Читать книгу Sunshine on Putty: The Golden Age of British Comedy from Vic Reeves to The Office - Ben Thompson, Ben Thompson - Страница 49

By the mid-1990s, the London Comedy Store – once the spiritual home of alternative comedy – is firmly re-established in new, college-bar-style premises on the other side of Leicester Square. Going there on a random Thursday night at this point is a bit like going to The Cavern three years after The Beatles left, except that in this case the old stars still turn up to perform at the drop of a benefit-collecting hat.

The sense of being part of a living heritage attraction is hardly dispelled by the discovery that half the front row are students from Middlesex University completing their comedy module. Though it is sometimes hard to avoid the feeling that the waters of the London comedy scene have been drastically over-fished, two out of six acts on this particular evening have got something special about them, and that is a pretty heartening percentage.

It’s easy to see how Open Mike contender Ardal O’Hanlon managed to come equal first in the Hackney Empire New Act of the Year contest. Where some Comedy Store regulars just seem to be going through the motions, he is polished and graceful and makes every one of his ten minutes count. There is a beguiling feel of genuine otherworldliness about his reminiscences of a dad who spent all his money on the horses – ‘he bought them hats and scarves and everything’.

Harry Hill is a little further down the comedy conveyor belt at this stage, with one Radio 4 series behind him and a series of short black-and-white films coming up on BBC2. He’s got a distinctive look: rosy cheeks, milk-bottle specs and huge shirt collar sprouting out of the top of his jacket, giving him the appearance of a man with no neck. His act has a lovely rhythm to it. Hill sets up a series of riffs – snatches of Queen lyrics, ways of coping with the lack of services on the M40, his father depriving him of the best cuts of meat by saying they were poisonous – and flits between them with blinking eyes and darting tongue. For now, it’s hard to predict where his headlong comic momentum might take him, but there is a definite hint of lizard, as well as Izzard, in this man’s demeanour.