Milton Jones On The Road

DVD review by Steve Bennett

Milton Jones is a overhead projector comedian in a PowerPoint world; charming and quirky, if a little off the pace everyone else.

That metaphor suggests itself when the wild-haired, loud-shirted oddball brings an OHP onto the stage of the Theatre Royal, Basingstoke, to display a few of his eccentric gags in crudely-drawn cartoon form. It’s a little gimmicky, and slows down the pace, but does allow him to gently tease the audience – especially those who mistakenly think themselves his comic equal.

Jones’s finest punchlines are – as you probably already knew – untoppable. And there are plenty of exquisite examples of cunning wordplay on display here. With most one-liner comedians, it’s often fairly easy to see how they’ve reverse-engineered a set-up to deliver a twist on a common phrase, but Jones genuinely comes out of leftfield with delightfully esoteric premises, as well as some quickies so devastatingly efficient you don’t have time to see them coming.

In one section towards the end of this short short, he strings together several ideas in a shaggy-dog story redolent of his meandering, pun-packed Radio 4 shows.

There are a few bits of faff padding the gold, though, much of it featuring his grandfather ‘character’ that offers only a token nod to varying the style of the delivery. Grandfather does get a song to put a spring in the show, while Jones himself has a few wacky sound effects to achieve the same effect… although the techie with their finger on the play button has a very slow sense of comic timing.

Jones incorporates the audience a little in his act, ever-so gently mocking the stag do who have turned up to the recording wearing gaudy Hawaiian shirts to rival his own – while lobbing in a few affectionate jibes at supposed rival Luton, to make this DVD seem like a real gig, rather than a recording with any of the variations that enliven a live gig honed away.