Review by Steve Bennett

Full of geezerish appeal, Eddy Brimson works the crowd like a charm. By blatantly seeking their approval to plumb ever more inappropriate depths he unites them in complicity – not only winning their approval for any material before he’s even done it, but building up a conspiracy that his act is some sore of illicit pleasure, a bonding that heightens any response.

But it's not really that filthy, by live comedy standards, and there’s a lot of similarly laddish comedians who go at lot cruder than him. He’s suggestive, rather than overly graphic, when it comes to anything bodily – but he manipulates the mixture of laughs and pseudo-shock masterfully.

‘Anyone else think that political correctness has gone too far?’ he asks at the start of the set, to a rousing cheer. Not necessarily the words you want to hear from a shaven-headed former soccer lout, albeit one who's a long-reformed character. But this is not the prompt for some virulent attack on minorities, more a complaint that you can’t smack kids any more. Cue a rant about how parenthood ruins your life and a raft of willfully inappropriate things you might say to the tiny ones he purports to despise. The elderly and the blind are equally bear the brunt of stories of how he’d like to behave badly – though it’s not mean, just cheekily defiant.

Brimson is also a more-than adequate storyteller, making the most of any anecdote. The one about humourless Germanic folk in a comedy club is the only one that doesn’t really come off – seeming contrived and over-reliant on tired stereotype. But his yarn about a terror alert on a Dutch aircraft certainly hijacks the attention, for want of a better phrase.

Brimson’s material can sometimes be slight, but as the philosopher once said: ‘It’s the way you tell ’em’ – and Brimson certainly tells ’em with confident style.

Review date: 20 Mar 2009
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett