It seems to be the season for light entertainers to show us their musical chops, with Nick Knowles, Bardley Walsh and Jason Manford all doing their level best to prove that they are All Round Entertainters. Matt Berry, however, provides a rather different twist on the comedian-troubadour trope.
Although primarily known for "Guns Don’t Kill People, Rappers Do", Goldie Lookin' Chain have actually been around longer than you'd imagine. The Welsh comedy collective was formed at the turn of the millennium, and Fear of a Welsh Planet is, staggeringly, their 20th LP. Back in the day, the boys would wear shell suits and rap about council estates. But that was years ago. Surely, by now, they've moved on?
Not a bit of it. On the new album, the lads still sound like a Welsh version of Insane Clown Posse with added blue humour. The rudest track is "Sex People" which discusses "shooting each other in the ass with a sex gun". The rest aren't far behind: The narrator of "Bonk Eye" declares "your missus thinks I'm staring at her tits all night", while "I Got A Van" contains the immortal lines, "We don't need to go to a hotel/We've got my van if you don't mind the smell".
Still, no-one expects Oscar Wilde from GLC. Surely, the main thing is simply whether it makes you laugh. Unfortunately, there's precious little here to raise a decent smile. Even those few lines that do possess a certain goofy charm are ruined by GLC's awful DIY approach to music-making. Much of the album sounds like it was played on a Casio keyboard with tinny beats that wear you down like Chinese water torture.
You wonder why the boys don't try something new. Especially given the goodwill the band tends to generate. Their former singer, Maggot, was once a cultural icon (of sorts). And let us not forget that GLC were the inspiration behind the hilarious YouTube hit "Newport State of Mind". But GLC have long since stopped being funny. On their website, the band joke about not wanting to be seen as Oldie Looking Chain. It's not their age that's the problem. It's doing untold versions of the same bad joke.
Overleaf: Goldie Lookin' Chain's video for "I Got a Van"
That the countryside is a dump where all good things come to a dead end is hardly a new punchline. There are plenty of novels and memoirs, and indeed newspaper columns, about trading the toxic metropolis for the green and unpleasant pastures of the rural life. The joke is it’s mainly horrible for a narrow spectrum of predictable reasons. It’s muddy, petrol costs a bomb, bored kids are forever after lifts, and as for the people…
What do you call a woman who murdered Dirty Den, is the darling of TV comedy producers, writes radio plays about the golden age of Hollywood, hosted and judged Channel 4’s Jewish Mum of the Year, was until just a few weeks ago tap dancing through eight shows a week in Stepping Out in the West End and was runner-up on Celebrity Mastermind with her specialist subject:
Perfect comedies for the country-house opera scene? Mozart's Figaro and Così, Strauss's Ariadne - and Britten's Albert Herring, now 70 years and a few days old, but as ageless as the rest. With the passing of time it's ever more obvious that this satire of provincial East Anglian tricks and manners also has universal appeal and stands with the best.
In the dog-eat-dog world of White Gold it’s 1983, when greed was about to become good and (as the show’s creator Damon Beesley puts it) “a time when having double-glazed patio doors installed meant you were winning at life”. The streets were full of sludge-coloured cars from British Leyland, and Duran Duran and Bonnie Tyler ruled the charts.
Men playing boys playing girls, women and men, all female parts convincingly falsettoed and high musical standards as backbone: Sasha Regan's single-sex Gilbert and Sullivan has worked a special magic on Iolanthe and The Pirates of Penzance, HMS Pinafore and now The Mikado, not so much. Energetic song and dance are still in evidence.
Jeremy Hardy is very happy to mock his audience and they love it. One of the biggest laughs of the night is when a punchline refers to us as a collection of “middle class white people”. Being Brighton, he goes further, explaining how tolerant the city is but that everyone’s frustrated as they have no-one to tolerate. Any immigrants, he explains, take one look and head down to Devon “where they have cream teas”. His “demographic”, as he refers to them, are certainly an older crowd, mostly retirement age, probably Radio 4 listeners who’ve heard him on endless quiz shows, but the comedian is full of political pith and vinegar that would appeal to anyone sick of this country’s ongoing political decline.
It’s a show of two parts (with a 20 minute interval), each around half an hour long, and it truly flies by. He’s not a comic who, as far as it’s possible to tell, has a tightly plotted set that comes to a heady peak at its close. He’s much more of a rambler, interspersing thoughts on a wide variety of subjects, from Jeremy Corbyn to English Sunday lunches in the 1970s, with punchy surreal asides, and oddball flights of fancy. Clad in a blue denim shirt and grey-black jeans, with a small greying quiff, he’s a lean and diminutive presence, but has a wry way about him that’s contagious.
He claims, near the start, that he no longer believes politics can be influenced by a comedian, so he’s going to leave that alone, then proceeds not to for nearly two hours. Whether he’s assessing Jeremy Hunt or UKIP’s Paul Nuttall, his thoughts chime with everyone here, it seems, and, of course, he can’t leave Theresa May alone, relentlessly referring to her miserable presence and general inhumanity. I enjoyed the line where he talks about people being bullish about “our country” with regard to asylum seekers when, in fact, it’s all "owned by dukes, pension funds, the Russian mafia and the church”.
It’s not all politics. He talks a lot of his recently deceased parents, their lives and values, in a way that's both touching and playful. Although, in its way, that does eventually turn out to be socio-political too. They become emblems for the arrival of a more caring society at the end of the Second World War. However, he's also a snappy performer of silly routines and voices. At one point he combines the talents of Nicola Sturgeon with those of the pop singer Kelis for a bizarrely brilliant turn, and later on, his bananas send-up of television hospital drama is a highlight of the evening.
For me, another moment that absolutely clicked early on was a ruthless assessment of the modern middle-aged person’s obsession with publicizing their physical exercise regimen on social media. “If you want to go for a run, just go for a run, you don’t have to tell me about it,” he says, exasperatedly. “I can’t stand the camaraderie around fitness.” From that point this expert raconteur had another listener wrapped around his finger, heading into a night whose chattiness and wit masked a lancet-sharp intelligence with precision topical bite.
Overleaf: Clip of Jeremy Hardy being funny at the Whitby Festival last year
Trimmings, trimmings. They prove the final straw for Molière’s Harpagon in this new adaptation of the classic French comedy-farce. The menu for his wedding banquet – which he doesn’t want to spend a centime more on than he has to – is being concocted by chef-cum-dogsbody, Jacques. Soup, yes; a bit of meat, possibly.
Nick Mohammed doesn't do things by halves as his chatty airhead alter ego Mr Swallow. Forget the scholarly approach of finely researched biographies of Harry Houdini (“boring!”); his “first-ever entirely true auto-biopic” of the magician and escapologist comes complete with conjuring tricks, song-and-dance numbers and a whole lot of laughs.