Harry Hill reminds us at one point during his latest touring show that he’s 60, but there’s no let-up in the energy he brings to New Bits and Greatest Hits, a pleasing mixture of old and new material showing he still packs a punch on stage.
There are sufficient new gags to justify the first part of the title, but equally enough old ones to keep his long-term fans happy – although the audience at Wilton’s Music Hall suggested that his fanbase now covers a few generations who appreciate Hill's madcap comedy.
The gags – visual, physical, outrageous puns and sly asides – come thick and fast, as the material jumps within a sentence from Davina McCall and What3words to Queen Camilla and then an audience singalong. The sheer volume of funnies is astonishing, while the cleverness of the material, with its deliberately anachronistic mentions of Dixons, Threshers and SCART leads, is impressive.
Away from the madcap comedy Hill throws in some political commentary too – about people who voted for Brexit, for instance, or intergenerational friction and cancel culture – but they’re carefully disguised among longer-form gags.
And while the material seems to ping-pong across several subjects, there’s a through line of sorts with his lengthy tale about his nan’s funeral wishes, another set-up that allows him to break into song several times in the two-hour show, including a Beyoncé number.
There’s a fair bit of audience interaction but it’s goodhearted fun where Hill is always the clown – and who wouldn’t want to play some interspecies Swingball anyway? Among the familiar content we also see Gary his mannequin son and Stouffer the blue cat.
If the first half of the two-hour show has mile-a-minute gags, the second half has more clowning, including a lengthy Beatles impressions routine that seems to be going nowhere until Hill breaks into song for a deliriously silly payoff.
It’s terrific, utterly daft fun – and the Beyoncé section is a showstopper.
