Alistair McGowan, Chorley Little Theatre, 21 September 2013

Alistair McGowan is probably the most famous impressionist in the UK, so for him to be playing Chorley Little Theatre was some coup.  And, he acknowledged, he wasn't expecting it to be quite so 'little'.  Small it may be, but it was packed out with a largely middle aged audience for his 'Not Just A Pretty Voice' tour.

His hour and three quarter act centres upon a run through the wide repertoire of famous and not so famous voices that he mimics, providing a smorgasbord of characters from TV and the world of celebrity from panel shows to Dad's Army.

As a former voice of Spitting Image McGowan has had many years' experience of mastering some voices, but what was particularly interesting was just how varied a range of people he chooses to imitate.  Whether it's up and coming comics who have appeared on Dave a few times (some of which references were admittedly lost on me) or Sky Sports' Jeff Stelling, McGowan is clearly a keen student of the media.

And McGowan is clearly a clever man, as his impression of Roger Federer giving a post match interview in three languages demonstrates.

Despite his obvious talent, however, the strongest material was the more personal storytelling such as his tale explaining what passed for in car entertainment when he was a child going on holiday with his family.  I would have preferred more of this to the Diane Abbott or Andrew Neill impressions and a pretty laboured Michael Portillo gag.

More up to date political satire would also have added spice, but the fact that no Cameron or Clegg impressions feature in McGowan's act speaks volumes about their lack of presence and their indistinguishability as politicians. Instead William Hague, whose thick Yorkshire brogue is clearly a godsend to an impressionist, and Ed Miliband were neatly parodied.

McGowan's best imitations were of comedians Frank Skinner, John Bishop, Alan Carr and Dara O'Briain.  With their mannerisms also neatly captured, it was possible to believe that they and not McGowan were strutting the boards of Chorley Little Theatre.

So a great night's entertainment in the company of almost 50 household names, and all for the price of a curry and a pint.

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.

Justin Moorhouse, Chorley Little Theatre, 16 March 2013

Justin Moorhouse is fat.  But not fat in a bad way.  He’s more of your affable Hairy Biker kind of fat, the sort of genial fat bloke who’d elbow his way past you in his eagerness to get to the cream cake counter at Greggs and crack a gag in the process such that you wouldn't mind him beating you to the last eclair.

And Moorhouse is comfortable with his size.  It's not glandular or due to big bones.  It is, as he tells a packed house at Chorley Little Theatre, because at home the biscuits are next to the kettle.

Food is a subject close to Justin's heart and at different points in his act the biscuits, a sausage roll and a Ginster's steak slice all feature.  But it isn't just about food, and in a two hour set he also talked about his relationship with his teenage son, his eight year old daughter's obsession with Catholicism and whether, when the rest of the country was facing civil unrest, riots in Euxton and Whittle-le-Woods were ever a realistic proposition.  His conclusion?  They weren’t.

He has a go at teachers in a ‘I’m not having a go but –‘ kind of way which even the teachers in the audience could not help but laugh along at, before - and using an image that will be instantly familiar to everyone who's ever been on a Sunday outing with their family - recounting a childhood visit to Botany Bay that came to an abrupt halt when his father refused to pay the admission.  His own visit to an owl sanctuary as a parent witnessing bored dads trying to get a 3G signal in order to watch the football on Sky on their smartphones also resonated. 

Moorhouse wasn’t afraid to be edgy – his jokes about Paralympian swimmers and the Asian guy running his corner shop had the audience wondering whether they dare laugh or not while he showed that beneath the affable exterior lies an experienced comic when he dealt firmly with a drunken heckler who, having slept through the first hour of his act, started to shout incoherently.

A good comedian draws you into their world, settles you into your seat with an introductory gag or two and then takes you on a journey looking at things you might not have thought you were going to spend your evening contemplating.  So it was with Justin Moorhouse.  Gay sex, teenage masturbation and paedophilia were probably not topics that the audience were expecting to be listening to as they sat eating their pre theatre madras in the curry houses of Chorley, nor where they thought Moorhouse would be taking them when he stepped onto the stage and blinked at them from behind his spectacles.  But that’s where he took them.  And they loved him for it.

Sean Lock, Chorley Little Theatre, 11th March 2013

Sean Lock brought his Purple Van Man tour to Chorley Little Theatre as a work in progress.  The almost full theatre was treated to an hour and three quarters of material, some of which was clearly taking shape on stage as Lock delivered it.

Lock’s laconic delivery will be well known to TV viewers as one of the stars of 8 out of 10 cats.  Voted amongst Britain’s Top 20 comedians by Channel 4 viewers in 2010, and arguably the first comedian to play Wembley Arena (he was the support act to Newman & Baddiel at the time and so preceded them on stage) Lock has sold out three nights at The Lowry in Salford with his current tour so getting him to Chorley Little Theatre was quite a coup.

And since the tour was due to get fully underway less than two weeks after this show, the only real sign that the Chorley audience wasn’t getting the full article was a flip chart on the side of the stage that Lock occasionally referred to as an aide memoire.

His act comprised musings on a number of topics, such as the cost of food at the cinema, the state that most cinemas are left in by the departing audience, and the questions that children ask.  Lock has three young children and questions flow all day at a rate of one a minute, so whether it’s okay to lie to children (it is – better to say that there are monsters under the bed than tell them about the monsters out in the real world) was one subject around which Lock chatted for around ten minutes.

He also spent several minutes expressing his views on Sir Richard Branson (not repeatable in case I get sued!) and considering whether Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones or Radio 2 presenter Jeremy Irons would make a better sleeping bag companion, which gives a flavour of how left field some of Lock’s thoughts are.

Lock has a reflective style, and throws in the odd old fashioned gag every few minutes accompanied by an Eric Morecambe style shuffle to illustrate the showbiz nature of his delivery.  It may have been work in progress, but for the Chorley audience it was job done.

Terry Alderton, Chorley Little Theatre, 4 February 2013

When you go to see a stand up comedian it's reasonable to expect that the act will stand up and tell jokes.  But with Terry Alderton what you get is a running, jumping and falling over comedian with at least two voices in his head and a range of sound effects that would put the BBC's radiophonics workshop to shame.  It was entertaining and non stop, and the term 'stand up comedian' really doesn't begin to describe Alderton's act.

Much of the humour on display at Terry Alderton's gig at Chorley Little Theatre was visual.  The venue was barely a third full but an enthusiastic audience saw this Essex stand up deliver a tour de force.  Billed as 'work in progress' some of the gags fizzled out, yet it was still interesting to see and hear how the character of Liam at the Apple Store in the Trafford Centre is developing.  Similarly, Alderton's discovery of a vibrator in his wife's bedroom drawer was a theme that he appears still to be working on, as he returned to it several times during the evening.

One of Alderton's stage tricks is to turn his back on the audience and pretend his inner voices are talking to him with the audience able to eavesdrop. This device works both as a means of delivering a joke but also as a way of parking one that hasn't quite caught light.

At times the sketches - they are too unformed and flow into each other too much to be called gags - seemed to go nowhere in particular, but it is not due to a lack of material on Alderton's part.  If anything, watching his performance was at times like flicking through the channels with a TV remote and only staying with each programme for a few seconds.

The performance is full on.  Alderton is a ball of energy and a brilliant mimic too, whether it's pretending to be two feuding neighbours in Northern Ireland or a call centre operator in Mumbai.

Alderton was supported by affable Geordie Seymour Mace, whose act included his take on a visit to Botany Bay and an enthusiastic performance fulfilling a 'lifelong ambition' to be a backing singer with Gladys Knight & The Pips.

All in all, a good night's entertainment and the Chorley audience left feeling they had their money's worth. At £8 for a ticket this was excellent value for a comedian who has already been on the small screen in various guises and is determined to make it as a stand up and an equally funny support act.

Chris Ramsey, Chorley Little Theatre, 27 November 2012

Chris Ramsey likes Chorley. He was back at the Little Theatre within 18 months of his last visit and has already booked a further gig at the venue in April of next year. With his Feeling Lucky tour he was bringing a brand new stand up show to town and on more than one occasion in front of a full house told the audience how pleased he was to be there.

Hailing from South Shields and most recently starring in the BBC comedy Hebburn set in the North East, Ramsey often laughs at his own jokes because, as he admits, he doesn't always know what he's going to say until a second before the words come out of his mouth.

In a 95 minute set, he focused on how lucky the audience were to be there in the Little Theatre, and how genetics and historical chance had brought them all to that point. In his own case, having his Dad drop him on his head as a two year old and then Ramsey almost drown himself in a swimming pool whilst on holiday in Spain were particular adventures that he was lucky to survive.

Although there were a series of themes that developed from his central argument about luck, the main theme itself could have been better developed and in truth the set flagged at one or two points.  However Ramsey’s engaging style of delivery kept the attention of his predominantly youthful audience and kept the laughter flowing.

The climax of his act wove his account of a sky dive and the recurring theme of his Dad's taste for practical jokes together. If you are a nervous flyer, Ramsey's description of preparing to leap from a small aircraft ('it was like a van with wings') will not make you any more likely to want to board an aeroplane.

Ramsey made headlines earlier in the year for being accused of breaking into his parents’ house, and his photograph on the mantelpiece and his driving licence carrying his parents’ address did not immediately convince the constabulary of his innocence.  He had something to say both about Russell Brand's predilection for female company and Roy 'Chubby’ Brown's reputation for telling racist jokes, neither of which he seems to appreciate.  He also had to admit to being kicked off Sky TV’s Saturday morning programme Soccer AM for making inappropriate comments.

But Ramsey is hardly controversial.  His material is no more filthy than that of many modern stand ups, although he possibly bases more of his material around using public lavatories than most.  Ramsey admits to not using public toilets if he can avoid them, but has various stories about encounters with lavatory attendants with whom he seems to have the unhappy knack of encountering, usually immediately after they have cleaned their establishmentand are leaning on their mop admiring their work and when he is desperate to use their facilities.

Ramsey engages with his audience, laughing at their jokes and making barbed comments as appropriate that take the crowd along with him.  He didn't  fill the Chorley Little Theatre in 2011.  In 2012 it was deservedly packed out for his return.  Grab tickets for his April appearance while you still can.

Jenny Eclair, Chorley Little Theatre, 5 November 2012

Jenny Eclair's Eclarious tour brought her back to Chorley Little Theatre for the second time in under two years.  She could sell out bigger venues but would appear to like the intimacy that Chorley's home of comedy provides.

After a nervous start, in which her delivery was noticably rushed, she settled into her stride.  She gave us a taste of her novel, which was nothing more than middle age porn with its references to sumptuous furniture, before prowling the stage and launching into an exploration of the issues facing women of a certain age.

Eclair is from Lytham St Annes, and whilst her familiarity with the North West is welcome, as the audience was immediately able to picture her portrayal of her no nonsense mother, the story about what she got up to in the bus shelter in Lytham is less so. How she got such big biceps is a gag that was told on her last visit and was one of several jokes that she told last time she played Chorley and which should have been rested.

She was funnier with her newer material, with much of her act focused on the perils of being over 50, whether that is lack of bladder control or having to hold onto one's breasts when running to stop them flopping about.  She is unimpressed with Madonna's propensity to flash her nipples when other women of a similar age are more inclined to slump on the sofa drooling biscuit crumbs from their mouth.

Jenny doesn't really do sex, and doesn't know why her partner Geoff is still with her given her overall decrepitude.  Her preoccupation is with how her body, and those of all women of her age, is changing, whether it's her hair falling out or the shape of her knees.  These are revealed to a disbelieving audience to be rather, er, manly.

Eclair does not have any pretensions. At home she prefers to spend the day in her night dress if she can, and doesn't like unannounced casual visitors because it means she has to put her clothes on when she could simply stay in her knickers. Small children are particularly unwelcome because of their tendency to make a mess.

Eclair attracts a predominantly female audience - 90% of the Chorley Little Theatre crowd were women - and they loved her take on post menopausal life.  But the men too were laughing out loud.

Another sell out gig at Chorley Little Theatre and a happy comedy audience.

Rob Rouse, Chorley Little Theatre, 10 November 2012

Being related to a comedian can't be easy.  Les Dawson's mother-in-law was the butt of many of his jokes, and stand ups who use observational material will inevitably be drawn to the people around them as subjects.

It seems doubtful that Mrs Rob Rouse realised that her bladder and bowel movements were going to feature quite so prominently in his act when she first started dating the comedian, who was visiting Chorley Little Theatre on his 'Life Sentences' tour.  Not that Mrs Rouse is the only member of the household whose toilet habits get a mention since the bowel movements of Rouse, his children and one of their friends all get discussed.

Chorley Little Theatre was barely half full for this exploration of the Rouse family's bodily functions, but those audience members who came wrapped in their coats to brave the slightly chilly temperature were soon warmed by the laughter Rouse generated.

After an introductory joke about Saturday evenings being a comedian's Monday morning and how it was important not to dive straight into work in case you make a mistake such as 'Chorley police tasering a blind man with a white stick', Rouse turned to his main themes for the evening.

One was his four year old son, who features heavily in Rouse's act, whether it's the tale of him appearing at his father's bedside at 5.30am to begin the endless stream of questions that a growing young mind needs answering or bursting into the lavatory with his potty to share an intimate moment with Dad and let the postman see the two of them having a bowel movement.

Rouse's at the time unborn daughter also features, with the effect of her her penchant for poking his heavily pregnant wife's bladder acted out on stage.  Her birth at home is also described in graphic detail, and one hopes that Mrs Rouse was given the opportunity to vet the material before her husband performed it to a wider audience.

Life as a parent is acutely observed, with his son's testing of his father's patience by prodding a lump of cheese with his finger bringing flashbacks for anyone who has raised a toddler.

A member of the audience was invited to drink a cup of tea that may have been made with Rouse's wife's breast milk ('but to tell you the truth I really can't remember') and sportingly took up the challenge, while the audience's reaction to the idea was 'milked' for all that it was worth.

Rouse is witty, filthy and thoroughly engaging as a comedian but definitely not for the under 16s, and you probably wouldn't want to be sat next to your gran at a Rob Rouse show either.  He wasn't fazed by the sparse audience and created an intimate atmosphere with his warm manner and enthusiastic way in which he threw himself around.  (For a 'stand up', he spent quite a proportion of his act on the floor.

The Chorley gig was filmed for a DVD and audience members present on the night have been promised a free copy.  When they drop through the letterbox it'll be a chance to show their comedy loving friends who decided to give the show a miss that this genuinely funny man deserves a bigger audience.  And a chance for Mrs Rouse to consider whether she wants her husband in the delivery room if she chooses to have another baby.

Greg Davies, Chorley Little Theatre, 6th October 2012

Greg Davies is a big man, as he was happy to admit to a packed Chorley Little Theatre when his The Back Of My Mum's Head show rolled into town.  Describing his body shape as resembling that carved by a four year old from a big piece of ham, he confided to the audience that the waistband in his underpants had snapped before he came on stage and that, whilst we might not witness the event, his underpants might fall down inside his jeans at some point in the evening.  Being so large had a number of other drawbacks, including the fact that he'd destroyed two toilets at home in one day.

Having shared his wardrobe malfunction secret, and engagingly got the audience on his side, this former teacher (perhaps best known for playing the teacher Mr Gilbert in The Inbetweeners) revealed his agenda for the evening, helpfully set out on a flip chart.  Davies did not go so far as to tell the crowd when they should laugh but such information would anyway have been superfluous, as they were laughing from start to finish.

The show was a well paced mix of story telling and audience interaction, with Davies' observational comedy taking random incidents in his life and weaving a narrative from them, such as the east London taxi driver who called Davies 'Big Bird' on picking up his fare and, having riled his passenger from the off, then got into an argument with him about what the ingredients of a pie are.  'It's pie, isn't it?'

Davies' top five involuntary noises, with the Pick of the Pops theme tune helpfully hummed by the audience, included a reference to a friend caught spying on his sunbathing neighbour by his monster of a wife.  Davies disguised 'Darren's' real identity to spare his embarrassment only to accidentally blurt out his real name, which is now known only to Davies and 250 theatregoers and staff.  Apart from the laugh it got, the mistake was ironic since Davies' theme was how adults need to censor what they're thinking in a way that children don't.

Davies' parents feature in much of his material, with his mother's concern about Davies being bitten by a fish whilst he was up a mountain so baffling to him that he produced a script so that the audience could help him act out the telephone conversation he had with her and his father.  His mother's 'it's not normal' refrain was reflected back by Davies to highlight how everyone says or thinks things that perhaps they shouldn't.  His friend Nicky's confession at a university Truth and Dare party that he'd fondled his sleeping grandmother's breasts was one example, whilst the hospital consultant asking Davies if there was going to be another series of The Inbetweeners whilst performing a cystoscopy on him was another.

Davies tells a story with a suitably conspiratorial air.  His family's camper van being followed through the American countryside at night with his parents terrified they are about to be killed only for Davies' then 12 year old sister to save the day by hanging out of the back door waving a plastic machine gun to scare their pursuers away has everyone on the edge of their seats, intrigued and amused.

The show concluded with the audience joining Davies on his guitar singing a song about a bonsai tree called 'I wish I was a bonsai tree'.  Music and comedy does not always work, but as a means of concluding a very funny set Davies succeeded in creating the sense of a camp fire singalong and making the audience feel they had been part of something special.

Davies' support was Ed Petrie, better known to younger readers as a presenter on BBC children's television shows.  Petrie suggested he had been asked rather at the last minute to accompany Davies on the tour, a statement which was supported by a short and slightly stumbling set that concluded in him forgetting his last joke.  The Chorley audience gave him a sympathetic hearing but the belly laughs were reserved for Davies.

Danny Bhoy, Chorley Little Theatre, 23 September 2012

Some stand ups limber up for a gig by baiting the audience members in the front rows. Danny Bhoy eschews this approach for his Dear Epson show. Shuffling onstage in unbuttoned check shirt and jeans, and looking for all the world like a postgraduate student in a shared house who has got up late for breakfast, he initially comes across as a mild mannered kind of guy. But the sheaf of letters he has penned to various corporate giants, around which his show is constructed, reveals an angry inner Danny. He reads the letters whilst sat on a stool, giving an intimate and confessional air to the show.  And whilst his targets are mostly institutions everyone is familiar with, his reasons for attacking them are often personal. From BT To Oil of Olay, Danny has critical questions for them all, wanting to know why Epson printer ink costs as much drop for drop as vintage champagne and whether FIFA President Sepp Blatter took a bung when he awarded Qatar the 2022 World Cup. As a Scot, he's particularly perturbed by the latter. 'Knowing my luck, that's the only World Cup we'll qualify for in my lifetime.  The one you can't drink at.' Candle manufacturers Molton Brown get a letter asking how they can justify charging £36.50 for marketing a candle that is meant to conjure up a forest on the edge of midnight but which to Bhoy smells like wet grass.  His missive to British Airways, twelve years after their failure to let him reschedule a flight back from New York without having to pay for a new ticket, is a reflection on how a TransAtlantic love affair fizzled out.  He also reveals something of the young Danny, cutting pictures of New York out of brochures collected from the local travel agent to paste on his bedroom wall. The letters are an opportunity to lay some ghosts to rest.  Mr Dowel, the school woodwork teacher who never had the comic possibilities of his name exploited at the time, gets a letter. Rather satisfyingly, Bhoy tells him that whilst IKEA has rendered redundant what he learnt about joinery, he did get somewhere as a result of joking around in class. The show was well paced, and appreciated by the audience.  That it was a work in progress is evidenced by the fact that Bhoy had an idea on stage as to how his letter to Ticketmaster could be improved. 'Write that down, somebody.'  In the interests of furthering his comedy genius and without revealing the gag - Captcha, Danny, Captcha. The show concludes with a touching letter of advice from Bhoy to his 13 year old self. This final letter encapsulates the thoughful and thought provoking nature of a well written, beautifully executed and very funny show.

Russell Kane Chorley Little Theatre 20 May 2012

Russell Kane packed more into a sixty minute set at Chorley Little Theatre than most stand ups manage in two hours but, as he said himself, he does talk at twice the speed of most comics.  He was off to Blackpool for a charity gig after his Chorley appearance and the rate at which he delivers his act was like being on a seaside rollercoaster.


Barely pausing for breath during his Manscaping set he leapt about the stage in an athletic performance.  He mimicked everything from Olympic mum door knocking, which featured audience members Amanda from Chorley against a woman from North Carolina, to Lancastrians being poisoned by drinking Yorkshire Tea.  He also collapsed to the floor as he imagined Northern women crawling gratefully out of the bedroom and into the garden to hug a warm rock because their men won’t.


In truth, it wasn’t just Northern men who were the subject of his material but men in general.  He talked about his relationship with his father, how women deal with relationship crises better and mothers’ relationships with their sons.  He painted telling portraits of men getting grumpier as they get older, which for some reason led my partner to prod me quite hard, and how they find his material less funny as the evening wears on and their bladders get fuller.


Going to the loo during a Russell Kane set is a risky business, as you are likely to be teased as you leave the room and talked about when you're not in it.  When one woman admitted that the man next to her was her brother but that she didn't know him, Kane wondered if they'd been brought up at different foster homes.  Even the intelligent looking chap who tried to make himself inconspicuous by ducking down as he left the auditorium was not immune, with Kane imitating him wondering 'is he going to do anything with prime numbers?'  On learning that a teenage audience member he was talking to was called Cavan, Kane wondered if he'd been found in a cave and went off on a riff about how Lancashire children are discovered near the cliffs: 'And this is our daughter Igneous Bed.'


He finished with a story about the snobbery that he encountered on a first class train journey to Cambridge with a final twist that, although slightly predictable, was still funny.


Whilst there was plenty afterwards, there wasn't a lot of applause during Russell Kane's set - he just doesn't give his audience time to stop and reflect before firing off the next gag.


Trains also featured in the set of Kane's support, Iain Stirling, or more particularly getting locked in the toilet of one with a fellow passenger.  The story had the person next to me crying with laughter. Edinburgh born Stirling also neatly wove together stories about his Auntie Pam, a drunken punter at a Newcastle gig and his mate's posh girlfriend.  Stand ups at Chorley don’t always feature a support act, but Stirling was well worth his twenty five minute slot.


Together, Kane and Stirling were a winning combination and the best night's comedy at Chorley Little Theatre for a while.

Shappi Khorsandi, Chorley Little Theatre, 18 May 2012

Comedian Shappi Khorsandi was nearing the end of her act at a packed Chorley Little Theatre when a group of men trooped in from the bar carrying drinks. Her gentle chiding of their decision to put lager ahead of laughter – ‘you’re like characters from Viz’ - won her sympathetic applause from the audience, most of whom were enjoying the show. Chorley Little Theatre plays host to a lot of comedy, but a comedy club where the punters can wander freely to and from the bar while the stand up is in mid flow it is not.

In truth this was another coup for Chorley Little Theatre and a full house had turned out to see Ms Khorsandi, who wanted to know who’d heard her on Radio 4, seen her on Michael McIntyre or ‘just been dragged along?'

She hadn’t heard of Chorley - ‘I thought it was somewhere near London’ – and engaged with members of the audience throughout the auditorium to find out who was there with friends. When one woman explained that she’d met her friends through Rainbows which were 'little brownies' Khorsandi replied: 'I thought we'd got past all that.'

It was her first foray into tackling the casual racism she has encountered since arriving in the UK from Iran in the 1970s with her parents. As a child her brother responded to taunts of 'Oi, Gandhi! with 'Oi, Churchill!' and she recently criticised a national newspaper for allowing its dating site members to choose the skin colour of potential partners. When the man handling her complaint suggested a date she wrote back declining his offer: 'Too brown.'

Khorshandi handles the subjects of parenthood and moving to another country with aplomb. Her riff on the topic of siblings, the central theme of the show, started off as an affectionate portrait of her older brother Peyvand, but made some wry observations on the attitudes of parents towards growing numbers of children, and how the third child of the family gets neglected, a comment that resonated with my youngest-of-three-siblings partner.

Going through a divorce, she revelled in explicit details of her adult sex life, including a fling with a rock star, and some audience members will never be able to watch The Good Life on TV in the same light, but her gag about the Edinburgh Festival puppeteer who tried to put his hand up her skirt (‘you’re not at work now’) was the highlight of this section.

Her strongest and most distinctive material revolves around her family and her stories of arriving in England from her time in pre Revolutionary Iran, including watching children’s television: ‘We had the Magic Roundabout but Florence had to wear a hijab’. The Wombles was also different, Orinoco being blown to bits after the family were forced to serve as minesweepers in the Iran-Iraq war. Morph was the first non white person she saw on English television.

Her father was once the subject of an assassination plot and even this gets woven into the act. The 10 year old Khorsandi writes to Ayatollah Khomeini, apologising that she hasn’t written in Farsi but ‘I’m dyslexic in two languages’ and pleading that she loves her dad ‘but I love my brother more.’ He didn't write back. But when she later visits Iran she’s pleased to see that on the signed execution warrant the Ayatollah had underlined that the children should not be harmed.

Other vignettes included her auntie visiting England and, after experiencing ten years of the Iran-Iraq war in a bomb shelter, going out on Bonfire Night and throwing herself to the floor at the first sound of fireworks.

At the conclusion of a ninety minute set, she appeared genuinely pleased at the reception she’d received. ‘You're nice, Chorley,’ she said, and seemed to mean it. A shame those members of the audience who chose to go to the bar couldn't have paid her the same respect.

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.

Mike Gunn and Sean Collins

Mike Gunn & Sean Collins
Chorley Little Theatre
3rd February 2012

Chorley Little Theatre is becoming a regular stopping off point on the Northern comedy circuit, punching above its weight by attracting household names such as Jeremy Hardy and Jack Dee, whose recently announced gig sold out in two hours.

Sadly the venue was a long way from being full for Mike Gunn and Sean Collins, which can only be described as a missed opportunity for Chorley comedy fans who decided to pass on this one. Not that it put the performers off. Comedians do like to make audience members the butt of their humour and in a less than half full theatre it's like shooting fish in a barrel. In Chorley the fish were leaping out of the barrel with targets painted on their bodies, with one man admitting to taping old episodes of Ground Force so that he can ogle Charlie Dimmock.

Gunn could hardly miss when presented with that target, and maybe it's the readiness of Chorley stand up fans to be humiliated that makes the venue such a hit with comedians. Gunn is a Londoner with a dry delivery somewhat reminiscent of Jo Brand and the looks of one time 'They Think It's All Over' regular Lee Hurst. Admitting he is 'married to a ginge', he hopes his children get their genes from him on the basis that it would be better to have no rather than red hair.

Unusually, they played this as a two hander, with Collins warming up for Gunn in the first half and Gunn returning the favour at the start of the second before both men appeared on stage for the last 25 minutes. Collins is a reflective Canadian who has lived in the UK for eight years and loves how we expect our train service to be terrible whereas querying if his train might be late in Germany led to the rail officials thinking he was a terrorist with some prior knowledge of a delay. He’d done his research on Chorley and 'there's no other night life, right?' His second half set was performed sat on a stool a la Dave Allen.

The show ended with them on stage together playing comedy tag, with one cracking a gag before handing the topic over to the other, a format they said they enjoyed. This was less successful than each on their own, partly because neither man had the chance to get into the flow of things before it was time to hand the baton back.

All in all, a good night's comedy. A riff on bingo and paedophilia and some advice from Collins on how to get a girlfriend in Canada using a bear trap ('after 3 or 4 days stuck in that they'll do anything you want just to get out') closed the show and left the audience happy. Just a shame there wasn't more of one.

Tom Stade, Chorley Little Theatre, 25 November 2011

Billed as 'Strictly for over 16s only' Canadian comic Tom Stade arrived in Chorley on the penultimate night of a mammoth three month tour. Chorley Little Theatre was sold out with an audience comprised of a balance of people in their 20s, 30s and 40s. There weren't too many grey hairs in the audience, which was just as well, since this wasn't the kind of show you would happily take your grandmother too, unless your grandmother used to work in a shipyard and was used to someone who uses the F word to punctuate every fifth word they speak. Stade's gags mirrored his language as he picked on members of the front row, analysing the sex life of a couple who'd been married 17 years and questioning the commitment of a man who was with his pregnant partner of 7 years but hadn't married her. 'Still not sure she's the one, eh?'

His 90 minute set covered the sex act in various forms, domestic violence and the tribulations of married life. He may not make many friends amongst the feminist movement but the howls of mainly female laughter would suggest that he touched several nerves in his description of life in the Stade household.

Using his non native status to comment on the Brits, the highlight for me was his description of how Brits think Argos is a great place to shop even though there are no goods on display.

The language is filthy and Tom Stade will never be to everyone's tastes as his subject material is at times edgy and absolutely not prime time material. But as his joke about starving Ethiopians going to 'McGeldofs' showed ('why is it that in America poor people are fat'?) he can be funny and thought provoking. Not many comedians can say that.

Alun Cochrane, Chorley Little Theatre, 17 November 2011

Stand up comedian Alun Cochrane likes entering into conversations with members of his audience, so sitting in the second row of the Chorley Little Theatre was always going to be a high risk strategy. Especially when the venue was only half full. And he was less than ten seconds into his act before he alighted upon my 15 year old son Bill and warned him (and me) that we would be hearing some colourful language, albeit he suggested no more colourful than Bill probably hears in the playground every day.

A comedian originally from Scotland but now living in Manchester by way of West Yorkshire and, inevitably for a stand up, south London, he doesn't tell jokes. Instead he shares with his audiences his dislike of certain types of people - fat ones who breathe too loudly on the quiet zone on trains, motor home owners who take all their worldly goods on holiday with them, the man who threatened to pull out of buying his house in an attempt to haggle the price down just before contracts were exchanged - and the human race in general.

Cochrane cheerfully admits to being a misanthrope who can 'suck the joy out of any joyous occasion' but noted shrewdly that all the women in the audience immediately turned to their menfolk and mouthed 'you do that'.

He also shared his discomfort at finding himself in B&Q with fourteen cardboard cutouts of a slightly less than life sized Alan Titchmarsh, imagining him on the phone to his agent to complain that B&Q had shrunk him by a couple of inches.

He didn't enjoy his free skiing holiday - 'I call it "slipping"' - while signing up for a new 25 year mortgage as a professional comedian was also quite stressful. 'What happens if I'm only chucklesome in twelve years' time? Will we have to move out of our new house?' The audience was doing more than chuckling though, and he was gratified to see that a woman in the audience had laughed so much she spilt her drink. He finished with a real highlight - a sketch about Darth Vader telling his hairdresser how his holiday went.

Alun Cochrane doubts there is any immediate prospect of him entertaining a crowd at an arena-sized gig. But the reaction of the stand up fans who witnessed him in the intimate setting of the Little Theatre suggests suggests that could all be about to change. He certainly acquired a devotee in Bill.

Chris Addison, Chorley Little Theatre, 7 October 2011

Chris Addison, star of TV's 'The Thick Of It', played to an almost full house at Chorley's Little Theatre with an act comprised of very new and very old material, and something for all tastes. The comedian, completing the final leg of his first stand up tour in five years, was so keen to make sure that his act contained fresh material that he was tweeting for facts about Chorley an hour before he went on stage.

The result, after a gag about putting up prices by £2.50 in order to put off students from buying tickets, was a hot off the presses analysis of life in Chorley, with a dissection of the contents of a butter pie and an admission that his rider for the gig was "two cans of Coke and two Chorley cakes." Jokes about the Mormon church and Botany Bay followed. Only his story about his middle class origins being exposed if he was sliced open ("cut me in two and you’ll see I’m middle class. I haven't got middle class written through me but you’ll see my dad come and sew me up - he's a doctor!”) creaked a little, having been part of his act for ten years at least.

After a 35 minute opening set he returned for a full hour in which he deconstructed his middle class life growing up in north Manchester and more recently south east London. Gags about the Queen Mother and the Pope worked less well than vignettes about married life in Bromley, such as his wife ordering a new lampshade online in the time it takes him to break one and clear up the debris, and her uncanny ability to find something in five minutes that he’s failed to locate in two hours (“She could find Osama Bin Laden. He’s probably on our kitchen table under a piece of paper.”)

A highlight of the second half was his suggestion that chickens are frustratedly saying something other than cluck, despite what human ears may hear. Attacks on people who wear Ugg boots and the lack of insight shown by people who say "the thing about me" rounded off an energetic performance by a comedian who isn't quite on the A list but for whom a venue the size of the Chorley Little Theatre is lucky to capture.

He may be 38, but Chris Addison is a still rising star of comedy.

Jo Caulfield, Chorley Little Theatre, 24 September 2011

Stand up comedienne Jo Caulfield will remember Chorley for two reasons. The audience rewriting one of her jokes - and the Hartwood Hall Hotel.

The Hartwood certainly made an impression on the TV and Radio 4 regular as she stopped off in Chorley for her 'Cruel to be Kind' tour. Imagining a boutique hotel set in rolling grounds and not a Beefeater, she drove round and round the roundabout on the A6 and thought: "This can't be it." She was underwhelmed. "No Sky TV. And only one plugpoint. So no TV if you want to put the kettle on."

Jack Daniels and coke in hand, she started her 90 minute set at the Chorley Little Theatre complaining that a younger comedian was lazy for suggesting vodka and Red Bull got alcohol into the bloodstream more quickly. "Why can't he get to the bar two hours earlier like the rest of us?"

In an evenly paced set that had the audience laughing out loud throughout, Jo revealed her love of TV reality shows and her dislike of self service supermarket checkouts and the way people in love talk to their new partners. The highlight of the set was her longer observational material, including the story of bumping into someone in HMV that she recognised very slightly, meeting his fiancée at dinner and then realising she didn't know the couple at all.

After the interval, Jo asked the audience for marks out of ten on some new gags. For the joke "Don't you hate it when people offer you food to show off the fact that they've been abroad?", they even contributed a better punchline, suggesting "Have a slice of Arctic Roll" should finish with "it's from Iceland" rather than Tesco. Ms Caulfield was suitably impressed. "You're brilliant, Chorley."

The set finished with her running through some of the audience's pet hates (men, dog waste, Mormons), a list she admitted was much more irreverent than those of other venues she'd played, who had concentrated on the global economic crisis. "You're very angry, Chorley."

Hopefully memories of Chorley and the gag that the Little Theatre audience rewrote will stay with her. From her caustic tweets the following day, memories of the Hartwood certainly will.

Jenny Eclair, Chorley Little Theatre, 19 March 2011

Jenny Eclair sold out two nights at the Chorley Little Theatre on the strength of her appearance on I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here in 2010, but the hit ITV show received nary a mention. Any youngsters in the audience looking for anecdotes about sitting round the camp fire with Ant and Dec had their hopes quickly dashed: “I’ve got a message for any children in the audience tonight – f*** off!”

Instead the Grumpy Old Woman and one time Perrier Award winning comedienne gave her mainly female audience an X-rated analysis of what its like to be middle aged and entering the menopause. And so began a show which, although entitled Old Dog, New Tricks, could just as easily have been called Bodily Functions. In a set that was definitely not for the squeamish, no physical act or scatological description was left unexplored as Eclair brought gasps of shock and gales of laughter from her mainly female audience.

Identifying the men in the audience as designated drivers brought along so that the women could get drunk, Eclair talked about passing wind on the bus, passing wind whilst having a massage and whether middle aged women should gang together clutching their private parts to intimidate hoodies in the part of south east London where she now lives.

Eclair hails from Lytham St Annes and shared with her audience fond but entirely unrepeatable memories of spending her formative years dispensing sexual favours to teenage boys. Her parents still live in Lytham and were the subject of some of her material but Geoff, her partner of 28 years, was the butt of more jokes. We learnt that watching the Tour de France on TV he fell off the sofa pretending to pedal along with the riders, whilst plans for a Vegas wedding were abandoned because he couldn’t differentiate between a serving spoon and a dessert spoon. Breakfast in bed served by Geoff is also over rated (“wrong type of marmalade”), as is oral sex.

The female obsession with removing body hair, the wardrobe habits of female weather presenters (“I don’t want my weather girl in a spangly top looking like she’s been clubbing all night”) and the delights of the Per Una range of clothing from M&S all received the Éclair treatment. This grumpy old woman likes the self service section at her local Sainsbury because it makes shoplifting easier, but feels her frequent shopper status should entitle her to a VIP Nectar card and a free glass of champagne. And she rather likes Booths – “it’s the sort of place that, if you fainted while you were there, they’d make sure your skirt was pulled down so that you looked decent.”

Eclair is a Northern lass with middle class pretensions that have softened as she gets older: “I used to arrive in a place hoping to score some Class A drugs. Now I hope they’ve got a nice floral clock.” Few of her jokes could be repeated in a family newspaper and Jenny Eclair is unlikely to be offered the freedom of Lytham St Annes any time soon, but if she toned down her act in order to do so, the fans who packed the Chorley Little Theatre would not forgive her.

Dan Antapolski, Chorley Little Theatre, 18 November 2010

Despite a number of appearances on Radio 4 and Channel 4, stand up comedian Dan Antapolski is not a household name. This was reflected in the number of seats sold for his performance at Chorley Little Theatre, which was only one third full. But Antapolski didn’t let the rows of empty seats faze him, and turned the intimate nature of the gig to his advantage.

Resplendent in beard and multi coloured jumper, he began by making conversation with an Austrian lady on the front row: “Viennese architecture not good enough for you so you thought you’d come to Chorley, eh?”

He performed for 90 minutes in total, with a slow paced opening hour. His humour might best be described as surreal and it took the audience a few minutes to tune into his understated delivery. Pondering whether to describe a female audience member as having black hair or black hairs won them over, but amongst the good one liners (“I’ve just been reading the prequel to Shakespeare’s Hamlet – it’s called Piglet”) there were periods where the tempo dropped.

The punchier 30 minute post interval set worked better. Antapolski returned to the stage wrestling a pantomime spider he’d found in his dressing room and with a gag deconstructing the meaning of Bob Marley’s ‘No Woman No Cry.’ (“Does he mean he doesn’t have a woman? Or that she shouldn’t cry? What was he on about?”) Linguistic analysis seemed to be his strength, as he then imagined his 6 year old daughter querying why the Jack and Jill of nursery rhyme fame didn’t drill a well at the bottom of the hill to avoid falling down the hill later.

Apart from a brief foray into political comedy (“The BNP get seen off at the General Election. And they get their revenge with that oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico”) his young daughters were the source for much of his material.

His show finished with what proved to be the highlight of his set, an energetic “Laser Rap” about the joys of owning a laser tape measure with dry ice giving the full Top Of The Pops studio effect and beams of red light bouncing off various audience members.

Billy Connolly started out as a singer whose in between chat expanded until it became his act. With Dan Antopolski, a few more songs might be the key to his career taking off.