His show is called Confessions and promises “candid chat” with celebrity guests. Neither is forthcoming when I attend the Rev Richard Coles’ fringe outing, which finds the pop star turned cleric engaged in chummy chat with his Strictly Come Dancing mucker Joe McFadden. If you’re a telly addict, it might make for an entertaining hour’s gossip about your small-screen favourites. For the rest of us, it’s a form of purgatory: a mutual love-in about Holby City and Celebrity Antiques Roadshow, so backslappy that McFadden and Coles must leave the stage with bruises.
The liveliest section is the earliest, when Coles wheels out anecdotes from his life as a “middle-aged, doubtful, fat, seedy” (his words) village vicar. There’s the parishioner who expresses surprise at Coles’ skin colour, because “we’d heard you were in the Commodores”; there’s the dying man unimpressed by the Rev’s consoling quotations from scripture. They confirm Coles as a likable chap, chuckling at his own indignity, free of pomposity. I’d have preferred an hour of this mild clerical comedy than what follows, as the genial McFadden – with whom our host enjoys a “Joe-mance”, Coles tells us – is introduced to the stage.
Even by the softball standards of the modern showbiz interview, their tête-à-tête is cloying stuff. “Everything you’ve done, you just work really hard at,” runs one of Coles’ gambits. Or elsewhere: “The people who work on Strictly are just absolutely fantastic, aren’t they?” Swaths of the show are Strictly gossip, as the friends chortle about the time “Oti trod on my shoes”, and so on. It’s like being force-fed pages torn from OK! magazine.
Interest flickers more brightly when Coles jokes about his new spray-tanning expertise, or McFadden mentions Glasgow and Edinburgh’s fraternal antagonism. Coles tells a droll story – he’s good at that – about his background in radical street theatre, and dishes the dirt on Jimmy Somerville’s love of Le Creuset. But nothing is ever interrogated, no conversation is developed to the point it might become insightful or revealing. It’s all as cosy as a teapot at crochet class, and from the sublebrity gossip and mutual congratulation there is little relief.
- At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 27 August.
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