Tim Harding's comedy diary

Reviewer Tim Harding gives a rundown of the comedy he's been watching in London - in the last two weeks.

Of course one of the nice things about comedy is that it can happen almost anywhere. That said, dedicated fans of the live experience might find themselves following the laughs to some strange places; places that test the limits of suitability for the art form; places that make you ask, how did it even occur to someone to put on a gig here?

For example, I was surprised to find myself attending an edition of Suspiciously Cheap Comedy in the airy ballroom of the London Welsh Centre a few weeks ago, but had Kiri Pritchard-Maclean not decided to use that venue, my English-born Welsh nationalist cousin would never have attended, and would never have fallen in love with Tarot, her new favourite sketch group.

Returning for the latest run of their show Shuffle at the Soho Theatre last week, I was reminded how much affection I have for them as well. Specifically, there’s a particular type of looseness and anarchy that you can only get from friends mucking around on stage – they have the ability to surprise each other in ways that a solo performer can’t. 

Recently crowned as winners of the inaugural Next Big Thing award, which hopes to give bubbling acts a helpful push into the realms of mass media, it’s still a little hard to see how Tarot would transition successfully to a TV format. Their appeal is different from the scripted rigour of an act like Crybabies – so much of the fun of Tarot lies in the corpsing and mischief, usually generated by Ed Easton, who consistently pulls focus in this group in ways both positive (he’s very funny) and potentially limiting (his addiction to breaking the fourth wall is always going to be the enemy of a slick TV product).

Not that there’s any pressing need for them to make that transition when they work this well as a live act. Their sketches always have a twist or a hook or some grubby little bit of business carried over from their roots in Geins Family Giftshop – and a year into performing Shuffle it retains the exciting energy of all their shows, always on the verge of both coming together and falling apart.

Also new at Soho Theatre last week, Kieran Hodgson, whose latest show Big In America is an attempt to reckon with the changing status of the US in our hearts, minds, and on the world stage. 

It’s framed around the execution of a small role he scored in ill-fated 2023 superhero film The Flash – a one scene cameo as a guy making a sandwich, for which he nevertheless had to generate an American accent. 

Give a task like that to Kieran Hodgson though, and he’s not going to give you any old off-the-rack non-specific east/west coast generic American accent. This is a man who takes accents seriously, and who has here built an entire show about trying to find the accent that expresses America’s innermost soul in the age of Trump.

Like most of his shows, this one feels more like a Spalding Gray comic monologue than a normal hour of stand-up, although it’s not always clear why that should be. Something to do with the fact that he recites rather than extemporises, and the contrived narrative contortions he goes through to relate everything back to his chosen theme. 

Also, a certain underlying earnestness that is baked into his personality as a performer and never goes away no matter how cheeky he’s feeling. Hodgson is aware of all this, describing his core audience as ‘genial gay Doctor Who enthusiasts,’ and often making light of his propensity towards classical music and other expressions of his middle-class prissiness.

For those reasons, it’s a show that’s hard to fully embrace, despite a handful of really great lines (the reveal of John Major on Desert Island Discs almost made me choke) and a variety box of strong impressions. There’s a lack of stakes that runs through the hour right up until the final couple of minutes, when a certain malevolent spirit finally enters the room and everything suddenly gets scary and sad just in time for the show to end abruptly without closure.

For a demonstration of how to introduce malign energy into a comedy show without abruptly bringing the mood down, try Alice Cockayne, who was previewing her upcoming Fringe show Licensed Professional Trained Qualified at the Pleasance Theatre. 

Cockayne is a character comedian in the vein of Jamie Demetriou, and is similarly unafraid to get a lil freaky with it. The three main characters alternate scenes here, and all seem totally sui generis to me, although certain traits link them: wild staring eyes, relentless gum chewing and huge rubber tits. 

My favourite was the affectless brothel madam fielding phone calls for her ‘girls’ – a collection of doll heads in long luxurious wigs. Cockayne plays her as uncanny valley incarnate and beds her scenes with an ominous electro soundtrack, perfectly capturing the specific Lynchian foreboding of late-night Babestation in the early Noughties.

The Mother is perhaps even weirder, a constantly pregnant gothic simulacrum in an absurdly long red silk shroud, clambering through the crowd and mothering us all into a state of extreme discomfort. And I absolutely loved the conceit of the final character, a seemingly ordinary cleaning lady who finds something life-changing in the trash.

What’s particularly impressive about Cockayne’s characters is how impressionistically they’re painted: where a lot of character acts end up listing their invented biographical details, Cockayne’s don’t need to tell you who they are and their backstories remain largely unknown. Instead, each character’s vibe is conveyed through performance, audience interaction, music and snatches of dialogue, like you’re following someone on the street who’s talking to themselves.

 Even as a work in progress, awaiting some structural elements that will tie it together, this was some of the sharpest, scariest and funniest character comedy I’ve seen in some time.

Published: 23 Jun 2025