Not Perfect

From his Royal Albert Hall DVD

More Tim Minchin videos

Composer, actor and pianist Tim Minchin lept into the British comedy scene in 2005, with his Perrier-best-newcomer-winning Edinburgh show Dark Side.

It was a show he had debuted at the Sydney Big Laugh Comedy Festival earlier that year, and performed to critical acclaim at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, where it won the Festival Directors' Award.

His follow-up show, So Rock, was nominated for the Barry award for the most outstanding show in his native Melbourne in 2006 before returning to Edinburgh. That year he also appeared at the Just For Laughs comedy festival in Montreal.

He performed his first show, Navel, in Australia in 2003 and was a Victoria state finalist in the Raw competition for new comedians the following year.

As an actor, he has played Amadeus in Peter Schaffer's play, and Hamlet, both for the Perth Theatre Company, and has appeared with the Australian Shakespeare Company.

Winner of the best music and variety act at the Chortle awards in 2009, 2010 and 2011, where his show with a full orchestra was also named best tour.

In 2010, he wrote the music for the Royal Shakespeare Company's adaptation of Roald Dahl's Matilda.

Uncaged Monkeys: Night Of 200 Billion Stars
Live Review

Is particle physics the new rock and roll?

Well, obviously not... but even a couple of years ago, it would have seemed ridiculous to suggest that a bunch of scientists could fill a mid-sized rock venue, as one of them talked the audience through graphs of the invariant or transverse mass distributions for selected collisions, seeking evidence of particles around the 125GeV mark.

But those charts were fresh off the press – the results from the large hadron collider that provided evidence for the elusive Higgs boson, the so-called God particle. And the member of the CERN Atlas team explaining the significance of the day’s news to the Hammersmith Apollo was none other than science pin-up Brian Cox.

I say ‘explain’... I surely wasn’t the only one who didn’t understand most of the finer details, and I’ve a physics degree (barely used). But Cox is undeniably a great communicator and expertly coveys the excitement and importance of the discovery and even the broad concept of a Higgs condensate, even if the detailed meaning is lost.

A video link-up to his colleagues in Switzerland might have filled in some gaps... but the most complex machine man has ever built has an internet connection stuck in the dial-up age, and the Skype signal kept cracking up.

It’s testament to Cox’s charisma, though, that his explanation of the complexities of the Standard Model filled the audience with more wonder and awe than the more esoteric ideas coming from the mind of comic-book artist Alan Moore, proclaiming his faith in a 2nd century sock puppet snake god and spouting some nonsense about how we’re all cosmic holograms in a rather rambling contribution to the night.

This was all in the second half of this rationalist show, which curator Robin Ince has grown into a pre-Christmas tradition. Tonight was headlined by Tim Minchin, who hotfooted it to Hammersmith direct from recording the Jonathan Ross Show alongside Tom Cruise, and treated the audience to a silly new song about a ‘Woody Allen Jesus’ and his beautifully touching Christmas classic White Wine In The Sun, accompanied by Cox reviving his D:Ream past on keyboard.

Before the interval, mathematician Simon Singh delivered his favourite, if now over-used, set piece debunking those who see hidden messages in the Bible, before demonstrating an actual wartime Engima encoding machine; Guardian science writer Ben Goldacre made a case for evidence-based policymaking, rather than just running on hunches and doctrine; and geneticist Adam Rutherford broke from his field of expertise to introduce an inspiring eight-minute video compilation video of Space Shuttle missions.

‘We’ve become desensitised to wonder,’ he said succinctly – although this often inspiring, if inconsistent, show surely would have served to reignite that flame among many.

As well as the science bits, there came the usual bookish humour from Robin Ince and regular collaborator Josie Long, who read from a fictional version of Charles Darwin’s diaries in which he munched his way through most of his case studies, and a bit of variety from jugglers Feeding The Fish. All that and unlocking the secrets of this universe... what more could you want?

Skip to page: 1 | 2 | 3

Saw TM for second time at Beautiful Days this weekend, one of the most gifted and brilliant performers I have ever seen, who also happens to be extremely funny.

carmellaj, August 2011

That's the trouble with people called Mandy, they just don't do irony ....

Cathy, February 2011

@vicky... um what? guess I'm not 'intelectual' enough...

Dave, March 2010

An utter pleasure to watch perform and a delightfully down to earth person. Eagerly awaiting his interpretation of Matilda to hit the west end.

vicky, February 2010

I would advise this Art School Stilgoe to revise his sixth-form debater-informed 'Storm Movie' poetry - too preachy for his target crowd of rebounding Brand-ettes and too ill-informed and twitterati-driven to draw any intelectual audience worth its salt.

Mandy Allan, January 2010

I saw Tim at the Glasgow Pavilion. Wow what a night.

Helena, October 2009

You just can’t fault this guy. Saw his ‘Ready for this’ tour in Cambridge and was utterly brilliant. I bought his CD and listen too it regularly and you really start to appreciate all the ironies. All round good fun, sort off bloke if you met in a bar you would be entertained for hours just listening to him rant! Top class!!

Tim, October 2009

Always hilarious and a lovely bloke too

howlieT, May 2009

Skip to page: 1 | 2 | 3