Tim Harding's comedy diary

Reviewer Tim Harding gives a rundown of the comedy he's been watching in London recently.

I’ve been wanting to catch a show from Leila Navabi for a while. Some performers just make a distinctive impression from a mile off, and Navabi is one of them, even before you hear the pitch that her new show Relay is a DIY one-woman punk musical about making a baby with your best friend’s sperm.

Navabi has charisma to burn, but this show at least has a pleasingly homemade feel that reminded me of other minor outliers like Josie Long or Jessie Cave. Performing against a quilted backdrop, she’s surrounded by hand-drawn cardboard cutouts of the characters in her story, accompanies herself on keytar, and occasionally breaks for simple animations that might illustrate, for example, how fertility treatments work for lesbian couples like Navabi and her partner.

By nature of its subject matter, her narrative about trying to get pregnant using donor sperm dodges some of the kids’ TV associations that are caused by her presentational style, but she still does a little too much educating for this Soho Theatre audience of queer-coded media types. It’s a common pitfall when you have to ply your trade at the Fringe as well as in pubs and clubs up and down the land, but she could have run a little faster and trusted us to keep up. 

On this particular evening, perhaps the result of tech issues, there was an odd hesitancy to the performance as well, Navabi often quieter when singing than when speaking. Her movement around the stage is under-choreographed, and the combination of those factors made this soppy, maximalist show feel out-of-practice, although it certainly leaves you feeling warm and fuzzy.

Downstairs in the same venue, indulging in a little sentimentality himself, Ed Night was on masterful form for a run of 2025’s Your Old Mucker, the show that won him his most recent Edinburgh Award nomination – belated recognition for a comedian who’s been turning out hours of brilliant comedy on an annual basis.

Here is a writer who’s not afraid to challenge his audience, often affecting a kind of streetwise haughtiness that complements his writing style – ‘obviously I’m speaking to you guys, but only in the way the first violin speaks to the Albert Hall.’

 It’s interesting to hear him pause halfway through to talk about his approach to his material – he obsessively rewrites for increased density, and it gives each sentence a chiselled and muscular quality, where each word has been chosen for maximum force.

In contrast, the structure of this show is much looser, following Night as he takes a Sebald-esque ramble around his Streatham ends, pausing to remember his Grandad, with whom he was extremely close, or gossip about Dan Tiernan’s crystal addiction (a fascinating thread that’s been bubbling under a few shows I’ve seen recently). 

The darkness of previous shows has made a little room for something more whimsical, like a fantasy in which he’s a guide dog, although he still threatens suicide at least twice, so I suppose whimsy is relative. What’s not relative is the creativity and body-blow impact of his punchlines, which had this audience rollicking. Still stronger than any of his contemporaries and still bafflingly underrated, it’s time for people to start catching up.

Once punchy himself and now going delightfully to seed, Greg Davies brought his latest tour Full Fat Legend to the Hammersmith Apollo, once again trading in the imposing tailoring of Taskmaster for ill-fitting jeans and an adidas top. 

It’s always interesting going to see Davies live after having been exposed to multiple series of Taskmaster. He uses high status so well on that show, but in his self-penned material he’s seemingly addicted to deeply humiliating himself in an almost ritualised fashion, and it’s that tension that powers this show, where he recounts every indignity he’s suffered over the last few years and tries to square it with the bald men in vans who shout ‘legend’ at him when they see him in the street. 

Which one is he? Human shipwreck with bowel control problems and a prostate the size of a grapefruit, or the country’s most lusted-after giant and hero to middle-aged men everywhere?

His voice (alternately shrieking and hoarsely whispering), his physique (alternately round and long), and his upbringing in rural Shropshire all remain invaluable comic tools, and Full Fat Legend is at its best when it gets into the stuff from his schooldays, even if there’s a slight sense that four specials in, he’s nearing the bottom of this particular barrel. Or being forced to pluck the taller tales from the shelf, whichever analogy you prefer. 

Other shows have had stronger anecdotes, but he’s so naturally funny and his rhythms are so practised that you wouldn’t necessarily notice, apart from when he indulges in a bit of Stewart Lee repetition that scans more as timewasting than anything else.

On the question of legend or loser, he lands on both simultaneously, which is key to his enduring appeal. As he well knows, the fact that he spent Christmas Day complaining to his brother-in-law about how long it takes him to wipe his arse is exactly the sort of thing that makes him aspirational.

Published: 2 Apr 2026