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.

A few short capsules here as I’m cramming previews for Edinburgh, but I’ll be back soon with a lengthy report on my most anticipated shows for Fringe 2025.

Australian stalwart Dave Hughes takes the legend slot for July, dropping into the Bill Murray for a much more intimate performance than the concert halls he’d be playing back in Sydney. 

Hughesy started in the early 1990s and has been a fixture of the Australian media landscape for at least 25 years. He’s comfortably at the stage now where he can do routines about appearing on I’m A Celebrity or The Masked Singer and it authentically sounds like just another day at the office. Amazingly he’s only in town to attend the wedding of Mel B at St Paul’s Cathedral, and decided to make a little holiday out of it.

Comedically, he’s about as straight down the middle as it’s possible to get; Australia’s Michael McIntyre, albeit with a little more larrikin edge. Charmingly describing himself as ‘going out’ with his wife of 25 years, most of his non-celeb material is about her and their kids: hating his daughter’s ballet recital, getting body-shamed by his youngest, and trying to have sex with his wife while maintaining an open bedroom door policy for anyone in the house prone to nightmares. 

Safe to say it’s too broad to ever really light my fire, but these guys usually have staying power for a reason, and Hughes makes his craft look a lot easier than it probably is.

A little more zeitgeisty is Wanting To Be Cool, Having to Be Funny, a mixed-bill night hosted at a socialist theatre co-op in South London by Jack Shep. 

I’ve really never seen a younger, more uniformly stylised crowd of people in their early twenties, even at a Black Midi gig. Even headliner Sam Campbell was feeling his age at 33, to say nothing of myself. 

Funny then, that the song remains the same. I don’t know why I thought that a comedy night owned, operated and attended exclusively by Gen Z would feel qualitatively different to everything else on the circuit, but in the end it really didn’t – only a couple of the reference points had been updated. That’s not to do them down at all: they have a lovely atmosphere there, and it’s a great place to catch young comics before some of them presumably hit the big time.

Back at the Bill Murray, Ben Pope was previewing his new Fringe show The Cut, all about his experience getting circumcised as an adult. Trying to spin an hour-long Edinburgh show out of a relatively minor medical procedure is by this point a time-honoured practice among comedians, but I liked this one. 

With his soft voice and puppyish demeanour, Pope is a very gentle comedian, but he has an unmistakeable way with words, and mines a lot of borderline raunchy humour from his medical adventure with an organ that, until this process, "had only been shown to a handful of the UK’s most benevolent women."

Next, at the Pen Theatre, a refreshing blast of pure sketch from Will (Bicknell-Found) & Noah (Geelan), the double act that was formed when Alex Franklin went her own way and left Chuck Salmon. 

Utilising the classic dynamic of one clean-cut, one slightly more hairy, these boys have prepared a very enjoyable suite of sketches loosely based around the inescapable grasp of phone culture. Don’t expect anything serious though – these are quick, goofy blasts of nonsense given a driving force by a catchy musical bed. Especially for a debut sketch show, this held a lot of promise and had me laughing throughout.

Very very occasionally, the seeds of something like Will & Noah become the towering oak of SplitLip’s Operation Mincemeat. The West End’s best-ever reviewed show transferred to Broadway in February for a limited run which has now been extended to February 2026, and has won Jak Malone a Tony award for originating the role of Hester Leggatt. 

Back in the UK, it rumbles on in its home of the Fortune Theatre, having recently refreshed the cast. Cards on the table: this is the best musical I’ve ever seen. More cards on the table: I’m not really a fan of musicals. 

But maybe that’s the appeal of something like Operation Mincemeat, which takes the very unmusical premise of the titular military intelligence operation against the Axis during the Second World War and spins it into gold – it has very little of the operatic quality or overweening emotion of most West End musicals, having evolved out of the cynicism and argy-bargy of the UK’s fringe sketch scene. 

SplitLip’s exquisitely clear and clever staging takes the hat and moustache-swapping of sketch to a glorious nth degree, until the whole show becomes a delightful Rube Goldberg device of actors switching roles, jokes and props at lightning speed.

On this, my second viewing, I wanted to shout out the new cast. Following up the originators is never an easy task, but with all due deference, I think these guys might be even better than the creators. A bit like when Lin-Manuel Miranda handed over Alexander Hamilton, the new bunch of musical theatre veterans are able to bring their training to bear and cream it out of the park. 

Particularly, Peter McGovern’s Charles Cholmondeley is a little more human, with access to greater reserves of pathos, and Alex Young as Ewen Montagu was a clear standout, able to get laughs out of the few lines that aren’t already jokes.

 If you saw the 74 five-star reviews and thought that maybe it wasn’t for you, I implore you to stop hitting yourself. Operation Mincemeat is the kind of comedy that makes you inadvisably proud to be British.

Published: 21 Jul 2025