The Book of Blasphemy

Note: This review is from 2004

Review by Steve Bennett

It comes as no surprise when Biker Bob says he lives in Norwich. The show is a bit like meeting a loquacious Norfolk bloke who has been stranded for three months in a pub in Shepton Mallet on the way to the Glastonbury Festival. Pink Floyd is playing, but no loudspeakers are visible.

Biker Bob's God can make mistakes, particularly after meeting and mating with an ethereal female entity named Chance. God has lost three spaceships on the first manned mission to Mars. When God first sees them, they are leaving Earth. They suddenly disappear. Then they reappear circling Mars. The message is that God doesn't know what's going to happen next, any more than we do.

Biker Bob? Looks like a taxi driver. Talks like a barrow boy. Nice man. Nice idea. No big theory.

It is possible to make a lot of money from creating new religions or alternative, even comic, philosophies. Sadly Biker Bob won't. He's a pleasant middle-aged man who aspires to be a cross between Douglas Adams, Prof A.J. Ayers and Eddie Izzard but, instead, his true vocation lies more in becoming the definitive London cabbie he so resembles.

Sadly no blasphemy. Nor any laughs except, surreally, from a giggling group of four Germans in the audience. On the positive side, at least it makes a change from 20-year-old students striving for TV series and totty. And I wish Biker Bob luck in flogging a few copies of his real Book of Blasphemy on which the show was allegedly based.

Just two tips of advice, though, Bob. Don't keep the houselights on because you 'like to see faces'. It unsettles the audience. And enough, already, of telling us what we won't hear in the show but can read in the book - available for £9.95 in the foyer.

Through the power of Google, you can find that "Bob Hewett has reinvented himself as Biker Bob" and that he "had an unclouded childhood. When he grew up he had three children, who had pretty unclouded childhoods as well. He's still married to their mother. None of them understand why the world is run by unhappy people."

On the whole, I prefer the image of a loquacious Norfolk bloke stranded in a pub in Shepton Mallet.

Review date: 1 Jan 2004
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett

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