‘If you expect me to be that sweet and innocent tonight, you’re in a for a big surprise.” And so Lee Ridley greets his audience – those wooed by his winning stint as Lost Voice Guy on the recent run of Britain’s Got Talent – in a tiny garret room at the Edinburgh fringe, booked before fame came calling. His new show, Inspiration Porn, is more political – and more vulnerable – than anything you would expect to see on the same TV programme as Simon Cowell. It is a distinctive mix of barbed disability comedy and the kind of self-mocking humour that Hannah Gadsby, with her Netflix hit Nanette, has recast in a troubling new light.
There were times, in other words, that I felt saddened by how ruthless Ridley is with himself onstage – his disability (Ridley has cerebral palsy and is unable to speak), supposed unattractiveness and low self-esteem. But that is his prerogative, and certainly fits with his show’s rejection of the inspirational rhetoric that surrounds high-achieving disabled people. In the “posh old man” tones of his voice synthesiser – the unorthodox comic timing takes some adjusting to – he contrasts inspirational quotes and “yes we can” Paralympic mottos with the realities of his own life: lazy, lonely, he tells us, and “shit at everything”.
Specifically, he describes the unexpected happiness he found in a recent relationship, and how, despite himself, he sabotaged it. For all his attempts to leaven it with wicked jokes – including an off-colour number about the Make a Wish Foundation and others at the expense of disability as a sexual fetish – it is a sad story. And a political one too: the romance plays out against the backdrop of swingeing benefit cuts, in a culture that “sees [him] as a fire hazard instead of a human being.” In such a climate, how can his self-worth and his personal relationships not be affected?
The entwining of private and political is adroitly done. Ridley’s call-to-arms to fight, not for heroic individual success a la Britain’s Got Talent, but for social justice is – irony of ironies – inspiring. I flinched occasionally from the self-lacerating humour, and one or two routines (such as the Play Your Crips Right card game, the logic of which is jumbled) need work. But it’s undeniably a striking set by a comic who, if he’s missing a voice, certainly isn’t short of something to say.
- Lost Voice Guy is at the Gilded Balloon, Edinburgh, until 26 August.
