March 2013
The Found Footage Festival at the Soho Theatre is definitely not stand-up comedy. I'm not even sure if this cult American show is really what you would call a festival.
Interesting news today that David Walliams is to star in as well as co-write a new BBC1 sitcom, Big School, alongside Catherine Tate, Philip Glenister, Joanna Scanlan from Getting On and Daniel Rigby from those BT ads.
This really was one of the most wonderful and most weird big-venue gigs I've ever seen, from the unique entrance to the grandstanding finale. At 48 it would be understandable for Harry Hill to started winding down and doing less physically and mentally demanding shows. Instead his Sausage Time tour has totally ramped up the Hill madness. He might have been moaning about the pressure of watching too much television towards the end of TV Burp but it seems to have inspired him to greater heights of lunacy.
Clarification – The Comedy Club referred to throughout this article is not to be confused with the entirely different "The Comedy Club Ltd" which does not run any regular comedy clubs in central London but does put on special comedy nights and books comedians for events and corporate functions. There is no association between the two organisations.
Well, he came, he saw, he played the wrong venue, didn't do much in the way of advance press, but he conquered. After all the fuss about Louis CK jumping from the Bloomsbury Theatre on his last UK visit to the Hammersmith Apollo and the O2 Arena, the reviews gave him a unanimous thumbs up.
There seems to be growing trend for wordless comedy at the moment. The Boy with Tape on his Face and Dr Brown both won awards at the Edinburgh Festival last summer and it has just been announced that Matt Lucas is working on a new character for a BBC comedy called Pompidou which will have no dialogue at all. Lazy critics will no doubt compare Pompidou to Mr Bean, but Lucas – who certainly has a face for silent comedy – has clearly tapped into something currently in the air.
When the fifth Chortle Award winner was announced last night and Pappy's won best Character or Sketch Act I received a sharp nudge in the ribs from my partner as she said "you know the results already don't you." I explained that I had been on the panel that chose the nominees, so they were educated, informed guesses, but the winners were chosen by readers of Chortle so ultimately any nominated name could have come out of Chortlemeister Steve Bennett's hat.
Hopefully you have already read my probing piece about the clash of the comedy Browns and will know the difference between Doc Brown and Dr Brown by now.
About three years ago at the Edinburgh Festival a friend came up to me in the bar and said that I had to see a new performer called Dr Brown. My friend said that he was brilliant and completely unique. I replied that I had already seen him. In fact I’d just interviewed him because I also thought that he was brilliant and pretty unique.
The Altitude Comedy Festival returned to Mayrhofen in Austria last week, offering the perfect holiday for anyone who likes a combination of winter sports and gags. As ever the five-day laugh binge was a terrific opportunity to see Arena stars playing small theatres and clubs. John Bishop and Eddie Izzard both headlined Gala gigs in the relatively intimate - for them – 550-seater Europahaus, but also took the opportunity to get back to their club roots and do some smaller, intimate shows in the bars around town.
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