Lined with retirement bungalows and holiday flats, the Sussex seaside resort of Bexhill is a place where people generally go to wind down. But Rob Brydon – visiting the long, low, white De La Warr Pavilion last Friday night – was expanding an already busy professional portfolio that includes several TV panel shows and the comedy-travelogue The Trip, cruise commercials and West End theatre roles.
His first standup tour since an acclaimed stint in 2009-10 calls, as well as Bexhill, at other locations associated with those in the last phase of life, including Bournemouth and Cheltenham. Brydon is fully alive to the possibilities there for near-death jokes.
During the Q&A session that ends his 100-minute set, he checks whether one senior theatregoer is raising her hand or “just having an involuntary spasm”. He also fantasises about an aged spectator nodding off, then wondering, on coming to, why the figure in the blaze of light ahead, welcoming him to heaven, is not the dear departed, as he had hoped, but the guy from the P&O ads.
So warm is Brydon’s persona, though, that no offence ever seemed to be taken at a show that, in the manner of Barry Humphries or Al Murray, often consists of heckling the audience. Securing names and details from those in the front rows, he uses them in escalating running gags, their reward being a verse in a song improvised, on guitar, at the end. Such personalised comedy sometimes relies on preprepared gags that can be adapted to professions and names likely to turn up any night, but Brydon seems impressively able to create genuinely reactive ad-libs out of live situations.
The material is also geographically tailored. Bexhill ticket-buyers were flattered with references to their civility in comparison with the thugs down the coast in Hastings. (The dig will presumably flip when Brydon plays Hastings later in the month.)
Humphries and Murray, when using their fans as fodder, are hiding behind a character, whereas this performer is theoretically being himself, although the autobiographical strand is complicated by the “Rob Brydon” on The Trip and the cruise commercials having fictional wives distinct from the two factual women he has married; all four spouses figure in funny stories.
The comedian first made an impression through his facility with famous voices, and he sensibly drops into anecdotes his greatest take-offs, including Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Ken Bruce and Steve Coogan. So guileless is his style that it is impossible to be sure whether the sudden appearance of Rolf Harris during one routine was a voluntary or involuntary spasm. The latter was suggested by urgent pleas to the audience not to tweet about the moment, although this apology could be another sleight of tongue by a comedian who is consistently edgier than he seems.
- At Bournemouth Pavilion, 15 March. Box office: 0844 576 3000. Then touring.
