Phil Ellis has been plying his trade for a while and is an established performer at the Edinburgh Fringe, where he has won awards – including the Edinburgh Comedy Award Panel Prize in 2014. And now happily he has come to a wider audience through his appearance on series 20 of Taskmaster.
He makes a wry reference to the Channel 4 show during his mock bigging-up introduction by DJ sidekick (played by comic Tom Short) – who points out “loser” Ellis didn’t win. It’s typical of the self-mockery in Bath Mat, his touring show which I saw at the Leicester Square Theatre, in which Ellis paints a picture of his life (mostly not to be believed). He’s happy to play the fool, but there are some tantalising glimpses of a life beyond.
Like all of Ellis’s shows, Bath Mat has free-form elements and lots of audience interaction (which can go nowhere, or be fruitful, as both proved on the night I saw it), which belies the craft that goes into creating the kind of stage mayhem that he does so expertly. He works an audience well, even inviting heckles at one point – although one unexpected shout-out nearly undid him, being one of the funniest lines of the night.
There’s little narrative in Bath Mat beyond hearing about how, in his mid-forties, Ellis moved back in with his parents in Preston after living in a house share in London. He talks about any number of subjects, segueing from the benefits of AI to giving unsolicited parenting advice and the delights of roadkill to his views of “non-jobs” such as pet masseuses.
There are clever callbacks and long-form gags before he finishes with his paean to Preston in a reworked version of John Denver’s Country Roads.
The show overran, which meant the law of diminishing returns for some of the gags and a chunk of the crowd work. But Bath Mat is daft, unchallenging fun and Ellis is a convivial host.
