Review by Steve Bennett

More than 1,500 people packed into London’s Victoria Palace Theatre last night, but the comedian they had all come for would never appear.

But you couldn’t miss Linda Smith’s spirit hanging over Tippy Top, the three-and-a-half-hour tribute to her life, and fundraiser for her favourite causes.

This theatre is normally home to the Billy Eliot musical, so how apt that now the focus was on another performer who broke into a field supposedly alien, if not downright hostile, to her gender. When Linda started in comedy, as host Jo Brand pointed out, there were little more than a dozen female stand-ups on the circuit.

For her Middle England Radio 4 fans, it is perhaps easy to forget her roots at the vanguard of the alternative comedy scene, a movement defined as much by its radical, seditious politics as it was the desire to make people laugh.

But she ‘slipped under Radio 4’s radar’, in Mark Steel’s words. An erudite woman consumed by those very English interests of jazz, cricket and gardening, she fitted the demographic perfectly. But, as her barbed jokes demonstrated, she was never part of the Establishment; her ideas of decency meant raging against the rich and powerful who abused their position, but with measured, resigned calmness rather than furious ranting.

Just look at the Left-wing diehards who tuned out in honour of their friend tonight: Mark Steel, Mark Thomas, Jeremy Hardy, Brand herself… Their shared sense of social injustice defined Smith more than the radio panel games, also reconstructed here, which provided her audience.

Thomas regaled us with tales of his exploits at a London arms fair, soon to be included in a book exposing the trade, while Steel skilfully weaved elements of his own stand-up set with tributes to Linda – a task that made easier by their common values. Hardy, meanwhile, took part in three panel games, starting with a gremlins-blighted few rounds of Just A Minute with Nicholas Parsons, Paul Merton, Chris Neill and Liza Tarbuck.

A version of The News Quiz followed, with Simon Hoggart chairing, probably for the last time, Sandi Toksvig, Andy Hamilton and Phill Jupitus – whose contributions gave the game a more raucous tone than normal, not least thanks to his rip-roaring line defending a near-the-knuckle joke about Paul McCartney and Heather Mills: ‘He fucked a pirate, he was asking for it.’

However, the highlight, for many, was I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, with Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden and Barry Cryer being given the normal ‘silly things to do’ by Humphrey Lyttelton, such as singing Girlfriend In A Coma to the tune of Tiptoe Through The Tulips.

Linda’s deadpan, droll style echoed through the choice of comedians. Brand (who never got a bigger laugh than when quoting Smith’s lines); Arthur Smith, whose grandfather Jimmy once trod these boards as a comedian, too; and Hattie Hayridge, whose ‘can’t-be-arsed’ delivery and clever one-liners makes her the closest equivalent to Linda you could get – and that’s quite a compliment.

There was music, too, starting with the arrhythmic jazz of Sandi Russell and her trio (a genre I can’t abide), Humph with his band, and a stupidly barnstorming number by Barry Cryer and Ronnie Golden.

Singing Scouse comic Steve Gribbin was also on the bill with some snappy one-line songs – and, for stand-up nostalgia buffs – was accompanied on his rather mundane George Bush-bashing song by Brian Mulligan, marking a reunion of the long defunct Skint Video double act. Musical comedian Richard Morton also joined in.
And, for a finale, The Blockheads, serving to highlight another great entertainer lost before his time. Jupituss stood in for Ian Dury… at least until the last song, when we were promised special vocal talents. A little knowing laugh rattled round the auditorium: ‘Ah,’ everyone thought, ‘this’ll be Jeremy Hardy’, a man whose famously appalling singing voice had previously been given an airing during the Clue round.

But no. Instead a selection of Radio 4 announcers walked on. Hearing Sex And Drugs And Rock And Roll sung in the mellifluous tones of Brian Perkins or the prim and proper Queen’s English of Charlotte Green is something Linda Smith would no doubt have been delighted by. She mightn’t have been there in person to see it, but in such moments of incongruity, her spirit lives on.

Steve Bennett
June 5, 2006

Review date: 1 Jan 2006
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett