Review by Jay Richardson

A vegan communist who became a soldier, a former diving and snowboarding instructor, a man so taken with his wife on first meeting that he drove through the night and across national borders to ‘bump into’ her again, Gary Colman has an unfortunate knack of making his experiences seem less compelling than they undoubtedly were. Unlikely incidents are rendered only mildly amusing by unremarkable storytelling, aiming for easy laughs when more substantive ones are surely in his grasp.

He's a cool guy, he reassures us and deserves a more hip crowd than he's currently attracting, part of the shtick the 48-year-old Geordie uses to protest too much at settling down in London with his wife, kids and dog with a bowel complaint. Although it soon becomes apparent that this is a ruse to imply he's deceiving himself, it does have the effect of putting the audience down, ever so slightly. What's more, by making offhand cracks at various individuals, transparently just to introduce routines, it presents an inconsistent persona that undermines the affable, Everyman blether he seeks to project elsewhere.

He has some decent lines among an extraordinary amount of filler, but the route to them is invariably tortuous, full of hacky supposed misunderstandings that could easily have been cleared up at the time. The ‘cool’, unique tales alluded to very much play second fiddle to workaday anecdotes about the ‘grind’ of family life, his inability to control his dog and two young boys.

Ironically for someone with his backstory and protestations about being seen as a regular, middle-aged dad, as a comic, his instinct is to aim for the conventional. Only when he muddies the two personas, as when a casual remark dropped while playing a computer game convinces his father he was in the SAS, does he truly strike at something original. The exquisitely dropped payoff punctures parental pride without altogether dispelling the suspicion.

Unfortunately, Colman then reverts to form, the compelling tale of courting his wife hampered by a preference for setting up a cheap pun instead of embellishing and enriching the details. Even worse is his account of inadvertently entering and placing in the British Snowboarding Championships, simply not to lose face in front of an attractive stranger. At least this time, the story is bizarre and interesting enough to stand on its own, though it still feels like an opportunity wasted.

The moral he takes from his experiences, summed up in a sentimental epilogue, is that cool is meaningless affectation, dismissible if you really care about something. An admirable attitude to life, especially if you've experienced remarkable situations, it doesn't quite cut it for the sly deceptions, tricks and editing required of stand-up comedy.

Review date: 20 Aug 2013
Reviewed by: Jay Richardson