Show Rating:

Excellent Scottish comic JoJo Sutherland appeared in Channel 4’s Wife Swap and experienced first hand both the unreality of reality TV and the resultant publicity.

This two-hander is written and performed by JoJo and Jackie Callan
and directed by Gowan Calder, collectively calling themselves Onehanded Women. It is both funny and enlightening, though not earth-shattering in its revelations.

It centres on JoJo's variable experiences on Wife Swap intercut with her swapee's imagined experiences and, in the middle, includes ten minutes of interactive game show with the two actresses trying to find the 'cleanest' members of the audience by question-and-hand-ups.

This all seems unecessarily complicated.

I would have been perfectly happy just listening to the very funny JoJo as stand-up comic or as herself, monologuing about her experiences. The addition of a scripted extra character and the game show sequence add nothing. It's as if they were incorporated and it was turned into a 'production' because Onehanded Women exist rather than because the material itself merits the format.

There are serious points in here - about how perceptions and assumptions swamp facts and reality, how cutting 240 hours of tape  down to one hour of TV enabled the press to call JoJo a ‘lazy wife swap slob’. And she gives the best advice I've ever heard for people appearing in TV documentaries: keep changing the tops of what you wear so the editors can't intercut scenes shot at different times.

JoJo has now appeared in three theatrical presentations at the Fringe and never appeared there in a pure solo stand-up show. She should do.