Why This Is Hell

So the Carbunkle is barely a tenth full, we're told that we can sit where we like - it can only mean one thing: we're paying host to an Iffy comedian. Yes, the winner of last year's equivalent of the Perrier is in town, performing to thirty people. It's a tough gig.

It probably doesn't help his confidence that he's tried to walk onto stage through the wrong door.

He points out he's not been on tv, but there was the Eleven O'Clock Show and a couple of days hosting I@m a Celebrity. Their loss. It's in your face - lots of swearing (lots of C words), lots of material about sex, particularly dirty sex, lots of picking ona couple of audience members and suggesting things about their sex lives, lots of stuff about gay sex.

It has to be said he's got a tendency to milk a joke - but in such a way that it becomes funny again. Having riffed on the unlikelihood of Arnold Schwarzenegger starring in four comedy movies (complete with impression), he bounces off his commentary on Conan to do Arnold the stand up comedian. which lapses into through the second half. The first half - over seventy minutes - includes a long sequence on why Scousers aren't funny, with pitch perfect imitations of them (Liverpool having apparently replaced Glasgow as the toughest gig).

As always the sense of the special moment - the this night only. The audience member who looked like Harold Shipman. The new couple who'd rather be shagging. The mixed aged couple who left in the interval. The interval requested by a woman who needed the toilet ("Don't say anything funny whilst I've left the room"). And he tried out new material and had things to say on racism - that if the n-word (which is doesn't use) is kept so offensive, it gives the racists a gift.

In the end, brilliant - and Australian rather than Irish as I'd anticipated.

What is it about Radio 4 presenters that makes them so personal? I've felt more loss about Nick Clarke, Humphrey Lyttelton, Alan Coren, John Peel and even Alistair Cooke than anyone else I can think of. I guess because it feels like a voice which has been talking to you. There is something social about the tv and the cinema that doesn' make it feel so personal, even though I consume both on my own. Is it because you are doing other things whilst the radio is chatting to you? That sort of friendship whilst they're there with a mug and coffee and you're pottering?

Anyway, Linda Smith was a great loss and her boyfriend (Smith's word - partners are lawyers or bankers) Warren Lakin compiled first a selection of her routines and then wrote a biography in her honour. Now he's taken it on the road. I'm not sure how I feel about this - is it milking grief or keeping her spirit alive or allowing us to grieve too? My eyes were definitely moist by the end of it.

The venue was just over a third full, and the audience were largely female, and it felt a little older than the Radio 4 audiences of Punt and Dennis or Mitch Benn. I recognised a few faces.

Lakin sits, mostly, in an armchair, reading a script, a mole backed into the limelight, whilst old colleagues Kate Rutter and Mike McCarthy perform old material. There's something odd here, given how personal material is to specific comedians, and how specific her comedy was to either particular historical social contexts or panel games. Rutter looks like Smith - or rather looks like how you'd imagined she looked if you've only rarely seen a face (sister was my initial thought). Lakin occasionally stumbles, I suspect as much through inexperience as grief (and reading outloud is hard).


Towards the end of the first half, Hattie Hayridge, of Red Dwarf, did a guest appearance with Radio 5 monologue material. And then a trio performed some of Linda's favourite music - Tom Waits and Robert Wyatt sing Elvis Costello. Good stuff.

The second half had more music, more Hayridge, and the voice and face of Smith - a snatch from Room 101, a clip from Just a Minute, a late interview with Dawn French (their first meeting as female comedians, like female sf academics, can't be allowed to share the same bill). As it was the last night of the tour, Lakin left the script behind (maybe he did the same at each performance) and thanked the venue - where Smith had cancelled three times due to her illness - and the staff.

And then he leaves the stage to a single spotlight and Linda's voice: Humphrey Lyttelton (twinge) invites he to sing the words of "Psycho Killer" to the tune of Renee and Renato's "Save Your Love". Priceless. It shouldn't work, but it did.

Which I think sums up the evening.