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Chris Addison: Atomicity
Show type: Edinburgh Fringe 2005
Starring Comic:
Chris Addison

Chris Addison: Atomicity


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Description

Celebrated la-di-da smartypants and Perrier Award Nominee Chris Addison presents, for your amusement and derision, a trawl through the very fabric of the Universe.

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Reviews

Original Review:

Show Rating:Chris Addison: Atomicity rated 4/5

Edinburgh’s favourite ponce is back with another erudite theme: an hour-long show about the Periodic Table of the elements.

Atomicity is, however, no arid GCSE chemistry lesson. ‘It’s about how the human race copes with the universe,’ he asserts, which doesn’t exactly exclude a lot.

Thus what might seem like an obscure, over-intellectual theme actually allows Addison to leap nimbly between anything that takes his fancy, whether it’s the British battleship-naming convention, dinosaurs playing hide and seek or Britain’s cool response to the London bombs.

Addison’s gift is to be able to format all these disparate ideas into one convincing theme, and one that will most appeal to middle-class people like him who are smugly proud of their education. Addison is, if you’ll excuse the screamingly obvious pun, in his element.

Watching his show is like channel-surfing through the section of the satellite menu where all the documentary shows live. You get snippets of interesting information before the mind starts straying into tangents. But like the Periodic Table, he orders and makes some sense of all this.

Addison talks remarkably quickly – although his crisp received pronunciation means nothing’s ever garbled – which means he can  pack a lot more into his show than most. Sometimes surreal, sometimes clever, sometimes passionate and insightful; there really is something here for everyone.

Yet within the impressively wide scope of the show, the material always  remains informative – not in an intellectually showy way. It’s accessible without dumbing down; and with a point as well as a joke.

He’s quite intolerant of stupidity, against which he rails with corrosive vigour, but he lets his passions get away with him in a positive way, too, right up to the now-obligatory rousing crescendo with which he brings his show to its stirring finish.

Addison has again cemented his reputation as a copper-bottomed festival favourite, well deserving his sell-out status.

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Comments

Terrible. While he isn't totally lacking in talent, the little he does have doesn't justify his unbearable smugness - laughing on stage at his own jokes and generally just sending out the message "we're middle class, isn't it great?" I also hate shows which pretend to have grand themes but in fact just use them as a scaffolding on which to hang a load of hideously trite and unoriginal observations about daytime television. Better to see Stewart Lee do a less serious theme like comics stealing jokes and do it properly

Bee, October 2005


This was, without a doubt, the best show I saw at the Festival. I have to admit, I was expecting an air of middle class exclusivity, but not a trace of this was to be found. What makes Addison so endearing is his enthusiasm. He has an amazing ability to make his show seem wandering and ad-libbed, although it is evident it has been meticulously planned as it works so very well.

Rebecca, August 2005



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