I wasn’t going to review Jason Byrne. I felt that I’d seen it all and said it all when he ended Kilkenny’s Cat Laughs gig with a jockey on his back earlier this year. But within a minute of him charging onstage I had my pen out again. Once more Byrne went where few comedians dare to go.
Comedians are such a sensitive bunch. How do you describe someone as a safe pair of hands without them taking it as a negative criticism? A safe pair of hands is exactly what Jason Manford is, but this is meant as the highest of compliments. After three days when some comedians had died horrible sweaty deaths onstage and others had pushed the boundaries of their craft and divided audiences Manford closed the comedy arena with an assured set that pretty much entertained everyone.
There seems to be no stopping the inexorable rise of clowning on the Fringe. Ever since Dr Brown won the Edinburgh Comedy Award in 2012 I feel as as I have been inundated by press releases mentioning acts who have trained with esteemed French tutor Philippe Gaulier, who teaches performers to unleash their inner idiot. I don't know if Australian physical comedian Trygve Wykenshaw has done a stint with Gaulier but he has certainly found his inner idiot, prancing around like a loon, sometimes naked, sometimes in a skin-tight costume.
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.
Trust me, that is Jon Richardson on the screen in the distance in this picture, even if he is looking unusually muscular. One of the perennial problems of the comedy tent at Latitude is that it is too bloody popular. By the time headliner Richardson came on you were lucky to get a view of him onscreen sitting outside the tent. On the plus side the sun was shining and the sound was crystal clear.
In the absence of Daniel Kitson the coolest comedian at this year’s festival is Tim Key. Though as he joked throughout his show, he is a comedian who hasn’t quite been invited onto the comedy stage yet, having shuttled between the literature and theatre tents in the past. This year he was in the poetry tent, which felt right. Not to big, not too hot, and, of course, he had plenty of joyous so-bad-they-are-brilliant poems printed on the back of saucy laminated playing cards to read out.
Russell Kane said that comedians aren’t supposed to do Latitude two years in a row but he loves it so much he begged the organisers to let him come back this year. Good call. Kane and Latitude are made for each other. The Essex-born comic is obsessed by Englishness and class and Englishness and class permeates every corner of "Lattetude", as Kane always calls it.
The BBC has decided not to make any more episodes of acclaimed Afghanistan-set sitcom Bluestone 42 after three series and 21 episodes. The writers James Cary and Richard Hurst have issued the following statement on Cary's blog sitcomgeek.
Writing the perfect sitcom is the Holy Grail of comedy. Get it right and you will be carried through the city on people’s shoulders. Get it wrong and you might as well go and hide under a stone. Look at the brickbats aimed at Ben Elton’s The Wright Way. Even the co-writer of Blackadder got it wrong.
Update 4/1/16: Jenny Eclair's latest novel Moving has just been chosen as a Richard & Judy Book Club read.
Comedian Jenny Eclair’s latest novel, Moving, is published on July 23. Set in Kennington, Didsbury and Chelsea, it is described as “a novel of family secrets, shocking betrayals and, most of all, home.”
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