John Shuttleworth: A Wee Ken To Remember, On tour
If you love Partridge, Rob Brydon and Alan Bennett, you’ll find plenty to enjoy in John Shuttleworth’s Casio-assisted tales of suburban mundanity. Graham Fellows’s creation is a man of entirely finite horizons. Tormented by his passive-aggressive wife Mary and temperamental agent Ken Worthington, his only pleasure comes in the composition and performance of his hilariously dreary songs, covering such topics as buying margarine, caring for a Y-reg car, and the impossibility of finishing someone else’s leftover main course when you’ve already started on your pudding. This latest tour takes a typographical error as its jumping-off point. Having planned to stage a show all about his favourite weekend, John finds that what’s actually advertised is a tribute to his diminutive agent Ken, and feels honour-bound to go through with it.
Dapper Laughs: Socially Unacceptable, On tour
The success of Daniel O’Reilly – AKA Dapper Laughs – is one of the most fascinating comedy phenomena of 2014. He’s gained his own ITV2 show off the back of seemingly little more than a string of six-second Vine clips (although, as with many internet rags-to-riches stories, there’s some heavy management backing involved, too). O’Reilly’s rise has also generated a sizeable backlash. His shtick depends exclusively on assertions of boorish masculinity, generally at the expense of women; and while O’Reilly himself claims the inevitable get-out of irony, it’s hard to tell whether those championing Dapper’s antics are admiring the supposed satire or joining in the bullying. While it’s traditional for these kind of acts to draw fire from the liberal commentariat, O’Reilly is unusual in being heavily criticised – in public and in private – by his fellow comics, some of whom are clearly feeling that this is where they draw the line.
An Audience With Noel Fielding, On tour
The kind of surreal whimsy practised by Noel Fielding will always be comedy Marmite: you either embrace it or you find every element of the approach impossibly irritating. But even überfans found their patience tested by the first series of his Luxury Comedy, where Fielding seemed to have mislaid the magic touch that made his earlier work in The Mighty Boosh so sparkling. Ultimately, he’s at his best when the brilliant nonsense that fills his head is helping to create proper jokes, as it usually did in partnership with Julian Barratt. Yes, he may dress like an auxiliary member of Roxy Music circa 1975 but regardless of the flimflam and cobblers, this is a properly talented writer and performer with his own distinctive and, if you get on board, hugely rewarding approach.
