Every performance of Reeves and Mortimer’s new stage tour is nostalgic – the show re-animates characters and sketches from their TV projects over the past quarter of a century – but the opening night in Leeds was doubly so.
Vic Reeves was back in the city where he was born, as James Moir, in 1959, while Bob Mortimer is also a Yorkshireman, from Middlesbrough.
In another sense, though, this is a new beginning. The full title of the show is 25 Years of R & M – The Poignant Moments, and one poignancy is that the programmes for the opening night bore the date 2015, presumably printed before the original dates were cancelled last year for Mortimer to undergo emergency triple-bypass heart surgery.
There’s a sense on stage that this medical near-miss has deepened the already touching affinity between the performers, as well as giving them another link with Morecambe & Wise, the duo whom they have always shadowed physically and psychologically. (Reeves played Eric’s dad in a TV bio-drama.)
Although, in this case, it’s the short one, rather than the tall bespectacled one, who had the cardiac problems, the show begins with the pair echoing the sort of jokes that Morecambe made, on returning to performance after surgery, about his chances of getting through the show. At intervals Mortimer shouts out his pulse rate from a sports watch with scores – “116!”, “127!” – which, if he wasn’t exaggerating for humorous effect, will hopefully slow down after the fright of first night.
A gag involving Mortimer wearing a wig, as Ernie Wise was accused of doing, plus a spin on a famous M & W joke about Jamaica, add to the frequent feeling that we are watching an anthology of comedy references. Reeves is the only British comedian apart from Python’s Terry Gilliam who guarantees the audience a high-class modern art show in passing, through his paintings and montages, both in back projections and a souvenir programme that is, for once, worth purchasing.
Less happily, the character of a Japanese plastic surgeon who struggles with English pronunciation – his attempt to say “knowledge” misheard as “Norwich” – feels like a gruesome channeling of the grimmest bits of Benny Hill.
Like the recent Monty Python gigs, the show has the feel of a reunion of ageing fans with old jokes. In comedy’s equivalent of singing along with the hits at a rock gig, parts of the crowd join in with the catchphrases as the pair stage favourites from their screen days such as the talent show Novelty Island and the popular justice show, Judge Nutmeg, enjoyably silly spoofs of the sort of TV that is possibly stupid enough to begin with.
Those who haven’t binged on a box set before arriving may have less fun. Looking impressively fit and vigorous, Mortimer is a fantastic advert for his surgeon, but the show looks in need of some cutting and stitching as the UK tour proceeds over the next few weeks.
Although as trim as Mortimer’s post-operative frame (at barely two hours including interval), the premiere performance sometimes dragged and meandered even more than might be expected from the duo’s always-delicate balance between discipline and improvisation. In the end, enjoyment will depend on whether you find inspired or infantile the idea of lard being squeezed through the eye-holes in a photo of Benedict Cumberbatch.
