✭✭✭✭ One of several ‘work-in-progress’ shows that premiered at the Fringe-lite festival last year, It’s Best You Hear It From Me returns as the finished product this year. The main changes aren’t the result of audience feedback – last year’s show could easily have gone on the road with no alterations – but instead come […]
Review: Charlie Williams – Eh up, Me Old Flowers
✭✭ Billed as the Charlie Williams Story, this is the story of the first black comedian to become a household name in the UK. Sadly, caught between being a This is Your Life style biography and an attempt to view 1970s comedy through a 2020s lens, it fails to deliver. We see him visited by someone from […]
Review: Tim Key – Mulberry
✭✭✭✭✭ Tim Key had the showbiz world at his feet, about to appear on Pointless Celebrities and also lined up for the part of a paedophile in an episode of Vera. And then the country went into lockdown, and now two years later he’s back playing student union gigs wearing a tracksuit. Welcome to the […]
Review: Marcus Brigstocke – absolute shower
✭✭✭✭ Marcus Brigstocke is clearly delighted at being able to return to stand-up and to the Fringe after a pandemic-enforced absence, but he doesn’t feel that lockdown was without its benefits, the most notable of which was finally being able to tell parents and relatives that they couldn’t come to stay at Christmas. This hour-long […]
Review: Jon Culshaw is Les Dawson – Flying High
✭✭✭✭ Even if you are unfamiliar with Les Dawson and his place in the 70s and 80s comedy pantheon, this play by Olivier Award-winning writer Tim Withnall and performed by the impressionist Jon Culshaw is well worth a visit. Deliberate mangling of his piano renditions was one of the many things for which Dawson was […]