With Orange Crush, Ivo Graham promises us either his best ever standup set, or a colour-coordinated breakdown. I’m not sure it’s either. Having been asked “What’s your favourite colour?” by his six-year-old kid, this show riffs on Graham’s fondness for orange – which doesn’t exactly scream standup with something essential to say. But he roams around the subject entertainingly enough, in an hour addressing Wotsits and Irn-Bru, his mother’s MS and his role in the campaign to save Swindon Town football club.
Alongside that material, Graham is bracingly outspoken on Palestine, to which cause he also lends his support. All of which, with his newfound suavity and recent rebranding (tongue in cheek or otherwise) as simply “Ivo”, made me wonder: whither the shy and self-abasing Graham of yesteryear? It mightn’t have been much fun to live, but it was a compelling comic persona – whereas Ivo 2.0, 34 years old and with a bit of swagger, is harder to grasp.
Not that he’s grown out of awkwardness. The stories here loop around reveals of Graham’s favourite orange things (“It’s time to lift the first cloche of the evening …”), and the first finds him banging into an old flame while riding a particularly manky Lime bike. In another, his plan is thwarted to pester Nick Hornby at a VIP dinner. There are one or two clunky audience interactions, too, that our host frets about more than is necessary. On the flipside, a cocky visual gag offsets any Orange Order anxieties among the Scottish crowd; and then there’s his “I’m the top Ivo” material, comparing himself to his humbler namesakes.
One such is the rapper Drake (full name: Aubrey Drake Graham), and the comic knows well how funny it is for a posh Englishman to implicate himself in hip-hop “diss tracks”. His Eton background gives us the show’s funniest gag, too, about a careers fair at his former school. Much of what remains prompts smiles rather than belly laughs, with his tale of filming a video for his save Swindon campaign in particular feeling too many steps removed from the stage. It’s not a career best, but there are flashes in this chromatically themed outing of Graham in glorious Technicolor.
• At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 24 August
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