Mark Steel, Chorley Little Theatre, 21 April 2012

Chorley Little Theatre was predictably sold out for Mark Steel's In Town tour when it, er, hit town.  Steel is a stalwart on the comedy circuit with a left wing credibility that would make Ken Livingstone blush.  However on this tour he played down the socialism to highlight some of Britain's lesser known towns with accompanying slideshow and following his successful Radio 4 series on this theme. The audience was treated to tales about the Get Carter car park in Gateshead and a drunken Education Minister on the Isle of Man through to Walsall's hippo (don't rush). Steel mused on the perils of delivering a tailor made show to a local audience: 'As I was leaving Winchester, a chap said to me "Good job you were playing Winchester, seeing as how you have such a lot of Winchester material in your set".' Steel had not been to Chorley before.  Prior to arriving on stage he spent the day getting to know the town, learning about Vimto and the history of unrest from two centuries before.  He had also done some exploring.  'I like how all the shops are closed.  Stops people getting in your way.'  A highlight was wondering why the Mormons chose to build their UK church in Chorley.  When the audience volunteered that the founder of the Pilgrim Fathers was a local he went off on a riff about Chorley as the focal point of all religions.  'I suppose Jesus was from round here?' He also spent part of his afternoon watching Chorley FC: 'I was late.  The gates were locked, to prevent a huge queue of people from getting in' and hoped that the Magpies might get promotion to a more attractively named division than the Evostik Premier, 'like the Superglue League.' It was an instructive evening for Steel, who learnt that what differentiates Chorley cakes from Eccles cakes is that they're made from short crust pastry.  Aside from the local jokes, he also reflected on hitting 50, having a grumpy teenage son and the perils of cycling.  With a show weighing in at over two and a half hours, he might have kept going had a woman on the front row not pointed out that she had missed the last bus home to Astley Village.  'Where Cromwell lost his shoe,' said Steel.  He had done his homework, and his audience went home entertained and educated.

Robin Ince, Chorley Little Theatre, 19 April 2012

Thanks to Robin Ince I'll be drinking black coffee tomorrow morning.  Not because I was put off drinking milk by his sketch asking how many audience members would eat something made from human breast milk (more than in Wolverhampton, apparently, and the highest number so far on his Happiness Through Science tour) but because I came away from his gig at Chorley Little Theatre with a reading list going round in my head running from Carl Sagan to Noam Chomsky and Stephen Weinberg by way of Erwin Schrodinger's cat.  The mental cataloguing of the names of three Nobel Prize winning physicists caused me to forget on the drive home that I needed to buy milk for breakfast. This show was as far from the Jim Davidson branch of stand up comedy as it is possible to get with dark matter, stellar nurseries and the Large Hadron Collider all thrown into the mix.  Add a dash of Laurel and Hardy and a pinch of Melanie Phillips baiting (she of the Daily Mail) and you begin to get a flavour of what Robin Ince's act is all about.  Or perhaps not. Described as a 'militant atheist', although not a label he accepts, Ince brought his two hour show to a two thirds full theatre comprised largely of an older audience no doubt attracted by his Radio 4 programme The Infinite Monkey Cage with Dr Brian Cox.  The programme's title attracted complaints two months before the show was written, complainants to the BBC apparently not understanding the theory that an infinite number of monkeys given an infinite number of typewriters could produce the works of Shakespeare.  'Ninety typewriters,' suggested Ince, 'and you'll get a Dan Brown.' I can't ruin Robin Ince's act by reproducing his material word for word because I couldn't keep up with the torrent of ideas pouring from the stage, and because I'm not a scientist. Neither is Ince, but his enthusiasm for his subject, whether it's explaining the reptilian brain or why he doesn't believe Mr Potato Head would stop to offer Barbie a lift in Toy Story 2, meant that two hours flew by. It's a very rare stand up gig indeed that ends with the comic reading a passage from a book written by US physicist and Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman about the death of his wife.  Ince finished by saying 'I've stolen two hours of your life, Chorley, and you're not getting it back!'. I for one was happy to be robbed.