The Covid Arms started life as an online “pub” where a group of friends met during lockdown. Then comedian Kiri Pritchard-McLean was invited to perform there, and it became one of the success stories of pandemic-era comedy. Eleven shows later, it has featured several stellar acts and raised £86,000 for struggling comedians and The Trussell Trust, a food bank charity.
You can see why the format took off. It’s the quality of the comics – on Saturday we got Dane Baptiste, Dan Nightingale and Frankie Boyle alongside musician Fran Lobo – and it’s that “front-row” ticket holders (who pay more) get to chat with MC Pritchard-McLean between sets, evoking the club-night vibe. It’s also down to Pritchard-McLean’s compering. She doesn’t just do the links – she stays on screen during the other acts’ sets, giving them someone to play off and cackling at their jokes.
It’s an odd role: the visible avatar for a silent, unseen audience. But she plays it without self-consciousness, and it gives the show lift-off. (At other online gigs, the audience silence can be deafening.) Lancashire-born comic Nightingale bounces his whole set off her, and you can’t see the joins between his material – about new fatherhood, lockdown drinking and Mancunians – and the pair’s sparring.
Did I see her expression curdle at Baptiste’s questionable gags about “pussy-grabbing”? If so, only a little. Elsewhere, one “crowd-work” section found her negotiating the cancellation of her student loan with a staffer from alma mater Salford Uni.
Cut to Glasgow, and a rare flash of the real “francis boyle” (his Zoom handle) behind the scorched-earth cynic. The format finds Boyle in an unfamiliar state, halfway between a public performance and a catch-up with a friend. He reads us the first chapter of a novel he’s writing. It’s more literary than his standup, of course. But as its deadbeat hero is grilled by police about a mysterious death, sparks of unmistakable Boyle-ese (one cop shouts “at the volume of a pensioner’s telly”) fly off the text. It ends in Glasgow noir, then – but these Covid Arms gigs look like a real bright spot in lockdown-era comedy.
The next Comedy at the Covid Arms event is on 13 June.
