Tim Minchin - Live Review

‘Nothing ruins comedy like arenas,’ sings Tim Minchin with usual self-reference. ‘But your enjoyment isn’t as important as my self-esteem.’

But if you’re going to play big spaces, this is the way to do it; with a 55-piece orchestra and a juggernaut full of showmanship, making this a big show in every sense.

He’s not the first comic to bring on the musical big guns, of course. Both Bill Bailey and Barry Humphries tried it last year to mixed and dismal effect respectively. But what Minchin’s done, most sensibly, is not involve the Heritage Orchestra in any comic business, but just let them do what they do best; adding power and scale to his already potent and grandiose numbers. The effect is irresistible.

So classic songs such as Prejudice, Not PerfectAnd If I Didn’t Have You are given fairly straightforward orchestral arrangements, but he also gets to push the classical maestros outside their normal comfort zone, having them take a brief pop at disco, or backing up the funky boogie-woogie of his semi-brooding, semi-jaunty showstopper Dark Side. And what finer use for collective centuries of musical training than to insult the Pope over child abuse cover-ups in a catchy yet gloriously foul-mouthed rag.

The song Context is a typically daring ditty, in which our barefoot balladeer says the unsayable, causing palpable discomfort around the room as fans wonder just where he is going with lyrics that appear to be horrifically racist. He pushes beyond irony, and beyond the point you’re still certain everything is going to be all right. But don’t worry, it is.

But that tension is nothing as to when he starts talking about idiotic Christian fundamentalist Terry Jones – the pastor who threatened to burn Korans on 9/11 and who’s now in the news again thanks to publicity-seeking English bigots. Minchin, who makes no secret of his atheist standing, talks convincingly about why any book should be sacred – and produces a copy of the Koran. You could probably hear the sound of 6,000 or so buttocks clenching even if the orchestra was playing at full volume.

In Rock And Roll Nerd, and in some of his banter, Minchin protests that as a largely untroubled middle-class comedian he has no real edge – but routines such as this prove he can make the audience feel genuinely uncomfortable. Because he does it with intellectual rigour rather than provoking reflex repulsion with sick jokes about disabled children makes it more challenging, not less. Elsewhere, he makes further uncomfortable jokes about his irritation at his four-year-old, or about Western comforts compared to many in the world, which nonetheless manage to be funny.

Religious faith takes a fresh battering in another new song about the power of prayer -– but liberal sacred cows are given a musical skewering too, in a marvellously iconoclastic song combating the notion that there’s any clear-cut distinction between good and evil. There’s even more depth to his tender ballad Beauty, which doesn’t even attempt humour – but lest you think Minchin gets crushed under his own seriousness, there’s a long, funky and utterly silly new number in praise of cheese.

It’s on big production numbers like this that the orchestra really brings proceedings to exciting life. But some songs are just as emotive without them – as an encore he sings his touching and beautiful Christmas song White Wine In The Sun with only his piano, and the audience rise to their feet.

One lyric of this goes ‘it’s sentimental I know, but I just really like it’ – and that’s the hidden joy of Minchin’s show; he’s not afraid of sincerity, even at the risk of sounding schmaltzy. But the combination of his honesty and his commanding powers as an entertainer means that elephant trap is a avoiding in what is a superlative night out. And in an arena, too – who would have thought it?

Alan Carr - Live Review

He may have a reputed £2million-a-year deal with Channel 4, a weekly Radio 2 show, and be playing to 2,000 people a night at £30 a head, but Alan Carr is just like you.

That this camp ‘chatty man’ shrieking in outrage at every minor irritation, has the common touch is undeniable, but his first stand-up tour in four years, though entertaining, frequently felt too much like a gossip than a show.

Stories about walking to the bus stop in the rough area of North London where he lives might be over-gilding the Everyman persona; but at heart he inherently has the same lower-middle class concerns he had when he worked in a Barclaycard call centre. It reflects the life his audience has: shitty beach holidays, dreary office rituals, undemanding TV programmes….

That connection, in concert with his supremely warm and likable presence,  gives him the latitude not to have go into things in much depth. As he joins the legion of comedians moaning about automatic supermarket check-outs, he only has to say yelp indignantly: ‘Unexpected item in the bagging area’ to get a laugh.

It makes for an often underwritten show, ticking off such obvious ideas such as Baby On Board stickers, budget airlines or vajazzling and never developing them to any great extent. From the get-go Carr accepts there will be lulls, likening his performance to Cher Lloyd on X Factor – identifying with his demographic again – with enjoyable melodies ruined by ear-grating raps.

He’s stronger, though, when talking about himself, which was more of a theme in the superior Tooth Fairy tour than here. It used to be that comedians always said they started making people laugh to avoid the school bully, and Carr, still with bad teeth and thick-rimmed specs, definitely carries that vulnerable demeanour to this day.

He’s as much as the awkward, helpless loser now as he was when being teased for wearing a snood in PE – only now he has an audience wanting to hear him bitch about the indignity of it all: whether it’s being helpless in the face of a swimming pool’s wave machine or being mistaken for an old woman when he called the breakdown service.

To reinforce how disappointing his life is today, he introduces the character of Monica, his flatmate with a hairy face, personality defects and metal plate in her head. She must be related to Larry Grayson’s Slack Alice, as surely as Carr is comedically related to the effeminate Seventies Generation Game host himself – no matter what his forthcoming Who Do You Think You Are? uncovers.

But he perhaps fits closer with Les Dawson and Roy Barraclough’s Sissy and Ada, prattling over the garden fence. Much has been written about why non-threatening camp is such a deeply engrained tradition of British comedy, and Carr plugs into it effortlessly. His peculiar voice puts him firmly as an outsider, while his fey physicality, cantering back and forth across the big Brighton Arena stage, adds to his appeal. He’s got more mince than Fray Bentos, while his exaggerated, mimed reenactments are always high spots.

There are some wonderfully descriptive lines in his mild humiliations, too, with big laughs for payoffs about demanding stag weekends, Monica’s facial hair or massive prams among many other examples. Sometimes it’s simply the easily identifiable precision of the reference that gets the laugh, using ‘Nissan Sunny’, say, rather than any other marque.

These provide plenty of chuckles, and no one could come away thinking anything other than that Carr is a lovely, genuine man – but as a comedy tour, his Spexy Beast still needs to show more bite.