Six months after his Edinburgh fringe run was nixed in favour of a Sri Lanka travelogue for the BBC, Romesh Ranganathan is now on the road with a third solo show, Irrational. It’s the best yet from the panel show regular, 70 minutes that retain the curmudgeonliness of his early work, but leaven it with affection, improved craftsmanship and a liberal dose of self-irony. It’s a set that takes thoroughly everyday concerns – trips to Wagamama, iPhones v Androids, cinema popcorn portions – and fashions them into efficient, irresistible comedy.
Where he was once grimly cynical, here there’s light alongside the shade – as much dopey, doting love expressed for his first child, say, as resentment of the “feral” second. Ranganathan still plays high status, still delivers his opinions as if they were matters of fact. But there’s an easier awareness of his own ridiculousness, whether subtly (the groovy-dad phraseology) or overtly, as when relating his wife’s suggestion that he wear a T-shirt while swimming to conceal his middle-age spread.
The dryness of Ranganathan’s response to that proposal is characteristic. The pissed-offness recalls Jack Dee, while the domestic material evokes old-school, ’er-indoors comedy – minus the chauvinism, but with the picture of a hapless, emasculated husband intact. The show’s best line volunteers reasons why Ranganathan has never cheated on his wife, the second of which subverts the first very drolly indeed.
Later, there’s a fine section ribbing Ranganathan’s parents for their confused attempts to integrate him into British life – and for his mum upstaging him on that recent TV show. If once or twice it jars elsewhere (a riff on Madonna’s graceless ageing), here he can play as jaundiced as he likes, because the underlying warmth is clear. The skill, meanwhile, at honing a verbal expression of weariness or disgust, and timing its release for maximum stink-bomb impact, is gloriously in evidence.
- At Clair Hall, Haywards Heath, on 25 February. Box office: 01444 455440. Then touring.
