Review by Julia Chamberlain

Aah, that’s better. This is the comedy equivalent of a nice cup of tea and a sit down during a fraught day. Earlier on I’d been the oldest member of the audience by too many years at a kids’ show, and here I was the youngest by a similar margin, at a poetry event.

Matt Harvey is a regular guest on Radio 4’s Saturday Live, author of clever rhymes in the Guardian and softly spoken resident of Totnes, the candles and sandals centre of South Devon.

This is delightful, gentle stuff, he’s wryly self deprecating, even self-deprecating about being self deprecating and perfectly capable of gentle deriding the well-therapied, empathic, chakra-tuned male. He knows his audience perfectly and with his poems about potatoes and contemporary anxieties he had his audience sighing and giggling with pleasure.

This is more than written to order clever-dick rhymes, there’s an inspiring joy in language and rhythm, a relish for the spoken word where the musicality of his diction lifts your response, so that is not just what you hear, but how you hear it is that gives pleasure.

This is unashamedly middle class, and middle of the road, soothing and refreshing rather than challenging and over stimulating. He is plainly nonplussed to find himself in the comedy listings rather than poetry or spoken word. His style and content is very different to the battering harangue of verbal fireworks you frequently receive in the comedy world.

However comedy doesn’t have to be all cock jokes and contrived taboo busting, and this show has all the skill of miniature painting as contrast with a Banksy mural. It was an unexpected delight to try something different.

Review date: 21 Aug 2009
Reviewed by: Julia Chamberlain