Jeremy Lion's Happy Christmas

Note: This review is from 2003

Review by Steve Bennett

It's Christmas! No, it's August, but children's entertainer Jeremy Lion reveals Yuletide secrets to grown ups. Giant snowmen! A turkey! Brandy butter! A tree! Part of The Consultants, Perrier Best Newcomers 2002.

Whether there's room in comedy for two drunken entertainer characters remains to be seen, but if Johnny Vegas ever does fulfil his potential to self-destruct, then Jeremy Lion will be there to take his place.

Though there are plenty of similarities, Justin Edwards has also managed to do his own thing with the belching, bitter persona - most notably in making him a washed-up children's entertainer.

This gives him the excuse to dress up in tacky gingham hat, yellow shirt and ill-fitting red jacket, and provides the justification to have a lot of fun with props, songs and sketches.

One of the highlights of this Christmas show, for example, is Lord Sebastian The Aristocratic Turkey, a poor-quality ventriloquist's dummy - complete with a brilliantly unrealistic decoy arm.

Not quite everything works as the show degenerates slowly into booze-fuelled oblivion; a medley of carols seems especially pointless - and technical problems prevented us seeing the planned nativity slide show.

Two formidable set pieces raise the show well above expectations, though. The first is terrifyingly gruesome snowman's outfit that would permanently scar any child subjected to its horrors. Adults, too, may find it hard to wipe the hilariously inappropriate image from their minds

The second is the truly impressive, and perhaps inevitable, display of drinking, with Edwards necking a good half a bottle of wine during an increasingly slurred and incoherent version of The Twelve Days Of Christmas.

Edwards expertly extracts every last drop of comedy from such appalling behaviour, his grotesque creation always accurately, if exaggeratedly, observed and brilliantly brought to drunken life. At its best, this is a superb, if little-known, fringe gem.

Review date: 1 Jan 2003
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett

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