Marcus Brigstocke, Chorley Little Theatre, 11 April 2013

Marcus Brigstocke's Brig Society tour came to Chorley and played to a full house.  Politics was the overriding theme for the evening. Brigstocke set his stall out in the opening minutes with a few jokes about Margaret Thatcher that, despite the nearness of her death, were acerbic without bordering on the tasteless. 

The central concept of Brigstocke's two and a quarter hour show was a critique of David Cameron's vision of a Big Society, with members of the Chorley Little Theatre audience appointed as ministers for Education, Health and Transport and free to make up policies of their own. The truck driver given the transport brief duly abolished people who hog the middle lane, proposing that machine guns be fitted to the front of lorries in order to remove offending vehicles in the centre of the motorway.

Brigstocke demonstrated he could easily have been a politician. Not only did he go to a posh school and have a very good line in appearing to talk down to people but he also made a splendid fist of explaining how the banking crisis occurred. His use of audience participation to illustrate how the banks lent other people's money to those that couldn't afford to repay was as clear as anything the BBC's Robert Peston might come up with, and in the process he emptied the audience's pockets of more than £50. His analogy of the Greeks staying in the Euro being like gatecrashing a German run nightclub and being unable to keep up with the music also illustrated his ability to extract a gag out of unpromising material.

George Osborne (net worth £4m) and David Cameron (£30m) were targets of his ire for pursuing the Government's economics policy, but so too was Jimmy Carr for the tax avoidance measures he employed and made headlines with last year.

Some of what Brigstocke does is hardly comedy at all. His rant against The Sun ('why does anybody still buy it? They hacked into a dead girl's phone') could be that of a left wing politician, and his amusing comments about UKIP leader Nigel Farage speared the pretensions of the UKIP leader to be treated as a serious politician more effectively than anything being said by the mainstream party leaders. Proving Brigstocke is also no fan of Labour Ed Miliband was dismissed with a withering one liner about his appearance.

But it wasn't all about politics. Brigstocke questioned the necessity of most train announcements and washing your hands after visiting the lavatory, whilst also cautioning men against drying their genitals in a Dyson airblade.

Despite its length and the weighty subject matter, the show was evenly paced and by the end the audience had been entertain and educated, with everyone having a better understanding of economic policy and with those who 'invested' money in Brigstocke to help him illustrate the banking crisis once more clutching the banknotes he borrowed mid show. Unlike the audience member in Leeds who Brigstocke apparently took £10 off and omitted to refund, finding the money in his shirt pocket afterwards, the Chorley audience did not go home unrewarded.