Hardeep Singh Kohli: The Nearly Naked Chef - Fringe 2009
Live Review

Does The One Show have fans? It’s affable enough background noise, suitably vacuous not to actually get in the way of anything you might have to do early-evening. But devotees?

But if there is such thing, this is the Edinburgh show for them. As hard-hitting as a melted marshmallow and full of well-meaning but shallow platitudes, it’s an hour of pleasantries and small-talk, but little else besides.

Hardeep Singh Kholi is, of course, a roving reporter on the programme – if currently on suspension for inappropriate behaviour, a topic that goes unmentioned in this hour. He says the BBC job is one of the best gags in television: ‘Because I get to connect to the most important people in the process – you.’

If such ingratiating sentiment has you reaching for the sick bag, this isn’t for you, as it’s full of such earnest banality, and slightly patronising reassurances that we, the civilians in the audience, are ‘lovely’ and that if we see him in the street, we really ought to pop over and say ‘hello’.

Of jokes, he says they have the power to ‘change things, to make a difference’ – but he also says ‘life is funnier than gags’; a sentence only comedians with no jokes would ever say.

He does crack a couple of pub-style jokes his mate Charlie told him, admits that his younger brother Sanjeev, who stars in the sitcom Still Game, is funnier than him. These are not necessarily good qualifications for a comedian.

Kholi is, however, an amiable host, even if some of his stories tend to waffle. He gets close to a couple of good ideas – such as the loose interpretation of the term ‘cousin’ in Indian families – but never quite captures them. The best gag probably comes, unmentioned, in the opening music as the first two words in the title of the Bee Gees’ How Deep Is Your Love? provide a subtle pun on Kholi’s first name.

As well as the lightweight banter, this is also a cookery show – though exactly why is never explained, unless it’s just to underline the feeling that this has no greater ambitions that daytime TV. Kholi occasionally returns to behind his kitchen counter, but he never really explains what he does. A duck was fried then cooked, and some tomatoes blanched – but how that converted into a meal he served to his celebrity friend Iain Rankin, who happened to be in today’s audience, is a mystery.

But whatever happens in the oven, this show feels decidedly underdone.