How did we get here? asks Mark Thomas. His new show, 50 Things About Us, promises little-known facts about the UK to explain our current predicament. Six per cent of UK land mass is grouse moor, he claims – while there are only 22 countries that we haven’t invaded (yet). It’s a compelling conceit, even if Thomas’s inventory of Britishness – demanding that, for a change, we see ourselves as others see us – sheds little new light on Brexit, Boris and our political travails.
That is partly because our host doesn’t stay on topic, as he ties up loose ends from previous shows and teases new material (about displaced Chagos Islanders and their fledgling football team) from his next. His thesis that our EU exit is the last spasm of the British empire has been widely aired elsewhere. But it needs restating, and Thomas gives it a characteristically emphatic workout, with red-faced routines about Gibraltar (whose claim to Britishness he finds less persuasive than the Calais refugee camp), the national anthem and the larcenous British Museum.
Beyond any argument, the show is a grab bag of stats and titbits that give Thomas licence to roam where he pleases, via very funny caricatures of Democratic Unionist party zealots, rebel songs dedicated to Boris Johnson (the accidental enabler of a united Ireland?) and a striking account of Britain’s historical (and not-so-historical) compensation to slaveowners. A subplot traces Thomas’s late-middle-aged bodily decline, which parallels the decrepitude of Britain’s imperial self-image. Let’s hope the parallel isn’t too close, as there is plenty of life left in Thomas and his bullshit-busting comedy.
At the Drill Hall, Lincoln, on 28 February. Then touring.
