Review: Rob Brydon (Comedy)

Friday afternoon I bunked-off work early to jump on the train down to Brighton for the last of my Christmas presents: Tickets to see Rob Brydon.

I’m a big fan of Brydon (otherwise it would have been a pretty poorly-chosen gift!). From his early role as Keith Barrett in the heart-breaking Marion and Geoff, to his more recent involvement in the excellent Gavin and Stacey, it’s clear he’s got a great eye for character and is an incredibly nuanced comedic actor. Thus I was expecting his stand-up show to be very well written and performed. And it was. But what surprised me was his willingness to deviate from script and banter with the audience. The dependence on the public to provide him suitable material meant these parts of the show didn’t always work as well, or run as smoothly as the more established routines. But they added a nice change of pace, and helped showcase his ability to think on his feet and above all, stay in character. Brydon is one of those rare comedians with whom it’s difficult to spot the point where the real man begins and the character ends.

He spent a good deal of time giving the impression that fame has turned him into a bit of an arsehole (e.g., him revelling in the fact that he recently upgraded to a younger, prettier, but most notably blonder wife) and the self-depreciation continued apace with relentless mockery of the Welsh. He performed a new take on his infamously-unflattering Tom Jones impersonation (“You don’t have to be beautiful, to turn me on… Mind you, I don’t want any mingers turning up at my dressing room door.”) and repeatedly portrayed his own mum as a stoic pessimist. It’s obvious that Brydon is quite patriotic in his own unique way, wearing his nation’s short-comings as a badge of honour.

The show as a whole was fantastic. Brydon put on a great performance, thoroughly well received by the crowd. After his musical encore, I wandered out of the theatre to turn on my phone and discover Wales’ Six Nations Rugby hopes had been destroyed by the French. Yet rare is the day I’ve felt more proud to call myself a Welshman.

List: The Cotswolds

This weekend, we drove up to the Cotswolds to spend some time with my brother, his wife and their one-year old daughter. Also, I like lists. Here are tens things I learned this weekend:

1. When motorway driving, the primary role of the passenger is not that of navigator. No, when overtaking any motorist who insists on occupying the middle lane despite the slow lane being completely empty, it is the passenger’s duty to enthusiastically label the offending driver a “tool” and shakes one’s fist in their direction.
2. Babies are douche-bags. They invariably do a big smelly poo the moment they’ve had their nappy changed.
3. Babies are evil geniuses. They force my brother to repeatedly deal with smelly poo when all they offer by means of recompense is an adorably-cute palms-up shrug.
4. Unless you live in Bangalore or Moscow, London traffic is a bigger nightmare than you can possibly imagine. The queue to get on the M40, right outside the SEGA building, took AGES.
5. “Hedgehogs on carts” are simply spiky wheels on golf-club trolleys. Man, was I disappointed. I sat watching that saucer of milk for hours, too.
6. Rock Band 2 is ace, but in dire need of two things: Firstly, an “it’s my first time” mode, which gives a newbie a 20-second tutorial mid-song, while the rest of band get on with the business of rocking on down; Secondly, and possibly more importantly, some Starship tracks.
   
7. Every parent is under the delusion that their little bug-eyed, slack-jawed poo machine is heaven-sent. My little niece, however, genuinely is the cutest thing on the planet. And not just because she looks like some kind of Aryan wunderkind, but because she’s developed an affinity for drumming before even bothering to learn to talk. See also point 4.
   
8. No-one, no matter how upstanding a citizen, can resist being a bit of a dick to a floppy-haired toff in an open-top sports car.
   
9. Some record exec needs to snap up the guy behind the Beautiful Katamari music, write a few throw-away English lyrics and hand them to Kylie. I don’t see any possible way it could fail to produce less than ten consecutive number-1 hits.
   
10. Anything repeated often enough, no matter how inane, becomes funny if beer has been consumed. And so’s your face.
    

Journal: Bob Park lays into religion

For my last birthday, a close friend bought me a year’s membership to the Royal Institution. One of the major achievements of the RI is the weekly science talks, all pitched squarely at a level accessible to the general public, and thus giving me a fighting chance of grasping at least part of the content. Last night I finally managed to tear myself away from the Xbox long enough to attend one of these events.

American physicist, writer and pseudo-science debunker Bob Park gave a talk on Superstition: Belief in the time of science, with the aim of explaining why 90% of the population still clings to superstition (i.e., religion), when causality – the idea that every observable event has a physical, not supernatural, cause – was proposed 2,500 years ago and has done a pretty good job of explaining the universe ever since. Unfortunately, I felt Park ultimately fell short of this goal. He occasionally touched on reasons why religion persists, even prospers, despite the complete lack of supporting evidence (e.g., the psychological need for humans to create Gods, how our lifestyle and environment has changed far more rapidly than our brains can evolve, etc.) but it felt more like a loose collection of ideas rather than a coherent argument.

I think part of the problem was that Park stuck solely to presenting the science and presumed that the implications were obvious. Well, sometimes it’s good to explicitly state the obvious, just to be sure your message is hammered home, straight and true. For instance, Park spent a good chunk of his time responding to the argument oft-cited by believers that God must exist as all humans are intrinsically moral. He took the Ten Commandments and reduced them down to “Know who’s the boss” (God is your Lord; You shall have no other Gods; Don’t make graven images; Don’t take God’s name in vain), and “Do unto others as you would have do unto you” (Thou shalt not: Steel, kill, lie, adulter or covet wifes/asses). Thus all of the Christian moral code can basically be summarised as reciprocity. And that’s where he stopped. I know that elsewhere he’s argued that reciprocity gives a distinct survival advantage (a group of animals working together as a pack has a better chance of surviving long enough to reproduce than a lone beast), and thus is a simple product of evolution and not some divine imprint. But last night that was left for us to conclude on our own. If time was the issue then he could have easily skipped over the in-depth discussion of a medical trial which concluded prayer has no measurable impact on patient’s health: Surely that one’s a no-brainer.

Despite failing somewhat to meet expectations, it was nevertheless a great evening: Park has a warm, laid-back style, a wide range of witty anecdotes at his disposal and is just an all-round likeable guy. Though I guess it helps that his opinions mesh almost one-to-one with my own…