Another al fresco comedy gala, another downpour. It must have seemed a smashing idea when the organisers of Cambridge’s annual comedy festival, faced with continuing Covid restrictions, recast the event as “the UK’s first ever all-comedy three-day festival with camping”. It didn’t feel quite such a brainwave at 9pm on opening night, when Mark Watson was struggling to make himself heard above the monsoon. “I’ve been heckled in many ways over the years,” he protested. “But this rain is really loud.”
Perhaps the skies brightened over the weekend; I hope so. But on Friday, it was hard to keep the spirits unsoggy. That was no fault of the site. Grange Farm, erstwhile home of the Secret Garden Party, is quite the idyll, with woods, obliging hillocks like nature’s dress circles, and even a freshwater swimming lake. As I arrived, Angela Barnes was telling the Main Stage audience how common she was, deploying the same “you can tell you’re working-class when … ” setups that Kelly Convey used later in the evening on the same crowd.
Between those two, Milton Jones and his Hawaiian shirts brought a splash of summer to the gloom, and a spike in comic quality. At that point, the rain was in abeyance, but such is the calibre of Jones’s one-liners, they’d have perked us up regardless. “What’s your name?” “Chantelle.” “Well, if you’re not going to tell me your name … ” It’s not easy to raise the roof at an outdoor gig, but Jones came as close as anyone, with a set full of mind-bending puns, including a series twisting the names of UK cities into unexpected new shapes.
Arthur Smith offered up a companion piece at the Amphitheatre stage, reworking Shakespeare’s “To be or not to be” into a battery of place-name puns (“Ruislip, perchance to dream,” etc). That he did so with his whole audience crowded on stage with him, the better to shelter from the rain, only added to the pleasure of this half-hour in the south Londoner’s company. Smith took advantage of this intimate arrangement to lead us in a singalong of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah and recite a handful of his own – and others’ – poetry, comic and otherwise.
The evening’s losers were those acts programmed in the Glade, a clearing in the woods visited by precious few punters all night. I saw Mo Omar there performing to six people, while the enjoyably embittered Jen Brister, decrying the ignominy of Zoom comedy and drive-in gigs, mustered barely twice as much. Nearby, Watson too made merry with his experiences of pandemic-era comedy, recalling a particularly excruciating corporate gig, performed on Microsoft Teams mano a mano with a solitary CEO.
Watson’s show, alas, was the high watermark of the night at the Amphitheatre, where later I saw the excellent Nabil Abdulrashid gigging to only a smattering of onlookers. Worse still, the power outed, and he had to deliver half his set in pitch darkness, un-amplified. It’s a measure of Abdulrashid’s quality, greater than that of many a better-attended Main Stage act, that he prospered regardless, with a chewy 40 minutes about his complicated Anglo-Nigerian background, about language, and his love-hate relationship with male privilege. I felt privileged to see him turn such forlorn circumstances to his advantage – and to escape after his set too, not to a tent, but to the merciful dryness of my own bed.
