Our look back at Fringes past arrives at 2009

The 2009 Edinburgh Fringe, where Tim Key won the main comedy award for his show The Slutcracker. The prize went without a sponsor this year so were funded by producer Nica Burns (Wikipedia insists they were sponsored by AbsoluteRadio.co.uk, though you would be hard-pressed to find anyone who remembers that). Jonny Sweet won best newcomer over the likes of Jack Whitehall and Kevin Bridges. Here are some of that year’s reviews from Chortle editor Steve Bennett..

Tim Key: The Slutcracker

Tim Key is wounded. ‘I’ve got a Wikipedia page,’ he states dryly. ‘It describes me as a "deliberately bad poet". There’s nothing deliberate about it.’

It may be a moot point – but you can certainly argue that his verses aren’t exactly conventional. They are usually incredibly brief, have little rhythm – which he interrupts in any case by breaking off to provide a running analysis – and often contain less-than poetic language, with him choosing words that convey just the right ideas but derail the flow of the piece. It means the poems sound like real conversations, while the topics, too, are not always what you would expect – an hilarious list of animals he thinks he can fit into, for example.

Everything contributes to the agreeable feeling that you’re entering another realm when you enter Key’s Portakabin. Performing to a continual soundtrack of operatic arias, trad jazz and portentious classical music helps reinforce that ethereal mood; as does the series of short films that punctuate the hour – artily shot and pretentious in tone, they could almost pass for smug fragrance adverts if there wasn’t an undertone of knowing wit.

That’s a very important aspect of Key’s appeal. While he affects seriousness, he’s very playful with the persona and the form, and constantly seems trying, unsuccessfully, to stop an amused grin playing across his face. Proof, should it be needed, comes in the wonderfully childish set-piece towards the end of the show.

His disarmingly charming delivery is full of ‘erms’ and pauses and half finished words, reflecting the way people really speak, rather than the polished patter of a stand-up. When he chats to his technician, Fletch, the conversation is awkwardly stilted. The affected shambolism, which begins from the moment he walks in swigging lager from a can before changing into a suit that’s seen better days, can only endear him to the audience.

There aren’t many jokes here, but Key presents an ever-shifting landscape full of delightful surprises and wryly funny moments through his distinctively original approach.

Jack Whitehall: Nearly Rebellious 

If E4 was to sit down and design from scratch the comic with perfect youth appeal, they would probably have come up with Jack Whitehall. With quirky haircut, skinny jeans and white T-shirt, he looks every inch the part, so add an immensely animated delivery, and an attitude of ‘I may be middle-class but I’m still misunderstood’ and you can see why his TV career has soared.

Burgeoning fame hasn’t always coincided with his development as a stand-up, however, and since he burst on to the scene a couple of years ago, he has variously affected the mannerisms and style of Stewart Lee and Michael McIntrye.

Even now, he’s still to find his voice, as his Edinburgh debut is a triumph of on technique over soul. But my, what technique. And what triumph.

Only born in 1988, he has already mastered the craft of delivery. He’s a whirlwind of slightly camp physicality, of enforced passion, of big, demonstrative gestures, of the snap characterisations of the people who populate his stories. He’s slick with his audience banter, fluid with his prepared material, compelling to watch.

The material isn’t always so assured, and certainly not nearly as distinctive. Lazy quips about behaving inappropriately in the Anne Frank museum, of the gentlemen terrorists who ring in advance and about swine flu meaning you only need sneeze to get a Tube carriage to yourself have already been well-covered by other comedians.

Yet there are moments of greater inspiration. He has a cracking Apprentice joke, a running gag about fellow youth presenter George Lamb is deliciously outrageous while mention of his reactionary dad Michael – whom the 21-year-old still wants to impress despite his bigotries – proves a rich seam of material. As is so often the case, personal issues resonate so much stronger than pat observational comments.

The theme of Whitehall’s show turns out to be that he can’t really rail against the system, while his right-wing father is the real rebel in an increasingly tolerant society. Well, his cosmopolitan middle-class part of it, anyway; Whitehall can be blinkered about the bigger picture.

But while it’s easy to pick holes in his thinking, and his lack of true distinctiveness, there is so much to enjoy in Whitehall’s hugely entertaining and charmingly likeable performance. Even if it does appear slightly insincere, the relentless swell of energy sweeps even the most curmudgeonly up in its wake.

Kevin Bridges: An Hour To Sing For Your Soul

Kevin Bridges is the great white hope of Scottish comedy, selling out his entire Fringe run at the miniscule Joker Dome on the back of his impressive appearance on Michael McIntyre’s Comedy Roadshow.

Five years on the circuit have proven this 22-year-old to be good comic, too, so it’s a shame that his debut is pretty, well… a bit dull.

The problem seems to be that small room isn’t his natural habitat. He rightly brings down the energy of the performance to an intimate chat, but the club-set material seems pedestrian without a decent crowd to bounce it off.

The show runs for only around 50 minutes – despite what the title promises – of which a good five minutes was asking the audience their names, where they were from, what they do for a living... Such verbal gladhanding is a crucial part of settling the room in club comedy, but at a festival show, where a small, well-behaved ‘crowd’ has come specifically to see you, it seems like filling time – even if it does showcase his ability to seamlessly segue prepared material into the conversation.

His speaks of tough life in Glasgow, where rottweilers roam the estates, of shopping in bargain-bucket clothes shops, of the terrible quiz shows on late-night television, of lads’ holidays on budget airlines, of shit universities that used to be polytechnics. Scotland is a place of suicide and should be advertised not by Sean Connery, but by ‘Big Mental Davey, the joiner’. There’s an undeniable air of authenticity about the tableau he paints, which isn’t shared by every comedian has, but the ideas feel mundane and familiar.

There are, however, some lovely turns of phrase and images that pepper the set, albeit sparsely. His one-liner describing one low-cost store’s price positioning, his obsession with the phrase ‘shite in a kettle’ or his the hilarious image that comes to mind when he recalls the racist graffiti artists idiotically taking several goes to get the swastika right are as evocative as they are funny.

He generates regular chuckles, as is the job description, but they didn’t build up any sort of momentum, or bring us deeper into his world.

Bridges will do well in comedy – his career peaks in such short time has already proved that – and others have raved enthusiastically about this show. But it feels to me like a foundation on which to build, rather than anything close to the finished product, though you can clearly catch glimpses of the great things yet to come.

The Hotel

The Hotel is one of those high-concept Fringe shows you really ought to sign up for, if only for the experience alone.

The brainchild of the ever-inventive Mark Watson, this ambitious project takes over an entire property in Edinburgh – the former home of ArthurArt, in fact – converting it into a shambolic family-run hotel with secrets behind every door.

Guests are encouraged – for just one hour a day – to wander around at will, poking around the rooms to see whatever they might find. In the chillout room, a guru, one foot behind his head, utters soothing words of wisdom as enlightenment–seekers try to ignore the agonising screams of pain from the massage room next door. In the boardroom an unconventional, but hugely competitive, job interview is taking place, spilling out into the main road below. In the business centre, the computers seem stuck on a limited number of web pages, not all of them salubrious.

There is a hell of a lot going on here – far more than anyone could fit into an hour’s visit. I certainly wasted a bit too much time queuing in the Kafkaesque processing centre, for tests as bizarre as they were intimidating; and barely ventured into the cabaret room in the basement, where Marcel Lucont and Edward Aczel entertained. One bedroom is strewn with so many angry letters, you could spend the entire 60 minutes just reading these; and I missed the lost property office entirely.

A huge number of festival comics have been roped into this semi-improvised endeavour. The Idiots Of Ants serve lunch, music and games in the restaurant, Mike Wozniak offers training tips in the fitness centre, while George Ryegold attends the toilet, to name but a few.

Despite the robotic reassurances of the staff, every room offers a disconcerting experience, with impeccable attention to detail should you stop to rummage around. As a venture, The Hotel means absolutely nothing, and is strange more than it’s funny, but nevertheless, it should be on every Fringe-goers to-do list.

Jonny Sweet: Mostly About Arthur

Jonny Sweet has just landed a role playing the young David Cameron in a More 4 drama-documentary – so there may be a cautionary tale here. For while he is charming and keen to ingratiate himself with the promise of something different and new, when it comes to doing the business, he soon runs out of ideas.

There is no doubt that Sweet could very probably be a major comedy talent of the future: he has the distinctive look of a dopey but well-meaning middle-class chump, and the performance skills to exploit that deliciously.

But Mostly About Arthur feels like a one-sketch idea, too insubstantial to drag out to an hour, despite some impressive flourishes.

Fighting back his nerves, the enthusiastic but easily-flustered Sweet is here to pay tribute to his dead brother, one of the country’s leading writer of blurbs for the back covers of books, with The Furtive Fork and Guantanamo Gay among his greatest hits.

Sweet’s insistence that the hour be ‘bloody fun’ and not just a maudlin Eulogy begins as we file in, greeted with affectionate hugs and information about local restaurants that offer a delivery service should we get peckish. Interaction – and, indeed, invasion of personal space, continues throughout the show, offering a break from the de rigueur PowerPoint presentation telling of Arthur’s life from popular Filey schoolboy to blurbist fame, overcoming his nemesis – the reviewer against whom Sweet bears an enduringly overblown grudge.

There’s painstaking attention to comic detail here, and Sweet’s vulnerable persona, trying in vain to conceal his insecurities behind an awkwardly fixed smile, is enduring. But there’s really only so much he can do with the central idea and so, sadly, the padding overwhelms the moments of inspiration. Others in the audience forgave him that, suggesting even this show could have a cult following, but for me, this is frustratingly far from realising Sweet’s potential.

Published: 17 Aug 2020