Elvis Costello - Manchester Apollo - 12 May 2012

Like a fine wine Elvis Costello justs get better with age. That's the only sensible conclusion anyone who witnessed his two and a half hour show at the Manchester Apollo could reach. Bringing his Spectacular Spinning Songbook tour to town after an extended 2011 US tour, Costello (as his alter ego Napoleon Dynamite) arrived with his backing band the Imposters, a big wheel containing a selection of 40 songs or song themes and a go-go dancer in black fishnet stockings and red PVC high heeled boots.  Add to that an encyclopaedic musical knowledge, a full house of Costello fans and a chart history stretching back 35 years, and the audience were in for a treat. From the opening bars of Hope You're Happy Now through to Pump It Up, Costello roamed through his back catalogue via Cilla Black and Charles Aznavour's She, and even managed to throw in a version of the Rolling Stones' Out Of Time.  The big difference between this and most shows you'll pay good money to see is that the set list hadn't been typed out and gaffer taped to the mic stand beforehand. Instead audience members were invited up on stage by Costello's gorgeous female assistant to spin the wheel, with the point at which it stopped determining which songs the band tackled.  "Where it stops nobody knows", said Costello, but the wheel picked out hit after hit from Alison to Oliver's Army. With an ethusiastic and energy that would put entertainers half his age to shame (to call him a mere musician or singer/songwriter would be to understate the role he undertakes each night as emcee cum ringmaster in curating the show), Costello prowls the stage like a cross between Jerry Springer and a black panther, wisecracking as he goes and descending into the audience to sing some of the numbers, even appearing in the balcony. At one point, Costello span the wheel himself and artificially stopped it in order to land on the theme 'Joanna' ("well if you can't cheat in Manchester, where can you?") enabling keyboard impresario Steve Naive to launch into a couple of songs.  A personal highlight was a joyous Talking In The Dark, but in a set of this length there were several high points. Anyone returning to Costello's career after 35 years will be surprised to see the angry young man of My Aim Is True having mellowed into a vaudevillian entertainer who so obviously enjoys entertaining his audience.  But it didn't seem incongruous that he could play Tramp The Dirt Down (which envisages the day that a former prime minister is finally buried) and yet have his audience leave at the end of the evening to Morecambe & Wise's Bring Me Sunshine.  This was rock'n'roll as wholesome family entertainment with something for everyone.  Long may the Spectacular Spinning Songbook continue to revolve.

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.

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.