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.

Aside from just being a great show, the incredible value of Taskmaster in a largely post-panel show climate has been its role in creating a pipeline into the home for new comedic voices, offering consistent exposure and a familiar setting to a lucky chosen few, enough to almost guarantee that a decent section of the audience are going to fall in love. 

It’s wonderful to think how many people are discovering deep feelings for Phil Ellis and Ania Magliano right now as the end of series 20 hoves into view.

Many of the true heads especially love Taskmaster’s foreign variants, which sometimes feel like insights into the comedic underground of a parallel reality. It’s the same feeling as when you get to see Spider-Man Noir in Into The Spider-Verse. 

In Taskmaster NZ, the set is the same, the show is the same, but Greg Davies is now a granite-faced newsreader with no sense of humour, and Jon Richardson is now an insane Filipino man with a bowl-cut, the magnificent David Correos.

Correos has titled his show at the Bill Murray ‘thank you r/taskmaster’, which is as clear an acknowledgement as any of the role that Taskmaster and its devoted fan community, especially via the show's subreddit, has had on essentially crowd-funding his debut UK mini-tour.

Correos has performed at the Fringe before, where he has a reputation as an unusually artistic and challenging comedian. For this show and its new, relatively mainstream audience, Correos is managing a tricky balancing act by staying true to his artform without pushing away prime-time TV viewers. He’s bridging the gap between the live and TV version of himself, as many comedians have had to do before.

In practice, that means he spends a lot of this show describing performances rather than actually performing. We hear about the show where he ate cat food, and the one where he stuck a bike pump up his arse, and it’s all good fun, the accessible reminiscences of a wild man, a smart way to ease an audience into more outré comedic concepts without bringing the bike pump out on stage and scaring the parents. 

He’s also testing the theory that it’s funnier to hear about someone putting a bike pump up their arse rather than actually seeing it, which is a viewpoint I have some sympathy for. And of course if you’re used to the more extreme stuff and perhaps anticipating it, he still spends a lot of the runtime shirtless and covered in various substances.

Whether he’s diluting himself or not, he’s a great performer, able to swing between feverish observational material and real underground clowning stuff in the span of an hour and make it feel consistent.

There’s a great sense that his material gradually builds in intensity and overwhelms you, which comes as a relief from washing-line shows that start and end strong while sagging in the middle. When he talks about being divisive on stage, or asks if we can see the art behind the chaos, it makes me wish for a little more blitheness. Let those aspects speak for themselves, and leave those who don’t get it in the dust. But his new path is clearer and funnier, and it suits him. Hopefully this tour can be a second foothold for him in the UK.

Newcomer nominees Ada Player and Bron Waugh brought their debut hour The Origin of Love to the Soho Theatre last week, a sort of sketch revue on the subject of love, with live musical accompaniment from Ed Lyness on keyboards. 

I first encountered Ada and Bron at Lorna Rose Treen’s Lorndrette, where they were playing the rock n roll lovers Maggie and Richard, seemingly having stepped out of a Meatloaf video. Those characters are still probably the highlight of the show, and are given more of an arc over their repeated appearances, in a story encompassing romance, betrayal, growth, and intentionally shitting yourself in the name of love.

The sordid 1950s affair of Judy and Dennis that bookends the hour is unfortunately its weakest part, characterised by performances that are 20 per cent too broad to be truly effective, but there’s plenty of great material in the middle. The two medieval goblin characters are a smash, and the pair achieve some interesting tonal variation in the back half: Waugh’s monologue from a deranged stalker has some genuine threat to it, and Player as a heartbroken woman suckered into a rebound relationship has real pathos It’s a wise decision to explore this wide emotional register – a whole hour of Pythonesque broadness wouldn’t have had the same staying power. 

Throughout, the Looney Tunes backing of Lyness and the two strong performances keep bringing it home, especially the unconventional squeaky charisma of Ada Player, who you could see having a rich career as a series of wacky best friends on mainstream sitcoms.

Finally, it was great to see Bella Hull packing out the upstairs room at Soho, making a persuasive case for being moved to the larger basement room. Hull has been building an audience steadily since her debut, and while she’s always been one of those rare comics who reliably gets better year-on-year, her new show Doctors Hate Her is a huge step forwards, so densely loaded with great jokes that it’s almost unwieldy.

Perhaps Hull is underrated because she doesn’t use a broad stage persona, and her shows never revolve around a press release-worthy narrative hook.

Instead, a bit like Ian Smith, she’s just a stellar joke writer and a conduit for relatable gripes. Her life in this show has taken a downturn since dumping her boyfriend for being too ‘fine’ and has left her Stranded in the box room of a high rise with a receptionist called Abigail. 

Struggling to sleep without watching hours of grim video essays and feeling existentially caged in the meat prison of her own body, she Retreat obsessively into bitter thoughts about her ex-boyfriend’s mum’s casserole and fantasy quandaries like whether she’d be gay if she was a mouse.

Her outlook is sometimes so hilariously bleak that it feels like it should be delivered with a thousand yard stare, but she’s more liable to deliver it with a wide smile and a laugh that’s musical yet forced. 

The jokes are so frequent that she’s developed a habit of tossing them off, gliding over the surface of the monologue rather than putting her weight into the punchlines, and it’s that performance aspect that could be fine-tuned to squeeze the last drops of juice from this deliciously sour collection of gags.

In a few years she’ll be getting a main prize nomination every year, just like Ian Smith, and probably being repeatedly pipped to the post by someone with a more saleable narrative. More grist to the gripe mill, with any luck.

Published: 27 Oct 2025