Review by Jay Richardson

There’s a disarming honesty in Bob Graham’s confession that he’s spent the last four years mostly unemployed and claiming benefits. With an occupational resumé best described as chequered, he’d had 34 jobs before he was 30.

By way of mitigation, he denigrates his hometown of Falkirk as ‘purgatorial’ and makes the claim that living and toiling on a farm as a child put him off hard work for life. Psychologically interesting, it’s not a thread he teases out over the course of this over-long show. Still, his refusal to entertain shame or self-deprecate about his lack of application and talent is refreshing, affording him a reasonable observation on the motivations of punk bands, while his continuing woes gift him a counterintuitive insight into the blues.

Despite a lightly-worn admission of socialist leanings and several heavy-handed comparisons of the Royal Family to asylum seekers and dole-spongers, arguing through convoluted mathematics that the latter actually cost taxpayers less, this show offers little overtly political content.

His disenfranchisement is alluded to when he admits that he can’t muster an opinion on the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s wedding because he didn’t own a television at the time. And he has a great routine about the National Anthem. But typical of his unfocused approach, he can’t leave it to simply be enjoyed or cut it entirely because it’s too similar to one by Lloyd Langford. So he compromises the laughs by issuing his disclaimer.

Margaret Thatcher is evoked as a convenient bogeywoman rather than out of genuine anger you sense, and he apologises for the joke’s lack of topicality as soon as he says it. An imagined anti-capitalism protest in a tent warehouse feels equally opportunistic, a nice premise but nothing he builds anything worthwhile upon. Austerity measures, a Tory government in Westminster, these just happen to be the backdrop to his persistent fecklessness.

Instead of exploring why he’s consistently failed to hold down employment, Graham opts to simply trot through the many crap jobs he’s held, occasionally bemoaning his lot too much when he relates the sort of unrewarding bar work or vegetable picking that many university graduates will recognise as temping.

Explaining how to undermine the Job Centre search process, he offers scant but damning details of his rejection by both Poundland and Lidl, but can’t put them into any wider context beyond evidence of his own lack of prospects.

His show’s centrepiece, an overplayed game of Top Trumps comparing his various positions doesn’t really hold together what is essentially a meandering string of anecdotes. Occasionally, he’ll throw in some groaner puns and there’s an amusing early section where he drolly gambles with the goodwill of the crowd by interviewing them for the role of audience.

But he has little conviction in a penultimate routine that strains for poignancy. And when, rather inexplicably, he recounts how he was given the job answering phones at the JobCentre, he underplays the tragedy of a woman desperately trying to reverse the call charges to get through.

Showing intermittent potential but invariably half-arsed in the execution, Work Ethic seems to be on a par with Graham’s employment to date. But the account of his cowardly refusal to pick up the woman’s call compromises his natural affability, closing the show on a jarring note of cruelty.

Review date: 17 Mar 2013
Reviewed by: Jay Richardson
Reviewed at: Glasgow Yesbar