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.