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From his DVD Robin Ince Is As Dumb As You

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Robin Ince started his comedy career as a writer, working on shows including Alistair McGowan's Big Impresison, V Graham, Norton and Meet Ricky Gervais, his first of many collaborations with the Extras star.

Ince appeared with Gervais, Stephen Merchant and Jimmy Carr in the 2001 Edinburgh show Rubbernecker, and regularly supports Gervais on tour. He also appeared in one episode of The Office, playing interviewee Stewart Foot.

That role inspired his tongue-in-cheek solo Edinburgh debut in 2004, and he has returned to the Fringe every year since. In 2005 he started erudite comedy night The Book Club, loosely based around bad literature, which won him the innovation award at the 2006 Chortle Awards as well as the outstanding contribution to comedy accolade at that year's Time Out awards. In 2007, he was named best compere at the Chortle Awards.

On TV, he has appeared as John Peel on Channel 4's 11 O'Clock Show as well as countless panel games and 'talking heads' shows, including Channel 4's 100 Greatest Musicals (2003), BBC Three's The State We're In (2003), Celebdaq (2004), BBC Two's Mock The Week (2006). He has also appeared on Radio 4's Now Show, Just A Minute and Mitch Benn's Crimes Against Music.

In 2006, he co-wrote his first feature film, Razzle Dazzle, about children's dance contests in Australia.

Douglas Adams: The Party
Live Review

This tribute gig is long. Really long. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly long it is. I mean, you may think an episode of Midsomer Murders is long, but it’s just peanuts to this...

Yesterday, ape-descended life form Douglas Adams would have spent exactly 60 years on this utterly insignificant blue-green planet far out in the unchartered backwaters of the unfashionable Western Spiral arm of the galaxy. That is, had he not had the bad manners to depart it back in 2001.

It’s testament to his legacy, his passions and his gregarious nature that so many old friends wanted to honour the Hitchhikers’ Guide To The Galaxy author on this, the second most significant 60th jubilee of the year. That’s why this show had to start just after 5pm to fit them all in – and even then there were a couple of absentees, most notably Stephen Fry, who had to send greetings via video as he was away filming the Hobbit in New Zealand.

Equally packed as the bill was the Hammersmith Apollo auditorium. To this day, Adams has fan base as devoted as it is geeky, in all the best ways. There were plenty of towels on display, while at least a couple of men who should have known better had come in their dressing gowns, Arthur Dent-style.

The four-hour show, deftly hosted by Clive Anderson, was broadly divided up into segments to reflect Adams’s varied interests, starting with his conservationism. The night was raising money for Save The Rhino, a cause close to his heart, and the audience was shown video footage from Last Chance To See as a reminder of the fact.

For the science bit, Robin Ince introduced what was essentially a pocket version of his Infinite Monkey Cage tour. A Finite Monkey Cage, I guess. Ince has some cracking lines in his monologue about his own awe of science, which definitely flattered the intellect of this savvy crowd.

He introduced Jon Culshaw, first impersonating the absent Professor Brian Cox (who had been advertised but had to rush to Australia to ‘point at a volcano’ for his next BBC show) and then Patrick Moore speaking street patois, an easy gag but expertly done. That was followed by Simon Singh with a brief explanation of the expanding universe – and why modern cosmology proves Katie Melua wrong – and enthusiastic schoolma’amish comedian and space-themed-stamp-collector Helen Keen gushing away.

Adams’s comic work was discussed in a talk-show element with Anderson chatting to ex-Python Terry Jones and Kumars star Sanjeev Bhaskar, who was influenced by him, but never met him.

Among the tidbits we learned was that Adams once almost killed a couple of the Pythons after driving the wrong way down a motorway in a drink-drive incident; that the Kumars lived at No 42 in a nod to the most significant number in the Hitchhikers Guide saga; and that Bhaskar applied to be a non-speaking extra in the Hitchhikers movie – and got turned down flat. 

Interspersed through the night were various of Adams’ early sketches, performed from scripts – as if for a radio recording – by an an ensemble that included Rory McGrath, Angus Deayton, Michael Fenton Stevens and Philip Pope. Stephen Mangan, who plays Dirk Gently on BBC Four was due to have been among them, but illness forced him out, too.

There’s definitely a rarity value in seeing curios such as skits he wrote for the Seventies radio series The Burkiss Way or 1974 Cambridge Footlights show (in which Anderson and Griff Rhys Jones were performers) revived. The formats of these often haven’t weathered the passage of time particularly well – but despite their dated feel, the scripts still sparkled with an unmistakably inventive use of language, such as the railway worker demanding a ‘vocabulary rise’ so he could use more sophisticated words, or the way the Paranoid Society meeting conducted its business.

The comic highlight of the night, though, was John Lloyd – producer of QI and Blackadder, among many others – reading out extracts from The Meaning Of Liff, the book he wrote with Adams which found items, feelings and situations which need a word to describe them, but never – until their intervention – had one. Even better than the original suggestions were those submitted by the online community, proving genius breeds genius.

Another hit was, perhaps surprisingly for 2012, a spoof of the Bee Gees. The Hee Bee Gee Bees – comprising Deayton, Fenton Stevens and Pope, reprised their surprise 1980 Australian No 2 Meaningless Songs (In Very High Voices) – giving Anderson a flashback to his most infamous talk-show encounter.

Much less successful was Culshaw undoing the good he’d earlier done, thanks to a ploddingly written sketch in which Tom Baker’s Dr Who made dull observations on David Cameron and the like; a blatant plug for the forthcoming Hitchhikers’ tour that had one decent joke amid some garbled and over-long dialogue; and a rather awkward interview with Adams’s Cambridge-era writing partners Will Adams and Martin Smith in which producer Dirk Maggs proved he was no Clive Anderson when it came to questioning technique.

In his defence, this was an impromptu chat while the stage was set for the final musical section, based around the ad hoc band Adams used to assemble in his flat. This line-up included Procol Harum singer Gary Brooker – who still has an astonishing voice at 66 – Pink Floyd’s Dave Gilmour, blues guitarist Robbie McIntosh and singer-songwriter Margo Buchanan, one of whose tracks Adams once used for an advert he made for his beloved Apple Computers.

Some of their tracks were rather slow and contemplative, but Gilmour rocked it, a cover of Etta James’s I Just Wanna Make Love To You was wonderfully soulful and Whiter Shade Of Pale is still a skin-tingler after all these years.

All this and a troupe of eight tap-dancing rhinoceri, too. And somehow, when Douglas Adams is involved, that seemed in no way unusual.

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Saw him a couple of years ago on a whim; cheap tickets, so why not? I could not have been more pleasantly surprised, it was one of the best shows I've seen. Highly recommended.

Jamie McIntyre, July 2011

Tries very hard to be funny. Unfortunately, he just isn't.

Tom, November 2010

Smug tedious hectoring know all. Buy The Guardian and be bored in the comfort of your home rather than waste money to see him. Or wait for one of his many yawn inducing BBC appearances. Probably alongside Marcus Brigstocke, the only man in the world more who's more of a "Student Grant" than this prat.

Robert, December 2009

I watched Robin Ince as part of Josie Long's Underbelly show. For me he was the highlight of the night. Truly engaging, surprising, and funny. His frantic delivery built to a intelligent outburst that really was fantastic. I can't wait to see more.

Jay Cowle, July 2009

Ince is a very Radio 4-friendly, charming, harmless act. Saw the ‘Bleeding Heart Liberal’ show in Tunbridge Wells. This was a ‘show of two halves’. The first half was around 20 minutes of mostly non-amusing observation of what happened to him on the way to the theatre, armed with a notebook. This was filler, as was a musical act featuring a Jacques Brel-inspired front man backed up with guitar, drums and double bass, singing existential songs about a blind man’s dog, uniformed, uninformed idiots and Cupid. Post-interval Ince was better. At the end, he said he’d missed out a lot of the ‘good stuff’, which suggests that he should beef up a weak first half with some of that. His self-awareness and realisation that he is not Eddie Izzard is acute and a little grating, but Ince is good when angrily attacking the media, religious leaders, and hypocrisy. With his ‘highbrow-books-on-a-table’ props and ‘top three’ lists of physicists, Ince is trying perhaps a bit too hard to cut out a persona of the intellectual. Ince repeatedly says 'I am a Marxist' but he fails to explore this and, as such, comes across as the shallow, comfortable, suburban Guardianista par excellence. An adequate two hours entertainment. With a bit more structure, Robin could lift his act from average to good.

Tim Probert, January 2009

Robin is one of Ricky Gervais's best mates which explains how this unfunny so called comedian gets work. It's obviously a case of it's not what you know it's who you know.

vectra owner, January 2009

Terrible comedian, whenever I see him him sat there in silence, he doesn't even get a smile from me from his so called jokes. *Yawn*

Bert Stein, November 2008

Pedantic,childish and a complete waste of a night. Never have so many been so bored by so few.

ted crilly, October 2008

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