Lee Nelson

Ealing Comedy Festival 2011: Wednesday

In a calendar packed with comedy festivals, Ealing’s has a relatively low profile. Yet its line-up is stellar, and it packs out a 1,000-seater marquee over five nights in a West London park - so it’s an event not to be ignored.

The festival reached its midway point in last night’s rain, with the ever-impressive Jarred Christmas compering. The Kiwi’s fast and emphatic delivery instantly establishes that he’s in charge, but he comes with such a cheeky, curious and endearingly playful attitude that means he’s never going to be serious authority figure. After all, he’s the sort of man-child who can say: ‘I was googling “ninja moves”...’ without any sense of self-consciousness, just part of another enthusiastically-told anecdote.

First of the acts is professional Northerner Paul Tonkinson, a favourite booking of this festival, with his wry commentary on married life and North vs South stereotypes. There are no great revelations, but it’s nicely observed and beautifully illustrated with a wide repertoire of subtly silly comedy voices. The man’s a one-man Simpsons cast as he brings to life the likes of his effete, sexually ambiguous ski instructor or a menacing South London laugh. At his best, he reduces a marital argument to meaningless sounds, prompting lots of chuckles of domestic recognition.

Fresh from Latitude come Ireland’s ‘seventh biggest hip-hop crew’ Abandoman, with their crowd-pleasing improvised raps; first the ‘What’s In Your Pocket’ routine, basing lyrics on items the audience hold up, then the made-up musical, composed around the circumstances of ‘Stoney’ – a London Underground escalator engineer plucked from the crowd. Rap purists might spot an overuse of filler line such as ‘that’s right/you know’ to make the rhymes fit, but the duo’s frontman Rob Broderick is quick-thinking and occasionally inspired in fusing ideas together.

Next up a ‘special guest who can’t be named’ – which used to mean comedy royalty, but these days can mean anyone who’s been on TV a bit and doesn’t want to hurt their forthcoming tour sales. Tonight it meant Lee Nelson, and I don’t think the demographic of the tent quite matched up with the demographic of the unbilled comedy chav’s BBC Three audience, given that mention of sidekick Omelette clearly didn’t receive the cheer he was expecting. In fact, there seemed some sluggishness in realising this excitable rude boy was a character. That, and the sheer size of this marquee, meant that some of his audience banter was robbed of its exciting piquancy, though Nelson’s creator Simon Brodkin is still as sharp as a tack.

There are some great jokes in his tales of casual sex and equally casual misogyny, although elsewhere, especially in his take on hosting the Olympics in East London, he treads on very cliched territory, not always with sharp enough writing to excuse it. And this is clearly a work in progress – as occasional glances at notes on a bar stool attest – so isn’t quite as fluent or concise at it could be. But Nelson’s still entertaining, with life in the old Burberry yet.

For our headliner, we leaping a few strata up the social scale, with the urbane Stephen K Amos. He hasn’t always been that way, however, and he gets much mileage out of his down-to-earth upbringing at the hands of his no-nonsense parents, and their catchphrase: ‘Shut up, bastard.’

The ‘back-in-my-day’ nostalgia, before iPods and mobiles, defines his attitude that the youth of today don’t know they are born. He even brings up a crew of teenagers to prove his point... and from the moment this segment starts, you know it’s going to be a countdown until the phrase ‘boy band’ is deployed. But however predictable the conclusion was, Amos’s forte is interacting with people (a facet his recent BBC Two show failed to exploit), and he created plenty of free-form fun along the way.

He ended the set with a couple of examples of racism directed his way, primarily from Australia, but he reacts not with fury, but with a charismatic roll of the eyes that anyone could be so dim. After all, Amos is nothing if not charming every moment he is on stage.

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