She might have been on in the middle of the afternoon rather than headlining, but a roar went up when Sara Pascoe was introduced. The thoughtful comedian has become a regular face on television over the last year and her fanbase has grown dramatically. And it looks like growing even more after this crowdpleasing set.
Pascoe is not doing a new show in Edinburgh this summer – although she is premiering a new show in London in the autumn – so this set was more of a mix of previous extended shows and her club sets, combining candid confessions about her family and boyfriend with more philosophical and topical ideas.
She opened with her familiar story about being recognised in public twice in the past, both times with her knickers down. This was now updated with a third incident during a cervix examination, which I guess is set to become the female comic’s equivalent of the male comic’s prostate test riff. Discussing pregnancy Pascoe explained that she has never had a baby, though she has had a tapeworm, before going on to compare the wonders of parenthood to appearing on QI, sarcastically joking that both are equally life-changing experiences.
Pascoe is not political with a big P, but politics permeated her performance. A brief aside about nurses deserving higher pay got an even bigger cheer than she got on her entrance, while a story about Tony Blair’s oratorial skills slyly put the boot into the former Labour PM.
Free from having to having an Edinburgh show-type theme the material ranged widely, from dissecting the way that male gloworms are rushing to lightbulbs like men rush to online porn to talking about her fear of Uber cabs to wondering if socialism died because TV got better so that we care more about fictional characters than we care about reality.
In the end though it did feel very cohesive. It was Pascoe articulating her view of the world, and, judging by the rapturous response she received at the end, which was even noisier than the response she got at the start, it chimed perfectly with a lot of the Latitude audience too.
