What can it mean, that Jonathan Pie is one of the breakout comic characters of 2016? Tom Walker’s fake news reporter, whose off-camera rants have racked up a gazillion hits online, is now starring in a deeply strange and unconvincing fringe show. The lion’s share is taken up by leftish rants that barely even pretend to be comedy. Perhaps the context – Pie hosts Children in Need – is meant to render them funny, but it doesn’t, because it’s totally implausible. Much of the show plays out to the strangulated sound of laughter dying in the throats of its audience.
The premise is that Pie has stepped in at the last minute to replace John Barrowman as anchor of the charity telethon. He’ll deliver a piece to camera, stage left, then kill time off-air venting at his studio audience about inequality, Starbucks and David Cameron. Latterly, and more or less incidentally, we learn that this is a make-or-break gig for the loose-cannon newsman – which an untimely phone call from his wife threatens to sabotage.
But it’s hard to care. Pie doesn’t really register as a person, just a mouthpiece for despair at the state of Tory Britain. He is disgusted by the government cutting loose poor, disadvantaged and homeless people. He abhors the barely concealed privatisation of the NHS, and the culture of taking offence as a way of shutting down debate.
At points, it’s exciting to hear this stuff get an airing. But – and it’s a big but – Pie is also dogmatic, self-righteous and cynical, ascribing all those problems to democracy, the flaw in which is that the general public is “thick”. Given that obnoxious personality, Pie presumably hasn’t been created to convert anyone to his anti-Tory worldview. But nor, at least here, does it work as comedy. It’s not believable for a nanosecond that the BBC, or anyone else, would let Pie harangue a studio audience like this, or badmouth his producer, or phone his family while onstage and on mic. It’s lame how little effort has been expended to make it seem real.
There are also precious few jokes. A diatribe about the iniquities of Tory policy doesn’t become comedy merely by calling Theresa May a “chicken-fingering slag” – a typical Pie manoeuvre. Describing Donald Trump as “just America’s answer to a question nobody asked” seems to me wrong as well as witless. Politically, I agree with about 75% of what Pie/Walker says in this show, but I don’t know why it’s being said in this way, in this context. I get that our political predicament is dire, and perhaps demands a new, more extreme satirical response. But is Pie’s brand of foul-mouthed fury and abuse the answer? On this showing, I can’t see it.
- At the Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 28 August. Box office: 0131-226 0000. Then tours from 6 September.
