Live review

You know you’re on to a good bill when Phil Nichol is your opener. But the high-energy Canadian forfeited his usual headliner status for good reason – one of Tommy Tiernan’s all-too-infrequent gigs on British soil.

The passionate Irishman was headlining the second night inside the Greenwich Comedy Festival marquee erected in the grounds of the historic Old Naval College. As well as the imposing backdrop, organisers had employed some elegant touches to bring a touch of class to proceedings: local beer at the bar, a jazz band for the intervals, posh food to take away.

In fact, the only thing they didn’t seem to invest in was the technical requirements of the stage. The lighting was so bad, comedians were either in brilliant white light or utter darkness, even just slightly off centre stage, with one patch of deep red to offer some odd variety. And the cheek mic employed so Tiernan could be at his most expressive sounded like a toy megaphone, when it wasn’t failing altogether, and was swiftly abandoned.

Still, such technical malfunctions aside, you couldn’t fault the bill. Dan Atkinson – by far the least famous person on stage – set the bar high with some hugely accomplished compering. He bantered just enough to set up Larry the policeman in the front row as the willing stooge for the night before slipping seamlessly into his own material, obviously aware that too much audience chit-chat can alienate those at the back of a 1,000-seater tent who simply cannot connect with those nearest the stage.

Atkinson’s winning persona is of an elegant wreck, an irresponsible drunk living in near poverty but attempting to be smartly dressed beneath his mop of unkempt hair. It’s an appealing mix, in equal part admirable and unenviable, onto which Atkinson dollops a generous ladleful of easy charm.

He playfully chats about his life on the road, of other gigs, of the contempt in which he holds his landlady, a wealthy Tory MP, and her feckless son – illustrated with a fine use of English that plucks out just the right word to give an anecdote impact, and delivered with a compelling passion.

Nichol’s passion is of a more intimidating variety, apparently possessed by some mischievous, possibly malevolent, spirit as he clumps around the stage with his T-shirt over his head, intimidates the front row with some predatory flirting or prancing gaily to demonstrate his idea of combating urban violence with contemporary dance.

There are a few new one-liners from his 2009 Edinburgh show – delivered with verve rather the deadpan he adopted for this year’s Fringe – but mostly this is the set Nichol’s been doing for years. But it ages well, as it’s based on the irresistible power of his performance much more than the cleverness of his material. The unpredictability of this apparent maniac gives the act an air of danger for those new to him; but even when you know it’s a well-practised shtick, the sheer energy, and the audience reaction, provides plenty of joyful abandon.

And who can tire of hearing Only Gay Eskimo, even if the catalogue of musicians he imitates when he breaks off into different styles could do with modernisation.

Second act, like our headliner, is another relative recluse from live performing. But we should be grateful Kevin Eldon dusted down his usual poet character, Paul Hamilton, to read from his never-quite published anthology Shadows Of Reflections.

He is an appealing mix of twee pretentiousness and a naïvety which he is too self-absored to ever be able to acknowledge. One-liners in which the preamble is the feed and the poem the punchline sit alongside ineffectual ‘topical’ pieces with all the contemporary biting satire of a Sixties Punch magazine. He perfectly captures that certain middle-class Guardian-reading smugness, which somehow seems apt for a lavish gig in affluent Greenwich, and while the character has limited potential, Eldon exploits it well.

That middle-class demographic wouldn’t enclose Tiernan, who for all his home-nation fame and Celtic Tiger wealth, prides himself on remaining an eejit on the fringes of acceptable society. He tells us be brought a swanky car, but looked such a tit in it that he swapped it for a 1981 Ford Capri, that was somehow more ‘him’; an anecdote that firmly establishes his credentials.

He shouts himself hoarse, as usual, with an impassioned delivery in which every syllable is pushed home with the force of a JCB – yet somehow maintaining the nuances of the material in a perfect combination of power and precision that engineers would boast about.

As he talks about his life as a father of five, and in particular of the trials of trying to have sex while there are small children in the house, everything is so delightfully described that you can picture perfectly the scenarios, and snort laughs of recognition and embarrassment at every one. Apparently throwaway phrases have the elegance and memorability of other comedians’ finely honed catchphrases, while the subject matter is disarmingly honest, if largely the sort of topics you should probably avoid in polite company.

It’s an irresistible combination of frankness and fiery delivery. If only we saw it more often on these shores.

Reviewed by: Steve Bennett

Published: 11 Sep 2009