The Swansea Fringe Festival

Harry Hill

Who said variety is dead? Well, whoever it was clearly forgot to cc Harry Hill on the email, for the big-collared one steadfastly remains a one-man Seaside Summertime Special.

There’s the gags, the stories, the songs, the dances, the pitiful attempts at ventriloquism – hell, he even bangs himself on the head with a tea tray for our entertainment. There’s nothing too cheesy, embarrassing or over-the-top our Harry won’t do in the name of showbiz.

His only misfortune is to be born in a time when a successful comic needs more that a solitary, unchanging 15-minute set with which to tour the country; unless, that it, they’re prepared to serve out their careers shouting at drunks in Jongleurs in some of Britain’s most dismal town centres.

No, for a career these days you need to keep the material coming. Hooves is an all-new two hour live show, less than two years after the last one. In that time he’s finally established himself in the TV niche that for so long eluded him, with his sniping at bad programmes in the Bafta-nominated TV Burp bringing him the wider audience he so richly deserves.

Not that the demands of mainstream telly have sapped his inventiveness. This tour contains some of the most outrageously stupid moments you’ll see on stage this year, whether it’s the obligatory giant badger, wrestling Hill’s blue cat Stouffer; a swingball game between ventriloquists’ dummies – one of which has a racquet for a head; or an array of puppets’ skulls superglued onto the stabiliser wheel of a child’s bike.

It’s pure Vic Reeves, obviously, but Hill equally revels in such surreal nonsense, seeming genuinely, childishly overexcited by the ridiculous shenanigans. If ever It’s A Knockout makes a comeback, they’ll have the perfect host in Harry.

But there are also gags to back all this up – silly puns stretched to destruction; stupidly cruel flight of fancy on such unexpectedly dark topics as suicide or his fictional Nan’s death; subversive takes on the rituals of audience participation; or the cathartic conscience-cleansing display of contrition over the shameful number of adverts he’s agreed to. Each of them good, solid jokes and routines of which the most serious-minded of comics would be proud, yet coming from a daft clown.

Yet that for all that’s wonderful in this show - for every catchphrase, every running gag whose fragments are scattered around in the wind like confetti or every snatch of Franz Ferdinand or Outkast sung in cheesy cabaret style – it is not without its problems.

Chief of these is the difficulty, if not impossibility, of maintaining the manic momentum Hill’s act demands. In the bursts when he’s in full flow, the audience are swept along with him. When he’s not, well you don’t half feel it drag.

A good third of the show is sluggish and barren of the hearty laughs he proves he can achieve. Long, convoluted and fruitless shaggy dog stories pad the gaps between the gems, bemusing the audience rather than entertaining them. A tiresomely strained idea about an ‘allegorical aquarium system’, wherein an insect is supposed to evoke a marine animal, is the worst offender by far. But it had many accomplices, including a hugely long-winded Space Shuttle fantasy, and, that classic of old-fashioned joke set-ups, the monkey going into a bar. As Hill’s energy wanes, so does the audience’s, meaning even some of the better lines are lost, eliciting only isolated giggles.

This wouldn’t have happened in the music hall of Hill’s spiritual home. There, with its limited time slots, his impressive, spirits-raising finale of a musical montage cheerily played on a keyboard of bicycle horns, could have been an act on his own. As it is, with every other affectionate light-entertainment homage he’s added to the postmodern mix, it’s wildly uneven. But accept this, and Hill’s finest hour does justify the ticket price – even if it really should be charged in old money.

Steve Bennett
in Woking, March 27, 2005