Jerry Hall, Yoko Ono, Gwyneth Paltrow, stand aside – Eleanor, the Tour Whore, is the world's greatest groupie. Or at least that's the claim made in this character comedy show (I use the term "comedy" loosely) with Mighty Boosh star Rich Fulcher. Draped across a chaise longue in a zebra-print mini-dress, fishnets and an auburn wig, Fulcher recounts Eleanor's life on the arms and in the beds of rock'n'roll's most priapic icons. "Is that not demeaning to young women everywhere?", she intends you to ask. Not really: it's just sloppily written – and the character struggles to muster even one dimension, never mind three. Eleanor is to comedy what her erstwhile conquest, Mick Hucknall, is to soul.
To be fair to Fulcher, he's scarcely trying to be true to life: "I opened my own recording studio in Burt Reynolds' moustache," Eleanor tells us, indicating the nonsense level to which her creator aspires. But even a daft caricature like this won't come alive without authorial care or technique and Fulcher does almost nothing, physically or vocally, to suggest the character. The script (co-written with fellow Boosh star Dave Brown) is almost entirely devoid of wit, featuring video clips of Eleanor swearing a lot about the glam-rock band Poison and of the moment – tenuously related to the show's groupie conceit – she was gazumped on Britain's Got Talent by Susan Boyle.
In Eleanor's description of her father's dysfunctional career as a whaler – afraid of boats, he had to throw javelins from the beach – there's a hint of what Fulcher and Brown are capable of. But too often the character is just an aggregate of half-arsed songs, celeb name-checks and sex talk – frequently all at once. Fulcher himself is unlikely to be much bothered by groupies after a show like this.
