Paddy McGuinness: Saturday Night Live Tour 2011

Note: This review is from 2011

DVD review by Steve Bennett

Writing a comedy review of Paddy McGuinness is like asking a wine buff for his opinion on blue WKD.

Like the vivid alcopop, the Take Me Out host’s show does the job it’s designed to do, and is immensely popular but has little to do with the love, craftsmanship or ambition that goes into the real thing.

Let’s start, counter-intuitively,with the encore, in which McGuinness converts Manchester’s MEN Arena into a giant version of Butlins. After all he was once a Club 18-30 rep, and, in many respects, still is.

On stage, he plays a version of his ITV dating game, which involves, among its many horrors, getting a tubby bloke from the audience to strip to his beer-bellied waist and dance suggestively to I'm Horny. They even do the Birdie Song, for crying out loud, before moving to karaoke mode to indulge McGuinness’s tuneless singing which, I guess, is the joke. But this surely isn’t a moment any sane person would want to watch time and again on DVD.

This might not be entirely indicative of his audience, but when of the lairy lads McGuinness selects for this mini-gameshow is asked his name, he replies: ‘Merv Pornstar.’ And what do you do for a living? ‘Shagging.’

McGuinness lightly takes the piss... but there is rarely the feeling that his own comedy has gone beyond the blokish Bolton labourer making lascivious pub jokes with his mates, before the singing and dancing begins. That’s surely his appeal, but it doesn’t make for particularly interesting viewing if you’re not in his gang.

Most of the comedy is by-the-numbers stuff. If humans could lick their balls like their pet dogs, no one would leave the house; ‘revealing’ how we all put on a fake face when receiving crappy Christmas gifts (like a Paddy McGuinness stand-up DVD, perhaps) or recalling how Bear Grylls does some disgusting things in his survival show, McGuinness’ voice rising feverishly as he injects fake outrage into the straightforward description.

As with his friend Peter Kay, namechecked a couple of times, nostalgia and naff brand names also play their part, as he mentions childhood bathtimes, Blue Nun and Capri-Sun – not all in the same routine, mind.

Unlike Kay, McGuinness also does bits that you might suppose are meant to be edgier. But references to Fred West, Gary Glitter and Michael Barrymore are dubious only because they are so lazy and hackneyed. Elsewhere there are jokes about sanitary products and easy piss-takes of advertising slogans such as All Because The Lady Loves Milk Tray (last used in 2003).

McGuinness knows his demographic, though, and the biggest chunk of the show is dedicated to strip clubs and stag and hen dos. The first is an extended metaphor about how you wouldn’t go to a restaurant where you couldn’t touch the food, the second a straightforward description of the outlandish behaviour. ‘What's with the L plates?’ he asks with incredulity. ‘None of you are learners!’

The holiday rep repeatedly peeks out as he shouts his ‘oggi oggi oggi’s or selects a woman from the audience to serenade. No fat birds or gingers, obviously, and you must have big tits and be up for anal on a first date. Then he promises ‘You'll soon be going down… to the dressing rom’.

Such allegedly cheeky - though in truth tiresome - double entendre is the very foundation for this DVD. But this is the last time I’ll be sliding it in and fingering the button that makes the action begin.