Tim Harding's comedy diary

Reviewer Tim Harding gives a rundown of the comedy he's been watching in London and elsewhere in the last two weeks.

There’s something atmospheric about the Bill Murray in autumn, beyond the inherent atmosphere of being London’s best comedy venue. Sheltering in a small dark room draped with black shrouds before emerging into the quiet rainswept backstreets of Islington – it gives you a nice sense of Halloween.

Not an unhalloweenish figure himself, Harry Hill is using the venue to try out material for a new show, New Bits & Greatest Hits, and understandably, the new material on this particular evening was given more prominence than the guaranteed gold from previous shows. 

Anyone who’s seen Hill live will know there’s a disconnect between his TV persona and what he likes to do on stage. The material is still absolute nonsense but there’s a distinct edge to the live version; he can come across as surprisingly spiky and pugnacious, even aggressive at times. It’s always fun to take someone new who’s expecting a Mr Saturday Night, shiny floor experience and watch the scales fall from their eyes as they realise what a challenging proposition Hill can be at his best.

The warm-up I saw at the Bill Murray for Hill’s previous show, Pedigree Fun, was my favourite comedy experience of 2022. Here, at last, I said to myself, is the British Sam Campbell. And I was only being halfway facetious. They really have such a similar vibe to each other; it’s fun to imagine Campbell reaching an ITV audience while Hill is rediscovered amongst the hipster crowd. 

I don’t think this evening was very much representative of what the finished version of his tour show will be, but he’s already packing some wonderfully silly moments.

At the same venue a little earlier, Grace Jarvis performed her third solo show Oh! The Horrors! as a reprise of her Edinburgh run. Jarvis, 26, calls herself a ‘kiwaussie' – half-Kiwi half-Aussie – and has recently moved to the UK. 

This hour is directed by Laura Davis, and the match between director and comedian may almost be too close. They share a relatively sunny presentation that belies a doomy outlook; both are interested in climate change and in skewering unfair social conventions, in Jarvis’s case this is perhaps partly a function of her autism. She has a very good bit about the strange tradition of babies taking the man’s surname.

She also has a chronic illness in the form of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which contributes towards her mystified, fragile and weary outlook, distinctive in someone so young.

This hour is partly about pushing back against the need to be relatable in comedy – Jarvis says that her experiences and her family aren’t relatable at all, but that shouldn’t stop people from finding it funny. But really, she’s a little more conventional than she appears, like she’s yet to truly shine a light on her strangest qualities in the way that Davis has.

The specifics of all our lives are unrelated but the desire to be seen as a little bit kooky and different are common to most of us.

In a similar vein, Sophie Duker’s new show But Daddy I Love Her, currently running for a two-week stint at the Soho Theatre, is a paean to the spiritual and physical benefits of being ‘delulu’, which is kind of the brat summer version of being delusional. 

Obsessed, like so many of us, with identifying her own vibe, Duker feels a gulf between the way she wishes to be perceived and her actual impact in the world, hence the delulu.

I was a huge fan of her 2019 debut Venus, but felt the 2022 follow-up Hag was lacking direction when I saw it in WIP. Here, the storytelling centrepieces are her encounters with a second-rate sugar daddy and her decision to go to therapy with her Dad, neither of which crescendo quite enough to support the weight of an hour, but she remains a great personality on stage, particularly when she keeps up the pace and avoids slowing down for unnecessary emphasis. 

Her secret weapon is the way that she’s able to (literally) ask difficult questions of her audience. It’s a tactic that always provides a jolt of energy to the room.

My final impression was that, in talking about her own life, she seems relatively guarded and struggles to turn it into punchy material. Her debut was so compelling because it was a little scholarly – she had done real historical research and had things to say about her findings.

It’s probably harder to generate a party atmosphere with comedy about history, but she’s wandered away from one of the things that made her material so striking. But Daddy I Love Her is another solidly entertaining show that nevertheless feels like she’s not quite operating at max capacity.

Finally, in one of my most anticipated shows of the year, Foxdog Studios brought Robo Bingo (Spooky Edition) to Moth Club for one night only. I gave 4.5 stars to the base version of the show when I first reviewed it at the Fringe, and it’s only risen in my estimations since. These guys are just operating on their own level.

If you’ve never seen them before, they’re two unassuming web developers who create incredibly surprising and delightful tech-based comedy shows. Robo Bingo is perhaps their most successful yet, based around a website they’ve built that allows you the viewer to play a bizarre, amorphous version of bingo on your smartphone that directly influences events on stage.

I absolutely wouldn’t have minded a reprise of their Fringe show, but the Spooky Edition is generously packed with new content.

Common frog calls bingo is OUT; obscure saints bingo is IN. There’s a séance in which audience members control taps, lamps and blenders, a multiplayer alphabet-based version of Guitar Hero, and a very funny collaborative attempt to roll a pumpkin into a ditch, among many, many other brilliant innovations.

As with all my favourite comedy recently (Julia Masli, Pony Cam Collective, Absolute Monopoly etc), the biggest laughs come not from scripted punchlines but from an ordered dissemination and proliferation of chaotic scenarios that allow the performers and audience to collaborate in creating seemingly spontaneous moments of hilarity; moments that build from meticulously engineered strands and come together in an unexpected flowering.

But with their uniquely crafted low-tech software solutions, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: there’s simply no one else doing what Foxdog Studios are doing.

Published: 11 Oct 2024