Josh Widdicombe - Live Review

It’s warranted a red felt-tipped ring on the comedy calendar since 1994, making the Leicester Mercury Comedian of the Year is one of the country’s longest running stand-up awards. Not to be sniffed at in a world where anyone can (and frequently do) set up an annual competition in the upstairs room of a pub they call a comedy club and don’t last past their inaugural year.

But with previous winners including Johnny Vegas, Jason Manford, Rhod Gilbert and Mitch Benn, the Leicester competition has proved its worth. The method by which each act is chosen for the final - no heats, just names put forward by promoters from around the country – seems to ensure quality.

They were presented with a tough gig this year; the audience weren’t the most responsive, though when tickled they could be persuaded to emit a pleasing ripple of laughter. Even a veteran such as Arthur Smith struggled to get them then going such was the inertia – bar a giddy group at the back who were curiously and off-puttingly out of sync with the rest of the room.

Up first was Liverpuddlian Jake Mills. He didn’t get off to a great start when his opening two gags relied on the perception of him being thin and weedy, certainly from the back of the Y Theatre he looked pretty normal to me. He continued with some uninspired Scouse stereotyping, which his monotone delivery didn’t help. Yet when dealing with the heckling from the back of the room he displayed some confidence, a glimpse of perhaps of the potential here.

Rob Beckett piqued the interest by parodying the stock ‘I look like…’ gag. His set was interestingly random, with a nicely absurd edge, but his delivery dipped and flowed, seemingly unsure one minute, only to recover the next.

The shambling figure of Ben Davids aimed to get the crowd on side with a familiar riff on what playground bullies used to call him, before moving off into more interesting territory where Dad misguidedly joins Al Qaeda and how a ‘snappy zinger’ of a line can get you into trouble. Davids’s one-liners showed considerable skill in their writing, and he displayed an admirable sense of timing in telling them.

Ivo Graham opened telling of how he found himself in the socially awkward situation of having to explain to his mum about ‘the mum joke…’ but failing to clarify what he exactly he meant by the ‘mum joke.’ Such presumption of knowledge the audience may not have is a problem with his set: later he refers to walking into the middle of a street performance in the Edinburgh Fringe. It may feel like the whole world is in the Scottish capital in August, but that most certainly isn’t the case. Consequently the crowd sat thoroughly bemused by much of his material.

After the interval, the eventual and well-deserved winner Josh Widdicombe produced a fine set packed with quirky observations, bundled up in an assured performance. He issues forth with layered routines on Hitler’s waxwork at Madame Tussauds, the worse thing about a robbery and his lack of a sense of direction. All neatly delivered without a moment of confusion.

Tom McDonnell struck an incongruous figure in the line up. A musical comedian, his lengthy whimsical songs meant that there was only time for two in the allocated ten minute slot. Their delicate construction requires careful listening to; if you missed, an early line revealing that the Dr Jones organising a school trip was a reference to Indiana Jones – as the crowd here seemed to – you lost the entire five minutes. Still, there was a hint of Flight of the Conchords here, so in a different setting he could do well.

Ade Ikoli was brimming with confidence, though lacked the material to back it up. His set mainly comprised a protracted routine about going out and copping off with the ‘reserve girl’ then returning home to his ‘full time’ girlfriend which unsurprisingly seemed to alienate the audience. Instead he largely seemed concerned with showcasing his quite fine R&B vocals and acting skills.

Last up, and well worth the wait, was Dan Bland, who was to be placed runner-up. His gloriously deadpan style has developed well in the last couple of years and he now has the assured performance needed to make such a downbeat demeanour work in a boozy club. A classic example is the slow confession about how he found Jesus: the slight unease that the slow and deliberate pace creates before he reveals his punchline was simply delicious.

Last year’s winner, Seann Walsh, rounded off proceedings with a headline set that showed exactly what an accomplished act the still relative newcomer has become in the last 12 months – and gave a hint to just where tonight's finest could be heading.

Mark Thomas - Live Review

Since MPs, not bankers, have become public enemy number one, this now inaccurately named tour is more about politics than economics. And Thomas takes a suitably democratic approach to the material, with his big idea being to draw up a manifesto, based on policies suggested by audiences around the country, then do his best to enact them. He’s even got think tanks set up to test the viability of some of the more intricate ideas.

The suggestions, as you might expect, range from the sublime to the ridiculous: from ensuring the 1967 Abortion Act applies to Northern Ireland to disguising panthers as foxes to terrify the aristocracy. Thomas has fun with the silly ones, but nudges the audience towards voting for those with a serious agenda. Nonetheless, the people of Leicester tonight insisted that the policy ‘people who sell homeopathic medicines should only ever be treated with homeopathy on the NHS’ is the one that should be adopted.

This is clearly a show that will morph as the tour goes on, with Thomas planning all manner of direct action en route. At this show, he urged his audience to join him the next day in a demo outside the local HM Revenue & Customs office calling for an invasion of the Jersey tax haven, followed by a mass descent on MP Keith Vaz’s constituency surgery to demand a go on his lavish, taxpayer-funded silk cushions.

The bulk of the show discusses the best such suggestions from tonight and earlier in the tour, mixed with a few from Thomas’s personal manifesto, such as ditching the National Anthem and enforcing a maximum wage, with allows him to perform some more polished set pieces, more substantial than simply tagging a gag onto the end of a serious point.

Mind you, for all the world-changing political posturing, the one thing that winds Thomas up the most is visiting Ikea on a Sunday afternoon, in a rather conventional, if furiously animated, stand-up rant. See, it’s not all edgy stuff…

Unlike Thomas’s previous shows tackling the likes of the arms trade or Coca-Cola’s corporate practices, there is no one defining villain here, which does mean there’s not a strong narrative drive. It’s more of a scattergun approach to much that he sees wrong with Britain and the world, so he’s not short of causes. Some aims are clearly more practical and achievable than others, but there’s a lot of activity here which everyone is urged to follow – and participate in – via Thomas’s lively website. Yes, this is a comedy show with homework.

But if anyone can recruit followers to the cause, it’s him. Campaigning often sounds worthy and po-faced, riven with internectine rifts between ideological factions, but Thomas makes campaigning sound playful. Changing the world becomes a game, so we start to cheer every one of his smart-arse victory against the State as we would cheer a football team. He got his DNA records erased? Starts suing the police for an unlawful stop-and-search? Launches legal action against the on-his-way-out Commons Speaker over the expenses scandal? 3-0 to the good guys.

The fragmented nature of the show, plus the fact it uses so many often baffling audience suggestions, does mean that the quality of the comedy is inconsistent, but Thomas’s passion and good humour as he squares up to The Man means that his call to arms is as entertaining as it is well-intentioned. If the revolution is going to start anywhere, here seems as likely a place as any.