who declares on stage every night that he would like to see a cute television presenter die in a horrific accident (as nearly happened to Top Gear’s Richard Hammond in 2006). But declares it Stewart Lee does and, for good measure, he also disses a fellow comedian while he’s at it.
Veronica Lee
Dylan Moran is, as the ethnic stereotype would have it, a great storyteller. The Irishman doesn’t tell jokes with punchlines as such, rather he rambles on a bit and sort of makes his points along the way. As entertainment, then, his latest show, What It Is, is the sort where one smiles a lot rather than laughs out loud.
Veronica Lee
Alastair McGowan’s larynx is an amazing thing; it allows him to do 120 voices in 120 minutes during his solo touring show, The One and Many..., which I saw at Journal Tyne Theatre in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Not all the impressions are spot-on and there’s an over-reliance on sport-related material, but this is a tour-de-force of the impressionist’s art
Jasper Rees
Of course there’ll be no certain way of knowing whether the ensuing rave is heartfelt. Four years ago Tim Minchin, fresh off the plane from Down Under, burst onto the Edinburgh Fringe to be greeted by a short sharp one-star crit from a Guardian reviewer who had possibly got out of the wrong side of the bed. Where a regular stand-up would look horribly petulant to bear such a public grudge, Minchin put his riposte in song, because he has that near-unique facility. Very amusing it is too, as well as a cast-iron insurance policy against further slatings.
Adam Sweeting
American critics have been fanfaring Modern Family as something of a sitcom revolution for its wit, intelligence and the cast's all-round expertise. It might take longer to grow a British fanbase, because you need a few spins around the circuit before its contours start to feel familiar, but then suddenly the lights go on and revelation ensues.