It’s Alright on the Night

Variety entertainment is rather a hit and miss business - but then that’s part of the point; it’s unlikely that every element will please everyone, but there should be something for everyone, and, indeed, there was.  John James had pulled together a wide range of acts with no particular unifying theme.  In itself, that’s fine - variety shows don’t need to have a theme (Sunday Night At The London Palladium never did!) - but I felt that the show lost a bit of focus because of the breadth of the material, which took us from 19th century poetry to 21st century stand-up.

There were some good sketches (a mixture of well-known material and pieces by uncredited members of the company).  Amongst the highlights, a Victoria Wood sketch set on a Health Farm with Lisa Siuda doing a very funny turn as the manageress who was so far out of her depth that she had become disengaged from the English language.

You would have thought that “The One-Eyed Yellow Idol” had been done to death.  (It dates from 1911, and is a staple of Music Hall revivals.)  Not so.  Jeremy and Melanie Seacombe managed to give it some genuine comic originality by combining it with a “someone else’s arms” routine - he did the monologue, she provided his hands.  I suppose this is so funny because there’s a perpetual element of danger - neither the audience nor the performers know quite what’s going to happen.  This makes me wonder if that’s why some of the older material didn’t quite come off.  Sara Yarwood made an excellent job of Joyce Grenfell’s nursery school monologue (“George, don’t do that”), but it didn’t get a big reaction from the audience; the sketch is so familiar that it lacks that element of risk and surprise.  On the other hand, Dennis Eason’s rendition of “Gunner Joe” went down well; it’s one of the Stanley Holloway monologues (from 1933) but probably benefits from being one of the lesser-known parts of the canon.

Mark Weston provided the stand-up, some of which fell flat and some drew the biggest laughs of the evening.  (It’s the problem all comedians have; the material needs a lot of road-testing to find out what works and to get to a consistent balanced set.)

Amongst the musical turns, there were songs from the company, an excellent Can-Can and a couple of solo songs in each half from Sharon Willegers and Derek Verney.  It was Derek who provided the highlight of the evening for me, with a rich comfortable bass rendering of "Old Man River".

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